Ki Tavo
Deut. 26:1-29:8
Précis: The parasha contains numerous religious mandates regarding the formation of a civil and moral community (including tithes of first fruits and tithes to support the Levites). The People are promised that if they follow God’s instructions, they will be transformed into a “holy people.” They are further instructed that they have a choice in their own destiny: there are blessings and curses (the “Admonition”), and they must choose between the two, and take the consequences. The parasha ends with Moses reminding the People about all that God had done for them in bringing them from Egypt, providing sustenance, defeating their foes, and giving them the Land.
Deut. 26:4-10 “The Priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God. Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous . . . So, the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the first fruits of the soil that You, Lord, have given me.’”
A central focus of this week’s reading is the renewal of the covenant. Rabbi Sacks has written about the distinction between a “covenant-based” society and a “tradition-based” society, remarking that American memorials are infused with famous quotations of the people being honored, while English memorials lack quotations, relying only on images of honorees (Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 9/19/24)
The United States of America tells its story on its monuments, a story woven out of the speeches of its greatest leaders. England builds memorials but it doesn't tell a story. In a tradition-based society, things are as they are because of how they were. A covenant-based society does not value the past merely because it is old. Rather, a covenant-based society exists to honor the moral bond of what was an essential ethical undertaking.
The passage quoted above, regarding the presentation of first fruits, reminds us that a covenant is more than a myth, because a covenant always contains specific undertakings that bind its citizens to the present and future.
Regarding the Jewish People, the original covenant-based society, Sacks notes, “The mere act of telling the story, regularly, as a religious duty, sustained Jewish identity across the centuries, even in the absence of all the normal accompaniments of nationhood – land, geographical proximity, independence, self-determination – and never allowed the people to forget its ideals, its aspirations, its collective project of building a society that would be the opposite of Egypt, a place of freedom and justice and human dignity…”
What do we learn from the first fruits declaration? If you want to sustain freedom, never stop telling the story.
