MENTAL HEALTH IN THE PARSHA – Parshat Haazinu: Carried on the Wings
Quick confession before we begin. I love to fly. Not in some deep spiritual way. Literally, on an airplane. Give me a window seat, a little bag of pretzels, and a few hours where someone else is in charge of the driving, and I am a genuinely happy man. So I feel oddly qualified to write about wings this week.
The trouble is, the flying this week’s parsha is about is the other kind. The getting-off-the-ground-in-our-own-lives kind. And some seasons, that kind of flying is completely beyond us. Getting through the day takes everything we’ve got, and the idea of soaring, of thriving, of being our best self, feels like a joke someone’s playing on us. If that’s where any of us is right now, the parsha has a picture drawn for exactly that, and it’s one of the most tender images in the whole Torah.
Haazinu is a song. It’s the last real thing Moshe gives the people, and he doesn’t hand it over as a speech. He sings it. We read it this week, on Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat of coming back. And right in the middle of it is an eagle.
The eagle
The line is כנשר יעיר קנו. Like an eagle stirring its nest, hovering over its young, יפרש כנפיו, spreading its wings, יקחהו ישאהו על אברתו, taking them and carrying them on its wings.
That’s the Torah’s picture of how we’re held. Like a young bird that can’t fly yet, carried on the wings of something much bigger and stronger. Not left to figure out flight alone on the worst day of our lives. Carried.
And there’s a detail in there that undoes me every year.
The one who carries us takes the arrow
Our sages ask why the eagle carries its young up on top of its wings, on its back, instead of underneath in its talons, the way other birds do. And the answer is this. Other birds carry their young below them, where an arrow from a hunter, or a threat from above, would strike the child first. The eagle carries its young on its back, on top of the wings, so that if an arrow comes, it hits the eagle. Not the child.
The one carrying us puts its own body between us and the thing that could hurt us. It takes the arrow so we don’t have to.
I don’t understand everything about how Hashem works, and I won’t pretend to. But I know this is the image the Torah picked to describe being held. Not a hand that keeps us from ever getting hurt. Something that climbs underneath the hurt and takes the part that would have destroyed us. Sometimes we survive things we have no business surviving, and we can’t explain how we made it through. Maybe something was carrying us on its back the whole time, taking arrows we never even saw coming.
Sometimes the wings feel like falling
Here’s the other half of that eagle, and it’s just as honest. Before it carries them, the eagle יעיר קנו, stirs up the nest. It nudges the young ones toward the edge. It makes them a little uncomfortable, on purpose, so they’ll learn to open their own wings.
And I imagine that, to the young bird, that moment feels like being pushed off a cliff. Like the one who was supposed to protect us just shoved us out into the open air.
But the wings are right there. The whole time. The eagle stirs the nest and then drops down and flies just underneath, close, ready. The nudge toward the edge was never abandonment. It was how the bird gets taught to fly, with a net of wings it couldn’t see spread out right below it.
Some of the hardest pushes in our lives are like that. A hard shove toward an edge doesn’t always mean we’ve been dropped. Sometimes it means we’re being taught to open wings we didn’t know we had, and the wings that carried us before are still right there, underneath.
We are the pupil of the eye
A few lines earlier, the song says Hashem guards us יצרנהו כאישון עינו, like the pupil of His eye. Think about how carefully we protect our own eyes. The tiniest speck, and everything in us reacts to shield them. We guard our eyes without even deciding to.
That’s how precious the Torah says we are. Even, and especially, when we don’t feel precious at all. Even on the days we’re sure we’re a burden, and a failure, and too much for everyone. Guarded like the pupil of an eye. That’s not how most of us feel on a hard day. But the song insists it’s how it actually is.
Why he sang it
One more thing, about the fact that all of this comes to us as a song.
Moshe could have given his final message as a lecture. He chose a song instead, because a song is what survives. We forget speeches. We remember songs. A melody gets down into a place that arguments can’t reach, and it stays there, and it comes back to us years later when we need it, humming up from somewhere we forgot we’d stored it.
I think that’s why the most important truths tend to come wrapped in something beautiful. Because we need to still have them on the hard day, when no argument can get through, and a song we’ve known our whole life still can.
What we can carry into the year
None of this is me having it figured out. It’s just what I want us to carry in together, in these days of coming back.
When we can’t fly, let’s let ourselves be carried. Being carried isn’t failing. It’s most of what these birds ever do before they learn.
When we get pushed toward an edge, let’s not be so quick to assume we’ve been dropped. The wings are often right underneath, closer than the fall feels.
When we feel like a burden, let’s remember the pupil of the eye. What we feel and what’s true are not always the same thing.
And let’s be someone’s wings, too. Let’s fly a little underneath the people we love, close and ready, and take a few of the arrows they never have to see.
We are carried on the wings of something far bigger than us, taught to fly, guarded like the pupil of an eye, and sung over by a song that refuses to let us forget it. May this be a year where we actually feel it. Gmar Chatima tova, and may we all be sealed for a good and gentle year.
If any of this is sitting close to home, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. In Israel, ERAN’s emotional first-aid line is 1201. Wherever you live, a local crisis line, your doctor, or one person you trust is a good place to start. When we can’t fly, we are allowed to let someone carry us.
Dedicated l’ilui nishmat Zev (Will) Shakin, z”l, who loved Israel and lived v’ahavta l’reacha kamocha. May his memory be a blessing, and may his light keep reaching the people who need it.
Mental Health in the Parsha is a weekly series on the weekly Torah portion and what it can offer us right now. These thoughts are meant for reflection and conversation, not as a replacement for professional mental health care.