Unscrolled: From Prophet to Poet

In last week’s Torah portion, Moses completed his great work – the writing of the Torah. “Moses wrote down this Teaching and gave it to the priests, sons of Levi, who carried the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant, and to all the elders of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 31:9).

It would seem, then, that his work was done. He led the Israelites to the promised land and gave them the Torah in full. The only thing left was to ascend the mountain and be gathered unto his kin.

In Parashat Haazinu, however, we see that Moses’ work is not yet finished. He delivers a final address to the Israelites – this time, notably, in the form of a poem.

When we first met Moses, he was weak of speech. “I have never been a man of words,” he said to God. “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” (Exodus 4:10). Later in Exodus, Moses refers to himself as “uncircumcised of lips” (6:12), a bizarre expression which hints at the spiritual and physical depth he ascribes to his issues with speech.

His arc throughout the Torah, then, is that of a man whose speech capacity is blocked to a man whose speech capacity is opened – from “uncircumcised of lips” to a poet.

This journey is traveled slowly and by degree. In the beginning, Moses is lent support by Aaron. God feeds him lines to repeat word by word. At this point, it seems that Moses has little agency in what he says, performing the perfunctory task of repeating back what he has heard like a stenographer in a courtroom.

In truth, however, this is a process of hachshera – preparation or training. Through his dialogue with God, Moses is learning how to speak. By repeating, parrot-like, the words of God, Moses is strengthening the muscles of expression so that they will be ready when he has something to say.

By the time the book of Deuteronomy comes along, Moses is speaking to the people on his own behalf. His language is fluent and elegant. Rather than parroting what he has heard from God, he subtly reframes and interprets the history of the people and the teachings of the Torah. When this is completed, however, he ventures to take a step further and writes a poem.

“May my discourse come down as the rain,” he begins confidently. “My speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass.” (Deuteronomy 32:2).

To understand the significance of this moment for Moses, we must understand what makes poetry different than other forms of writing. Poetry is language in its purest form. While some poems have narrative content, the emphasis is not on content but on form – the letters, the spaces, and the sounds themselves.

In delivering his poem, which is indeed a masterpiece, Moses shows us just how far he has come since we first met him. The muscles of his mouth and tongue have long been strengthened by the process of hachshera that God put him through, but now it is his heart that has learned to speak.

In delivering his poem, which is indeed a masterpiece, Moses shows us just how far he has come since we first met him.

In his book “The Tongue of Adam,” Abdelfattah Kilito sites an Islamic idea that a prophet, definitionally, cannot be a poet. According to this idea, the divine source of inspiration and the poetic source of inspiration are mutually exclusive to one another.

There may be a hint of such a notion here in the Torah.

Last week’s Torah portion opened with Moses saying, “I am now one hundred and twenty years old, I can no longer be going and coming.” (Deuteronomy 31:6). Parsing this strange expression, “going and coming,” Rashi suggests that Moses is saying that the prophetic spirit had departed from him and been transferred to Joshua, and that the “wellsprings of wisdom had stopped up for him.”

If this was truly the case, the poem that Moses now speaks is his own.

We most often think of Moses in terms of his relationship to the people. He delivered us, he brought us the Torah, he led us through the wilderness. In Parashat Haazinu, we remember that he also had a relationship with himself, which we see play out through his development as speaker.

Both of these relationships made great demands on Moses. In the end, both were utterly transformative. Leading the people and learning to speak – these were his two great missions in life. One was outward facing; one was inward facing.

Having at last completed both, Moses can now, finally, lay down to rest.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.