Ha'azinu

Ha'azinu is a short parshah nearly entirely made up of a poem that Moshe writes down just before his death. In the final few verses of this parshah we read HaShem telling Moshe that it's time to go up the mountain, both to see the promised land and to be 'gathered to his kin', to die.
What do you think it is about nearing death that evokes poetic responses? Why do you think death and love are so bound up together in poetry, song, and art? What parallels do you see between the section of Ha'azinu below and the Rilke poem? Now read the Rilke poem as if it is HaShem's words to Moshe on the final day, and read the Kinnell poem as if Moshe had written it. What insights might be drawn from this way of reading?

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Go To The Limits Of Your Longing
by Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

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The Still Time
by Galway Kinnell
I know there is still time –
time for the hands
to open, for the bones of them
to be filled
by those failed harvests of want,
the bread imagined of the days of not having.
Now that the fear
has been rummaged down to its husk,
and the wind blowing
the flesh away translates itself
into flesh and the flesh
gives itself in its reveries to the wind.
I remember those summer nights
when I was young and empty,
when I lay through the darkness
wanting, wanting,
knowing
I would have nothing of anything I wanted –
that total craving
that hollows the heart out irreversibly.
So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me –
so much of it gone
it returns, everything that drove me crazy
comes back, blessing the misery
of each step it took me into the world;
as though a prayer had ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines.
And the old voice,
which once made its broken-off, choked, parrot-incoherences,
speaks again,
this time on the palatum cordis
this time saying there is time, still time,
for one who can groan
to sing,
for one who can sing to be healed.