Our Torah portion this week, Parashat Ha’azinu, opens with Moses giving his last speech. He’s been talking to the Israelites for 40 years, and by now, some of what he says is pretty familiar to them. But the Israelites have grown and changed a lot during their decades of wandering in the desert. They’re about to walk into a land that Moses knows he won’t get to see.  

Moses reflects on this moment and compares his words of advice to rain: “Let my teaching fall like rain, my words drop like dew, like showers on new grass, like droplets on the grass” (Deut 32:2). Ibn Ezra, writing in 12th century Spain, noticed something simple in that image: Rain that helps a tender new shoot doesn’t land the same way as rain that helps something already grown. Same water. Different growth, depending on what’s underneath it when it falls. 

That’s something Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, can teach us, too. The High Holy Days come around each year, again and again. And most of us know the feeling of a line we’ve heard a hundred times suddenly landing differently. Maybe it’s quieter or truer than ever or we’re just paying attention for the first time. We know it’s not because the words changed, but because we did. That’s the invitation of this Shabbat named for return (based on the Hebrew root shuv): not new words, just a willingness to hear old words in new ways, as a way to notice our own growth.