Ha’azinu 5786

In the second century, when Rome had made teaching Torah a capital crime, Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion was wrapped in the Torah scroll he had been teaching from and burned alive. As he died, his students asked what he could see. “The parchment is burning,” he answered, “but the letters are flying up.” Earlier, when his sentence was passed, he had answered with the words of Haazinu: “The Rock, His work is whole, for all His ways are justice.” His wife and daughter answered with the next words and another verse. Centuries later, the scene became part of the Yom Kippur liturgy.

But why those words? They were spoken at precisely the moment when they seemed hardest to defend. The same song that declares God's justice ends with Moses being told to climb the mountain, see the Promised Land from afar, and die without entering it. Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra and Rav Hirsch each find different meanings in the verse: justice may be measured, completed beyond our sight, rooted in our own deeds, or whole in ways we cannot yet perceive. Yet the verse itself offers no explanation. It gives us something else: El emunah — a faithful God. Faith here is not having an answer; it is holding firm when the answer is withheld.

That distinction matters. Judaism does not ask us to explain another person's suffering, nor does it allow us to call suffering meaningless. The friends of Job teach us the cruelty of easy explanations; Rambam teaches that catastrophe should move us not toward “mere chance,” b