Moses' farewell is not a speech but a song — and it falls on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of Return, in the days between the shofar and the fast.
Shabbat: 19 September 2026 · 8 Tishrei 5787 — Shabbat Shuvah, between Yom Teruah and Yom Kippur
Torah: Deuteronomy 32
Haftarah: Hosea 14:2–10 — return, O Israel, to the LORD your God; with Micah 7:18–20 and Joel 2:15–27 in many communities
Commonly read alongside: Romans 10:14–21; Revelation 15:1–4 — where the redeemed sing “the song of Moses”
What happens in this portion
God tells Moses to write a song and teach it to Israel — because laws are forgotten but songs are not, and this one is to live in the nation's mouth as a witness against it. Ha'azinu is that song: heaven and earth summoned as witnesses, God as the Rock whose work is perfect, Israel as the child who grew fat and forgot, judgment, and then — the turn the whole song exists for — God's own compassion having the last word: He avenges the blood of His servants… and atones for His land and His people.
The song ends and Moses is told to climb Mount Nebo to see the land he will not enter. The portion holds both things at once: the man who spoke with God face to face, and the sentence even he did not talk his way out of.
Shabbat Shuvah
The Sabbath between the shofar and the fast takes its name from the haftarah's first word — shuvah, return. Hosea's instruction is startlingly practical: take words with you and return to the LORD. Not sacrifices first; words. Teshuvah in this tradition is specific speech — naming what was done, to God and to the person wronged. If Yom Kippur is in ten days and there is a conversation you have been avoiding, this Shabbat is the tradition's own deadline for having it.
Questions for the table
1. Why a song as the final safeguard, rather than another law? What do your children already know by heart — and what is it teaching them?
2. “Take words with you.” What are the actual words — not the feeling, the words — you owe someone before Yom Kippur begins at sunset on the 20th?
3. Revelation pictures the redeemed singing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb. Why both?
To go deeper
- Messianic Torah Devotional
- Fall Feasts — A Biblical Study — for the ten days you are inside
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