KI TAVO- LEARNING TO SUSTAIN WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED

The danger of arriving

I do not read Ki Tavo as a parashah about gratitude. Or, more precisely, gratitude is there, but it does not seem to me to be the central problem.

The problem begins when Israel arrives.

For a long time, everything had been about arriving: leaving Egypt, surviving the wilderness, walking, crossing, entering. Ki Tavo begins precisely when that long tension seems about to resolve:

“When you enter the land…”

And then another danger appears.

As long as something is missing, we know it is missing. Hunger does not need to remind us that food exists. Exile does not need to explain what it means to have no land. Slavery remembers itself; the body takes care of that.

Possession is different.

When what was missing is finally before us, it begins to seem natural. The land no longer feels like a promise. It is land. Freedom no longer feels like liberation. It is everyday life. The fruit ceases to be the improbable ending of a very long story and becomes, simply, this year’s harvest.

And that is where Ki Tavo begins.

Not because abundance is bad.

So good that it can erase the road that led to it.

The first fruit cannot simply be eaten. It must be taken, set apart, placed in a basket and brought.

The first fruits — a suspicion towards memory

For that reason, the first fruits seem to me something more serious than a gesture of thanks. There is in them a certain suspicion towards our own memory. The Torah does not trust the farmer to look at the fruit and spontaneously reconstruct everything that came before.

It does exactly the opposite.

The farmer comes before the priest and declares that he has entered the promised land. Then he places the basket before the altar.

He holds the fruit in his hand, but he must speak of a wandering Aramean.

He does not recount how he sowed. He does not explain how hard he worked or what he did to improve the harvest. He goes back — to Egypt, to the smallness of the beginning, to the oppression, to the hard labour, to the cry. YHWH heard. Saw. Brought out. Led. Gave the land.

The fruit says: you arrived.

The declaration asks: how?

That difference carries much of the weight of the parashah.

A man could look at the field and say:

And it would be true.

But it would be a truth that begins too late.

Before that there was a man without land. Then there was Egypt. There was slavery. There was a cry. There was an exodus. There was wilderness. There were years in which what now seems normal was still impossible.

That is why one sentence seems central to me: the basket contains a harvest; the declaration contains its genealogy.

The basket shows the result.

The word retrieves the causes that the result no longer shows.

That is causal memory.

When abundance separates, we must join again

After the first fruits comes the tithe.

Again the same operation appears: from what I possess, something must be set apart.

And it does not remain suspended in a religious abstraction. It goes to the Levite, the stranger, the orphan and the widow.

Abundance produces difference. Some have. Others do not.

The Torah compels us to notice that difference before it becomes indifference.

Memory that needs form

And Ki Tavo seems to know something uncomfortable about memory: if it depends on us alone, it wears away.

First one must speak.

When crossing the Jordan, they are to set up large stones, coat them, and write the words of the Torah clearly upon them.

There is something almost stubborn in this gesture.

The generation that heard Moshe might remember. Their children perhaps as well. But Ki Tavo does not entrust all continuity to human memory.

The word leaves the interior and enters the stone.

Experience leaves the head and takes form.

It no longer depends solely on the individual’s emotional state, on enthusiasm, on momentary fidelity.

It remains before the eyes.

Inner identity produces an outer structure which, tomorrow, can speak back to the inner self.

The stone does not remember.

That is why we write.

Here I see one of the most important movements in the whole parashah: a reality produces experience; that experience must become knowledge; and what has been learnt needs........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)