Ha'Azinu is the song Moshe recites on the last day of his life, after the laws, blessings and warnings of Devarim are finished and the people stand assembled in the plains of Moav. Its opening line does something strange: instead of addressing the tribes in front of him, Moshe calls on heaven and earth to listen. The reading takes that oddity as the key to the whole poem. Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator of northern France, notes that heaven and earth outlast any human witness and are themselves what delivers rain and grain or withholds them — witness and enforcer in one office. What follows, then, is less a plea for repentance than testimony filed permanently with the cosmos, which explains the song's most conspicuous absence: nowhere is Israel asked to return. Rescue arrives when Israel's strength is simply spent. The guarantee lies instead in the nature of the judgment: God calls Himself haTzur, the Rock, whose strength is exercised in measured judgment rather than flooding anger, and who declares He will "use up My arrows" — an arsenal that ends before its target does. The same exactness gives Moshe his own sentence: view the land from Mount Nevo, and die without entering it.
In the haftarah, the closing verses of Hoshea — who prophesied to the northern kingdom in its last generations — ask not for offerings but for speech: "Take words with you and return." Israel renounces three false securities, the Assyrian empire, Egypt's horses, and handmade gods, and healing comes unpurchased, quiet as dew.