Put It In The Book

By Rabbi Joshua (expansively known as The Hoffer) Hoffman

At the outset of the shira, the song, or poem, recorded in parshas Ha’azinu, Moshe tells the people, “When I call out the Lord’s name, give honor to our God” (Devarim 32:3). The Talmud (Berachos 21a) derives from this verse, the obligation to make a blessing before reading from the Torah. Why is this blessing mentioned here, at such a late stage in Moshe’s transmission of the Torah, and not earlier? The Netziv, in his Ha’amek Davar to the verse in parshas Vayeilech, “And now write for yourselves and teach it to the Benei Yisroel” (Devarim 31:19), explains that until this point, the Torah that Moshe taught was not written down first. Rather, Moshe was the medium through which God spoke the words to the people. As the rabbis put it, God spoke through Moshe’s throat. This was a miraculous process, and one does not make a beracha over a miracle. In regard to the shira, however, Moshe was first told to write the text, and then teach it to the people. This being the case, the blessing made is a model for the blessing always made before reading from the Torah subsequently.

Why was the shira first written down and then taught to the people by reading it to them? The Netziv, in his introduction to the Ha’amek Davar, says that the nature of a shira is that it has multiple meanings, not all of which are obvious through a mere simple reading of the text. This feature can be expanded upon by referring to a responsum of the Radbaz, cited by Rav Dovid Goldberg in his Shiras Dovid, in which he explains that the reason that a sefer Torah is written without punctuation or separation of verses, although they are of Sinaitic origin, is that according to kabbalah, the letters of the Torah contain continuous versions of the names of God, formed by combining the letters in different ways. Thus, there are two levels of meaning to the Torah – the plain meaning, following the traditional punctuation and verse separation, and this additional level, based on the kabbalistic reading. This notion for the Torah being a continuous presentation of the names of God is mentioned by the Ramban in his introduction to his Torah commentary as well.

The Netziv further points out that the entire Torah is considered a shira. The verse in Vayeilech that mandates the writing of the shirah serves as the source for the mitzvah of writing a sefer Torah. Although some explain that this is so because a sefer Torah must be complete, and so, the command to write the shirah requires that the entire sefer Torah be written, and thus the verse is thus saying that we must write a sefer Torah that contains the shirah, the Netziv demonstrates how the shirah has reference to the entire Torah.

Following the Radbaz, the Ramban, and the Netziv, we can understand why the blessing over the Torah is mentioned in reference to the shira. The verse that serves as the source of the blessing reads: “When I call out the name of the Lord, give honor to our God.” Reading the text of the Torah entails reading the name of God, according to the kabbalistic way of combining the letters. This feature first emerged in the shira, and, therefore the blessing is first mentioned in its connection.