Making God’s Business Succeed | Parsha with the Chief: Ha'azinu

At this time of year we pray to be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life. But what does this really mean? And how do we make sure we are written in the Book of Life? Ha’azinu holds 43 verses of poetry that carry the entire sweep of human history: creation, free will, the failures of the early generations, the emergence of Abraham and then of the Jewish people, our own drifting, and the long road to the end of history. It is called the Shirah, the song. The verse instructing us to write it down becomes the source for writing the whole Torah, which tells you that something at the heart of this parsha holds the essence of what Torah is. It is also read every year in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rav Yisrael Salanter read the famous Gemara about the three books opened on Rosh Hashanah in an astounding way, and it answers a question the commentators have been asking for many centuries. How can the Gemara say the righteous are written immediately for life, when every one of us can name righteous people who died this year? His answer reframes what the judgment of these days is asking of us. And it reveals a radically different way of understanding what self-dev