Between the Wound and the Healing: Reflections for Parashat Ha’azinu – Two Years After 7 October

Yehuda Amichai begins one of his most beloved poems with the line:

“A person doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything.” [1]

Many rabbis, myself included, have turned to this poem in moments of contradiction, when joy and grief collide in sacred space. Over the years, it has become a go-to text for wedding ceremonies held shortly after funerals, for baby blessings after miscarriages, for any moment when celebration and sorrow come too close to separate. But over the past two years, since that terrible day on 7 October 2023, Amichai’s words have taken on a deeper, more haunting resonance.

“A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes…

to make love in war and war in love.”

The Jewish calendar doesn’t avoid contradiction, it crystallises it. On that day, Simchat Torah, as we were dancing with scrolls, singing with children, and kissing sacred words, our people were being attacked, in what would become the most brutal assault on Israeli civilians in a generation. Simchat Torah, the “Joy of Torah”, remained written on the calendar. But something inside many of us broke open. And now, two years later, we are still living in the echoes of that collision: between what should have been and what was; between joy and grief, presence and absence, comfort and terror.

This week’s parashah, Ha’azinu, comes to us in the form of poetry as well. It is Moshe’s final song, a deeply layered, often stark poem that summarises Israel’s journey with God. In last week’s column, I wrote about the emotional force of music and memory, and the Torah’s invitation to “write this song” and place it in our mouths and hearts. Ha’azinu takes up that invitation in full.

But the Torah’s poem is not just a farewell, it is a tapestry of warnings, lament, and hope. Near its close, God says:

“I deal death and give life; I wound and I will heal” (Devarim 32:39).

We have been living in that verse. We have buried and we have blessed. We have sat shivah and danced under chuppot. And we mourn, not only for Israelis murdered and soldiers fallen, not only for hostages still in captivity and families torn apart, but also for Palestinian civilians killed, for children bereaved, for communities shattered. Every human life is of infinite worth, created in the image of God. Our grief must not be reduced to a ledger, nor measured in competing sorrows.

To say this aloud is not to blur moral responsibility; it is to insist on another kind of moral clarity, that compassion is not a scarce resource, and Jewish conscience does not permit dehumanisation. We can condemn cruelty and still pray for the protection of all innocents. We can pursue security and still yearn for a future where no child goes to sleep afraid. This, too, is something the Torah’s poem models: poetry capable of holding covenantal joy and searing lament in the same breath.

And now, we return to Amichai’s poem, which ends with this image:

“He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shrivelled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there’s time for everything.”

This week, may we give ourselves permission not to resolve the tension but to honour it. May we hold the wound and the hope together. May the songs of our lives carry the names of those we love and those we have never met. May our prayers reach toward healing: for the injured, the traumatised, the bereaved on all sides. And may we remember that our lives, like our Torah, contain both prose and poetry, and that sometimes the only way forward is through song.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] https://shira-ovedet.kibbutz.org.il/cgi-webaxy/item?2478