Ha’azinu (האזינו — “Give Ear”) – Shabbat Shuvah (שובה — “Return”)
Devarim (Deuteronomy) 32:1-52 – Hosea 14:2-10; Joel 2:15-27; Micah 7:18-20
Moses, on the last day of his life, calls heaven and earth to witness, retraces the history of the people since its election, and announces that G-d will ultimately have compassion on His people and avenge the blood that was shed. The haftarah of Shabbat Shuvah brings together three prophetic texts centered on teshuvah (repentance).
Devarim 32:7
זְכֹר יְמוֹת עוֹלָם, בִּינוּ שְׁנוֹת דּוֹר וָדוֹר; שְׁאַל אָבִיךָ וְיַגֵּדְךָ, זְקֵנֶיךָ וְיֹאמְרוּ לָךְ
“Remember the days of old, consider the years of generation after generation; ask your father, and he will tell you, your elders, and they will say it to you.”
In the early 2010s, several hundred manuscript fragments dated to the 11th–13th centuries began appearing on the market. Afghan antiquities dealers offered them to Israeli institutions. The National Library of Israel acquired the bulk of these manuscripts, commonly known as the Afghan Genizah[1], and continues to catalogue and publish them scientifically.
The texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. They were said to originate from caves in the Bamiyan region[2] of Afghanistan. The existence of a flourishing Jewish community in this region had until then been attested only by rare, indirect mentions in rabbinic and Islamic sources.
Together, these documents[3] reconstruct daily life — transactions, mourning, religious practice — with a level of detail no indirect source had ever allowed. Among them is a previously unknown commentary on the Book of Isaiah attributed to Rav Saadia Gaon[4], written in Judeo-Arabic and absent from the entire known manuscript tradition. This fragment constitutes a unique testimony to Saadianic exegesis, revealing a portion of his work that had been thought lost.
For the medieval Jewish community of Khorasan[5], no organized descendants remained, no oral tradition was passed down — only silence. It was the fragments themselves, recovered nearly a thousand years later, that came to stand in as elders and forefathers: it is the document that, in the end, “tells.”
Notes
[1] Some scholars prefer the term “Afghan manuscripts” to “genizah,” for lack of proof that this was indeed a repository of worn-out texts in the ritual sense of the term, rather than some other kind of deposit.
[2] The exact place of discovery has never been formally established: no archaeological excavation has confirmed the cave or caves of origin. This uncertainty is openly acknowledged by scholars rather than concealed.
[3] The corpus portrays a Jewish merchant society embedded in the economy of the Silk Road. Among the finds are an account book kept over twenty-seven pages by the Abu Netzer family of merchants, private letters, legal documents, a fragment of tractate Avodah Zarah from the Mishnah — the oldest known rabbinic text east of Babylonia — biblical excerpts, and a commentary on Isaiah attributed to Rav Saadia Gaon. A partial siddur is also among the oldest pieces in the corpus.
[4] Rav Saadia Gaon (882–942), born in Egypt and active in Babylonia, was the first great systematizer of medieval Judaism. As Gaon of the yeshiva of Sura, he composed, in Judeo-Arabic, the Sefer ha-Emunot ve-ha-De’ot, linguistic treatises, responsa, and extensive biblical commentaries, only part of which has survived, often in fragmentary form. The fragment found among the Afghan manuscripts attests to the spread of his writings as far as the Jewish communities of medieval Khorasan.
[5] Medieval Khorasan: the region covering present-day northeastern Iran, Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan.