Shabbat Message - Parashat Shoftim

In this episode I speak about the interesting ritual of bikkurim and the text reminding us where we have been and where we are now.  

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:19

I want you to picture a room. It's 1907, let's say, the peak year when more than a million people pass through it. The room is enormous. A cathedral ceiling echoes, and it's called, with a certain American bluntness, the Great Hall. We

Ellis Island And The Threshold

SPEAKER_00 0:37

all know it as Ellis Island. Light pours down through the arched windows onto a floor that has absorbed the footsteps of some 12 million people. Look at the photos of every person who came through those halls. They were coming from countries all over the world carrying almost nothing and yet at the same time carrying everything. A bundle, a trunk, maybe, if they were lucky. Sometimes they came with just the clothes on their back and a name sewn into a coat in case they collapsed and somebody needed to know who they are. They stood in lines that could take six or eight hours. They had their eyes checked for trachoma with a button hook. Can you imagine a button hook to turn your eyelid inside out to see if you were healthy enough to become an American? Or maybe a stethoscope to check whether they had tuberculosis. They had their names recorded. Often their names were changed, sometimes simplified by an overworked clerk who couldn't manage the Yiddish or the Italian or the Greek. And so a family became permanently something slightly different than what it had been an hour before. And then if they passed inspection, if the button hook found nothing or the stethoscope heard nothing, the doctor's chalk mark on their coat wasn't the wrong letter, they would walk through the door. And on the other side of that door was New York City, the ferry, and America, and everything that would come after that. The tenements on the Lower East Side, the pushcart, the sewing machine, the grandchildren who would one day not even know the name of the village that had been left behind. I would bet that nearly every family has a story like this. A place where the old story ended and a new one had to begin. And where somebody, someone whose face we may never know, stood with a bundle in their hands and had to decide what to do with everything they're carrying. So new, what does a checkpoint on Harbor Island in New York have to do with this week's Torah portion, Kitavo? Everything, as it turns out. Because 3,000 years before Ellis Island, our Torah already knew about

Ki Tavo And Arriving With A Bundle

SPEAKER_00 3:39

people arriving somewhere with a bundle in their hands. It already knew that the crucial question wasn't just did you arrive? It was what will you do now with what you have? And so let's go to Parashat Kitavo that we're reading this weekend in Deuteronomy chapter 26. The very name of the portion, Kitavo, means when you come in or when you arrive. Right there in the title, we already have our Ellis Island. Kitavo El Ha'arats, when you come into the land. Moses is laying out in these final weeks before his death what Jewish life is supposed to look like once the wandering stops. And the very first commandment he gives for life in the land, before the laws of the kings, before the laws of courts, before anything else, is a ritual of bikorim, the offering of first fruits. Listen to how this

Bikurim Ritual And The Script

SPEAKER_00 4:49

goes because the choreography really matters. This isn't simply a spiritual sentiment. This is religious choreography. The Torah tells the farmer when the first fruits ripen on your land, the first figs, the first dates, the first pomegranates, the first grain, you don't eat them. You don't even really think of them as yours to keep. You take a basket, you fill it with these fruits, and then you carry that basket up to Jerusalem, to the temple. For some Jews, this was a walk of several days. And when you get there, you don't just hand your basket to a priest and walk away with the transaction complete and check it off as a mitzvah fulfilled. No, the Torah requires a recitation. You take the basket in your own hands, you present it to the priest, and then you say these words. And the recitation keeps going. You tell how your ancestors were enslaved, how they cried out, and how God brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm with great terror and with signs and wonders. And then what I consider to be the most important line. And now, behold, I have brought the first fruits of the ground which you, O God, have given me. And now, behold, I have brought. Think about the emotional distance this one recitation travels. It begins with wandering, it moves through slavery, it moves through crying out in pain, it moves through redemption, through terror and wonder, and it lands right here in this moment, with this basket in your own two hands on the word Hinani. Behold, look, see, I am standing here with fruit that grew from the ground that was promised to a wandering man, and I am the proof that that promise held. That is Bikurim, first fruits, not simply a tithe, not an agricultural tax for the priestly class, although it was certainly that too. It is a performance of memory. He walks, he carries, he speaks of a fixed text, word for word, and that text recounts every stage of the story from wandering to arrival and survival. Gratitude in this Torah portion is not an emotion, it is a ritual. And here's a question worth asking. Why does the Torah bother with all this stage direction? Why just not say you should feel thankful? Wouldn't that be simpler?

Why Gratitude Needs Choreography

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Wouldn't that get us to the same place? I don't think so. And I think the Torah understood something about the heart that modern psychology has only recently caught up to. Feelings left to themselves are unreliable tenants. They come, they go, they get evicted by the next distraction. You can feel enormously grateful watching a sunset on the beach here in Boca, and yet feel nothing to watch the same sunset six months later. Once the wonder has gone and moves into the ordinary, there's nothing special. Abraham Joshua Heschel of Blessed Memory spent much of his time worrying about exactly this, what he called our tendency toward the paralysis of the imagination, deaf to the silent demands of things. Radical amazement, he called it, doesn't happen to us by accident. Each of us has to cultivate the capacity for it, which is precisely what Bikareem does. It doesn't trust the farmer simply to feel grateful when the figs ripen. Human nature, being what it is, the farmer is more likely to say, Hey, I plowed this field, I pruned this tree, I hauled the water from the well, the fruit is mine, I earned it. And that is perfectly natural to say, and it is also, the Torah insists, a dangerous half-truth. And so the Torah interrupts that thought with logistics. Get up, fill a basket, walk to Jerusalem, recite a fixed text that begins with your ancestors' homelessness. And only then, once you have walked the whole story through your feet, you are permitted to say, Hinene, behold, I have brought. A person leaves behind everything familiar in their little shuttle, their language. Sometimes the family couldn't come. Sometimes graves they'd never visit again are all behind them. They traveled, often in conditions of real suffering,

Immigrant Memory And Not Stopping

SPEAKER_00 13:39

steerage class, weeks at sea, hunger, fear, disease, the unknowing. And they arrive at the threshold, the great hall, the buttonhook, the inspector's chalk mark, not entirely certain whether or not they would be let through. And then, if they did get through, they walk out into a new land carrying whatever they manage to keep. And they begin to build something. They build a shop, a family, a synagogue, a life that their grandchildren, God willing, would someday inherit as they sit in an air-conditioned sanctuary and pray without the fear of a pogrom showing up at their door. And that story is repeated 12 million times, three million of them Jews. And here's the piece that I think matters most for us. The Torah does not let us stop at the arrival. The farmer doesn't just get to the land, exhale, and move on. He is commanded every single year at the height of the harvest to walk back through the entire story again. The wandering, the slavery, the crying out, the redemption. And only then is he able to say, He nani, behold, here is what I have brought. This gratitude is not a one-time event, not something a single relieved person says. And so this weekend, as you prepare for Shabbat, I have a suggestion. Make your own little basket, put it on your counter, and before Shabbat, before this day of peace comes, write down something that

A Shabbat Practice For Thanks

SPEAKER_00 15:49

you are grateful for. Put it in the basket. Or share it at your Shabbat table. Turn your blessings into a bikureen, into an offering of gratitude. And I guarantee that over a very short period of time, your eyes will be opened to all of your blessings, and you can say, I was a wandering Aramean. My ancestors endured so that I could thrive. Shabbat shalom.