# The Rock and the Mountain

> In the second century, in the years when Rome had made the teaching of Torah a capital crime, a man was wrapped in the scroll he had been caught teaching from and set alight. Tufts of wool, soaked in water, were laid…

By David Raitan · 2026-09-17 · Parashat Ha'azinu · https://torahmeirah.com/en/parasha/haazinu/haazinu-5787

*Ha'azinu · Deuteronomy 32:1–52*

In the second century, in the years when Rome had made the teaching of Torah a capital crime, a man was wrapped in the scroll he had been caught teaching from and set alight. Tufts of wool, soaked in water, were laid over his heart so that he would die slowly. His students, standing as near as they dared, asked their teacher what he could see. The parchment is burning, Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon told them, but the letters are flying up.

He had spoken earlier, though, and it is the earlier sentence that concerns us here. When judgement was passed — burning for him, the sword for his wife, worse for his daughter — each of the three answered with a verse. Chanina answered with the opening words of the song we read this week: *haTzur tamim po'olo*, "the Rock, His work is whole, for all His ways are justice." His wife took the next phrase of the same verse: "a faithful God, and without injustice." His daughter answered with a line from Jeremiah. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, whose comment on the scene the sources preserve, does not wonder at their courage. He wonders at their memory: how great are these righteous ones, that at such an hour three verses of the justification of judgement came to them (Avodah Zarah 18a; Sifrei Devarim 307). Centuries later that scene was set into a poem and placed, in the Ashkenazi rite, in the Musaf service of Yom Kippur, so that we say it days after we have read the song from which Chanina's verse comes.

It is worth pausing over the choice.

Of all the sentences a man might reach for while being burned alive, why that one? The words assert that the Rock's work is whole and His ways are justice, and the assertion is being made at the precise moment when it looks least defensible — by the person it fails, in the hearing of his family, with the fire already lit. Nor is the difficulty confined to the martyr's hour. It sits inside the parsha. The song that opens by declaring God's justice perfect ends, at the close of the same reading, with its singer told to climb the heights of Abarim, to look at the land from a distance, and to die there without entering it. The greatest of the prophets sings that all God's ways are justice, and is then handed the one decree that three thousand years of readers have found hardest to call just.

So the question is not really whether the claim is true. It is what kind of claim it is.

The commentators, reading closely, offer several ways to hear it. Rashi hears restraint: although He is strong — *haTzur*, the Rock — when He brings retribution upon those who transgress His will, He does not bring it in a flood, but in measured judgement; and He is faithful to pay the righteous their due, even when the payment is deferred to the world to come. Ramban hears in the words an allusion to the attribute of justice, and adds that what comes from God is complete and unchangeable, His very judgements being ways of mercy. Ibn Ezra is terser and harder: the song opens here, he says, to make known that whatever befell Israel came about through Israel's own deeds. Rav Hirsch, characteristically, goes to the root. The Sages of the Sifrei heard two words in *tzur* — *takif*, the unassailable, and *tzayar*, the fashioner — and *tamim* means finished, complete, lacking nothing; so that even a moment which looks to us unfinished is, as God's working, whole at every stage. Where our own efforts move by correcting failures, the divine shaping does not. And the Netziv offers the most consoling reading of all: what appears to break what was until now whole is in truth completing what was until now lacking, as a court that makes a robber return what he took has not impoverished him but made him entire.

Four teachers, four ways of saying that the accounts balance — later, or deeper, or in a ledger we are not shown.

And yet the same midrash that gives us the martyrs will not let the verse settle into a formula. In its last paragraph on our verse, the Sifrei imagines Israel gathering around Moses as he comes down from Sinai with a question they badly want answered: tell us, our teacher, how does the measure of judgement work up there? He replies that he cannot say it acquits the innocent and convicts the guilty — for it also works the other way about. And then, having said so, he quotes our verse. The words arrive exactly where the tidy scheme has broken down.

Here it helps to step outside for a moment.

Susan Neiman, the philosopher who has long directed the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, has argued in *Evil in Modern Thought* that the problem of evil is not one topic within modern philosophy but the engine that drove it — that from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to Auschwitz, European thought has circled a single question: why the world is the way it is, rather than the way it ought to be. She traces two lineages in the answers. One insists that evil be made intelligible, because a world we cannot understand cannot be mended; the other refuses intelligibility, because to explain suffering is already to have begun excusing it. And she notices something that should give any believer pause: the long effort to defend God's goodness against the evidence did not strengthen faith. It eroded it. The more ingenious the justification, the less terrible the suffering was made to look, and the less worthy of love the God who required such advocacy.

Which sends us back to the verse to notice what it does not do.

It offers no mechanism. No ledger, no reckoning, no reason. Rashi must bring the world to come to make it balance; Ibn Ezra must bring Israel's deeds; the verse itself supplies neither. What it supplies is a name and a relationship: the Rock, whose work is whole, who is *El emunah*. And *emunah* is not what the English word "belief" suggests. Its root means to confirm, to hold firm, to keep faith; the Sifrei glosses it as God affirming the world He had made, and Rav Hirsch renders it as a God in whom one can have confidence, who forsakes nobody. It is a word about fidelity, not information.

That is the distinction this whole passage turns on, and it is worth naming plainly: *explanation* and *trust*. An explanation tells us why something happened. Trust is what we extend to someone whose reasons we have not been shown. The verse is not a theodicy — not an argument that the ways of God can be justified before the bar of human reason. It is the sentence a person says when no such argument is available, and it says, in effect: I do not know, and I have not stopped holding on.

Everything then depends on who is permitted to say it. Read the martyrs' scene again and notice that each of the three speaks only of their own sentence. Chanina does not explain his wife's death, or his daughter's fate; he takes the first clause and leaves her the second. Said of oneself, *tzidduk hadin*, the acceptance of the justice of a decree, is an act of extraordinary courage. Said of another person's suffering, the identical words become cruelty — which is precisely the verdict of the book of Job, where the friends who arrive with explanations are told by God that they have not spoken rightly of Him, as His servant Job has.

For the tradition does not leave the sufferer with nothing but silence. Rambam, ruling on how a community should meet catastrophe, insists that the one response it may not make is to call what has happened mere chance, *mikreh*; that, he says, is a cruel way of thinking, because it removes the only thing that could make the suffering yield anything — the summons to examine our lives and change them. Notice that this too is not an explanation. It is a redirection. The backward question, why did this happen, receives no answer; the forward question, what shall I do now, receives one immediately.

Every culture must decide what to say in the presence of suffering it cannot explain, and there are two standing temptations. The first is to explain it anyway, which always ends by accusing the sufferer — the oldest cruelty in the world, and one with thoroughly modern forms, wherever we quietly assume that health is a reward for virtue and misfortune the evidence of a hidden fault. The second is to declare it meaningless, which spares us the accusation and also, conveniently, the obligation. Judaism refuses both. It gave the mourner a sentence that does not explain and a community that does not leave, and it kept, in the same breath, the right to argue — for the tradition that says the Rock's work is whole is the tradition in which Abraham asks whether the Judge of all the earth will not do justice, in which Jeremiah demands to know why the wicked prosper, in which Job is vindicated over his comforters. Faith without protest is mere resignation. Protest without faith is despair. What the song holds together is the refusal of both.

Moses sang of a Rock whose work is whole, and then climbed a mountain to die within sight of everything he had worked for. He was given no reason, and he asked for none; what he left instead was a people able to find words in the worst hour and to go on building in the morning. That is the inheritance: not an explanation of the world's fractures, but the faith to keep mending them. Heaven has never told us why. It has only, and always, told us what to do next.