This week’s parsha, Divarim, is always read on the shabbat  before Tisha B’av.    Its title is “Divarim”, “Words”, since it begins:  “These are the words which Moshe spoke…”   After which Moshe commences an almost book length speech.  It is ironic that the Torah ends with a book of words spoken by the law giver who was, at the beginning, “heavy of mouth and tongue” and “not a man of words.”  The Rabbis tell us the exile and the destruction are a result of the misuse of our words in service of baseless hatred, and so, I think there is something about the rehabilitation of words that makes this parsha appropriate to this period of time.

The book of Divarim, spoken by Moshe on the eastern banks of the Jordan river, prepares the Jewish people to enter the land.  Perhaps it is a mirror image of Tisha b’av, which is when the exile from the land began.   And so this parsha, about entering the land with repaired words, is very appropriate as preparation for Tisha B’av, the day on which the breakdown of our words and the deleterious impact they wrought, led to exile from the Land.

But this Shabbat is not called the Shabbat of Divarim, of words, after the Parsha, rather it is named for the Haftorah which begins with the word “Chazon”- “vision”- and this is called Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of Vision.

 A bit after our haftorah in the book Isaiah, he is granted a very lofty vision of angels praising God.  The state of the Jewish people’s debased slanderous speech affects even him and his response to this high vision is:  “Woe is me; I am lost!  For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld The King Lord of Hosts. Then one of the seraphs flew over to me with a live coal, which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  He touched it to my lips and declared, “Now that this has touched your lips, Your guilt shall depart And your sin be purged away.” (Isaiah 6:5).   The high vision of Isaiah brings him to realize the problem with unclean, slanderous, speech.

What is our vision and can it be a high one, a visionary one, and when we have a vision that is ideal enough, can it shock us into the realization of how unholy our slanderous speech is in contrast?   What is your high vision of the Jewish people?  Of the world?  Of your community?  Of yourself?