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This week’s parasha is Moshe’s “shira”:
We’ve talked many times about the difference between ספר דברים and the rest of the Torah:
There are two models for “speaking in the name of G-d”: חכם and נביא. Either we express our tradition and understanding of ה׳'s will, תורה שבעל פה, or ה׳ speaks to us directly, נבואה. We understood the bulk of ספר דברים to be תורה שבעל פה:
But האזונו is different:
Moshe is told that he will be told what to tell בני ישראל. This is Moshe’s נבואה. The Dubno Maggid (quoted in the Artscroll Chumash) explains (though he applies this model to all of דברים):
So שירת האזינו is a poem written in Moshe’s own voice. An essential part of נבואה is that it is unique to the נביא, even though the message is always the same: Listen to ה׳!
There’s a fascinating story in מלכים א פרק כב where 400 prophets all unanimously prophecy about Ahab’s victory, and it turns out that it was a false prophecy, given by a “רוּחַ שֶׁקֶר”, that ה׳ wanted to mislead Ahab. The gemara asks how were they to know that they weren’t getting a real נבואה?
Similarly here, we have similarities in language but not identity:
And that is illustrated by the fact that both Moshe and Yehoshua say האזינו:
Yehoshua gives his own version of האזינו, with his own מתורגמן . We don’t have the text of what he said, but it was his own נבואה.
The other aspect of the fact that this is a נבואה is that something is missing:
There is no mention of free will, of decisions or of repentance, in האזינו. It is simply a prediction of what will happen:
But does that mean we have no ability to change it? Doesn’t בחירה mean anything?
האזינו is Moshe’s prophecy, not prediction. It is given to us as an עד, to do with it what we will. How this נבואה is fulfilled would be up to us.A