Together and Alone (Extract)

By DAVID GREENSTEIN
Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. The Torah portion Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8, is read on Shabbat September 20 The last portions of the last book of the Torah are read as the Jewish year comes to a close. The Days of Awe approach, a time for individual and collective stocktaking. We, in our own time, prepare to enter a new year just as the Israelites, in their time, are being prepared by Moses for their entry into a new land. Moses looks beyond the immediate future, beyond the struggles and upheavals involved in entering the land, to a time when Israel would be settled in the land and God would be settled in God's Place. It would be a time marked by the neverending routine of planting and harvesting, an idyllic time imbued with generosity and thankfulness. Moses begins, "Ki tavo - When you enter the land…" (Deut. 26:1). The singular verb tavo is ambiguous. In many other instances when the Torah speaks of Israel's entry into the land, the plural form - tavo'u - is used. In the few other places where tavo is used, it is clear that the collective singular is meant. What about here? As we continue with the text, we discern an individual emerging from out of the collective. While it may be the entire people, as one, who takes possession of the land, the next verse pictures each individual collecting the harvest's first fruits. In gratitude for the successful outcome of this annual conquest of the soil, the farmer places the fruits in a basket and brings them to God's Place. (verse 2) For the first time the Torah requires that a simple Israelite recite a prayer (none of the prayers of our tradition, not even the Sh'ma, are explicitly mandated by the Torah). It ends with a declaration of gratitude and fulfillment as the farmer states simply: "And now, here, I have brought the first fruits of the earth that You have given me, Eternal One." (v. 10) During this moment of intimate reciprocity - God's gift is acknowledged by returning to God a portion of that very gift - the first-person prayer expresses deep emotions of satisfaction, pride, humility, love and awe. But, just as the individual has emerged from the collective textual reference in order to pick the fruit and place it in a basket, his/her individual utterance also emerges from a recital of collective memory and identification. The farmer retells the sacred history of Israel's humble beginnings, sufferings in Egypt, and miraculous deliverance by God. It is God Who has "brought us" - the entire people - "to this place." (vv. 5-9) And then, again, after this brief emergence, the individual returns into the bosom of the collective. She/he will place the basket before the altar and leave it for the landless priest to enjoy, while she/he proceeds to celebrate this gift of God by sharing the bounty with family and friends, as well as with the poor Levite and the alien resident. (v.11) The subsuming of the individual into the collective experience continued into late Second Temple times. As reported by rabbinic tradition (Mishna Bikkurim Ch. 3), processional pageants were organized in various areas so that the individual farmer did not ascend to the Temple alone, but rather joined the district parade together with multitudes, led by an ox with gold-plated horns and an olive-branch crown. The procession established the collective context from which the individual would emerge to give over the basket and recite the prayer. But it also meant that there were large groups of farmers waiting, right behind, for their fleeting chance to stand out from the crowd. The individual had but a moment and then it was time to move on. How much weight must have rested upon the prayer's last, brief, personal declaration, "And now, here, I have brought the first fruits of the earth that You have given me, Eternal One!" Extract from an article in Issue 11, September 15, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. David Greenstein is head of the yeshiva of The Academy for Jewish Religion, an independent, pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary in New York.