This week, in Parshat Ki Tavo, we encounter one of the most familiar declarations in the Torah, spoken by the person bringing their first fruits to the Temple. The ritual begins with a simple act: you come before the priest with the first fruits of the land and say,
הִגַּדְתִּי הַיּוֹם לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, כִּי-בָאתִי אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע יְהוָה לַאֲבֹתֵינוּ לָתֶת לָנוּ
I acknowledge this day before the ETERNAL your God that I have entered the land that God swore to our ancestors to give us (Deuteronomy 26:3).
Followed by,
אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי, וַיֵּרֶד מִצְרַיְמָה, וַיָּגָר שָׁם
“My father was a wandering Aramean who went down into Egypt and sojourned there” (Deuteronomy 26:5).
We then tell the story of our ancestors: Jacob went down to Egypt, we became a great nation there, the Egyptians oppressed us, we cried out, God heard us, and God brought us out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. It is the same story we tell at the seder table each Passover. The Torah teaches us to tell this story not when we are still enslaved, or in the narrow place, but when we are free. Not when we are wandering, but when we have arrived. Not when we are hungry, but when we are holding the first fruits of a harvest.
At the Passover seder, we tell the story of slavery from the place of freedom. We sit around a table covered with food and wine and say: We were slaves. We cried out. God brought us out. And here, in Ki Tavo, we do something very similar. We stand in the land, holding the first fruits of its abundance, and we say: Remember where we came from, where we entered from.
The Talmud, in Chullin 33b, asks at what point can we say that a people has entered? Is it when the first people arrive? Is it when they begin to settle? Is it when they establish themselves there? The Talmud concludes, partial entry is not considered entry. You have to deeply enter. In relation to the first fruits, they only come only after you have entered the land. But they don’t come immediately.
You have to arrive. You have to settle. You have to find your place. You have to establish yourself. You have to prepare the soil. You have to plant. You have to tend. You have to wait through the seasons. You have to harvest. There is actually a significant distance between entering the land and bringing the first fruits. And I think maybe that distance is the point.
I used to have a sign in my house that said: “Remember the days you prayed for the things you have now.” This, to me, is the spiritual work of the first fruits. It is one thing to be grateful when we have just escaped something. It is easy to say, “Thank you, God,” when we are starving and suddenly there is food. It is easy to say, “Thank you,” when you have been a slave and suddenly you are free. But it is a different kind of gratitude when we pause and come back further down the road. To come back to say thank you from a place of fullness, of comfort, when we have settled in, when life has become ordinary again and we have almost forgotten that we once desperately, desperately, wanted the thing that we now take for granted.
That is the spiritual flex.
It is easy to be grateful for the miracle when it still feels like a miracle, but the patience of the first fruits challenges us to cultivate gratitude after the miracle has become your life. First fruits call us to remember and appreciate that you weren’t always where you are now. This harvest did not always exist. This is something you couldn’t have actually imagined. Remember the days you prayed for the things you have now.
And so, here we are in the waning days of August, in the month of Elul. We have fully entered 5786. In fact, we are approaching the end! Soon we will stand together again and pray for another year. We will ask for this. We will ask for that. For health, love, healing, courage, abundance, and possibility. We will ask God to open the gates of this and open the gates of that. But before we ask for the next year, Ki Tavo is asking us to pause and notice the year we have just lived. What are our first fruits? What has this year given us? What are we enjoying now that we once prayed for? What do we have now that we once cried for? What has become so ordinary that we have forgotten how extraordinary it once seemed? What did we receive? What did we survive? Who have we become? Whatever it is, Elul gives us the opportunity to notice.
Our tradition teaches that during Elul, God is in the field. God is accessible, close, and waiting to receive those first fruits. We can stop right where we are and name our first fruits and we can bring them directly to God. And this does not mean that everything is perfect, or every one of our prayers has been answered. Or that we have arrived at some final promised land. But because we are here, right where we are now. And when we cultivate an attitude of gratitude, we become capable of actually recognizing when the promises are being fulfilled. In this way, gratitude is not simply something we give to God after receiving a blessing, but what teaches us to see the blessing in the first place.
So as we enter this Shabbat, may we remember the first fruits of this year.
May we remember the things we once prayed for that have quietly become part of our lives.
May we have the courage to acknowledge the journeys that brought us here – the wandering, the planting, the tending, the waiting, the growing.
And may we enter this Shabbat with the fullness of people who know that we are not finished, but who can nevertheless pause and say:
I am here.
I remember where I came from.
And I am grateful for what has grown.
Shabbat shalom,
Rav Tiferet