Today is day 353 of captivity of our hostages.
In a few weeks it will be Rosh Hashana.
And right after that, it will be October 7 again.
The thought of it could leave me speechless.
And then, once again, the mei ha shiloach’s insights on the parasha comes to gently show me a pathway to resilience.
This time he does that by pointing to a ritual described explicitly for the first time in the chumash: story telling.
This may not be the most obvious aspect of the ritual described at the opening of parashat ki tavo, more generally known as the ritual of the bikkurim, or offering of the first fruit (Devarim 26.1):
וְהָיָה֙ כִּֽי־תָב֣וֹא אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַֽחֲלָ֑ה וִֽירִשְׁתָּ֖הּ וְיָשַׁ֥בְתָּ בָּֽהּ:
And it will be, when you come into the land (...) and you possess it and settle in it.
וְלָֽקַחְתָּ֞ מֵֽרֵאשִׁ֣ית | כָּל־פְּרִ֣י הָֽאֲדָמָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר תָּבִ֧יא מֵֽאַרְצְךָ֛ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לָ֖ךְ
that you shall take of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you will bring from your land, which the Lord, your God, is giving you.
This ritual marks the end of a journey.
And although the text talks about geography, the invitation is, as Maimonides often suggests, to leave the pshat and read the symbolism behind: to read Israel’s peregrinations as a journey through symbolic spaces:
Only after breaking through our own limitations, only after crossing the desert of our painful growth, only after conquering the promised land, the space where we can fully be ourselves, only after we have settled in this new space of being, invested, and gathered the fruit of our work, then comes the time of the ritual described at the opening of Ki Tavo. And this ritual reminds us that at the heart of Human ethics are two things: expressing gratitude and reclaiming our story.
Both happen within the same ritual: the offering of the bikkurim- the first fruit. Saying, at the end of the journey, that we have arrived, implies thanksgiving: giving back a little of the first things we have received
But the ritual doesn't stop with a fruit offering.
It takes another ritual within the ritual, to complete the bikkurim: in addition to bringing of one’s first produce to the Kohen in a basket, one is to say specific, ritualized sentences:
הִגַּ֤דְתִּי הַיּוֹם֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ כִּי־בָ֨אתִי֙ אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֨ר נִשְׁבַּ֧ע יְהֹוָ֛ה לַֽאֲבֹתֵ֖ינוּ לָ֥תֶת לָֽנוּ:
I declare this day to the Lord, your God, that I have come to the land which the Lord swore to our forefathers to give us." (devarim 26.3)
And this is where the mei ha shiloach points to an oddity of language: although most translations, for purposes of coherence of the sentence, translate the hebrew to say “I declare”, the word used here is “higadeti”: I told, as in story-telling (haggadah).
Indeed, just a couple of lines later, the ritual seems to be pointing to what has literally become the central in opening lines of the magid portion of seder night on Pessach:
וְעָנִ֨יתָ וְאָֽמַרְתָּ֜ לִפְנֵ֣י | יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י וַיֵּ֣רֶד מִצְרַ֔יְמָה
An Aramean [sought to] destroy my forefather, and he went down to Egypt
Once we have settled and produced enough to give back, we pause and look back and share what we’ve been through.
And we don't stop there.
We tell the whole story.
During this ritual of offering of the first fruit, we have to retell the full story of what happened to the descendants of Jacob-the story of our birth as a people: how we went down to Egypt as a small human group, how we became numerous and powerful there, and how the Egyptians, in response, started treating us cruelly.
And then comes the story of redemption we re-tell each other each year on pessach:
How we cried out to God, how God heard us and saw, and how God “took us out from Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm”, and then h brought us here, and gave us this land.
In response to which the first thing we are to do is bring the first fruit which were “given to us” as an offering: the bikkurim.
Today we are in the exile part again.We aren’t free from the Egypt of “sinat hinam’ (gratuitous hatred) towards each other. And more literally, we are yet again at war, attacked once again - for the fifth time since 1948, on all fronts at the same time, the country’s very existence threatened yet again, just like in the 6th century BCE, just like in the 1st century CE.
And we have brothers and sisters captive in Azza.
This is why the mei ha shiloach’s commentary touched me so much when reading his very short commentary this week again.In just a couple of words, focusing on the choice of the term Haggadah, he says it all:
הגדה רומז על דברים הקשין
“Telling” or haggada in Hebrew, hints at difficult things.
Haggadah, according to the ishbitzer, would be storytelling applied to difficult things - dedicated to telling the pain we’ve been through.And we know that the Magid of Pessah is a ritual of resilience.
We know that it wasn’t enough to leave Egypt and journey towards a place of our own.
We know that after going through trauma, we also need time to tell and retell the hardship we’ve been through.A few millennia after the ‘vehagadeti’ of our parasha, this became Freud’s great contribution to modern society:
we can heal our minds and souls by telling our story- by putting into words what happened to us and by naming what hurts.
And this is what has been happening since October 7.
Amidst one of the longest, most impossible and painful war Israel has been through since its independence, one of the healing devices that has helped us the most has been telling what has happened to us- telling what is happening to us.Former Hostages are traveling the world- where people agree to hear, to tell the story of what was done to them.
Series of filmed testimonies of survivors of the Nova Festival have been produced and broadcasted throughout the year- check Yael Landau’s series, translated in English.
Artists have been painting, composing songs, dances and performances, testifying, expressing- literally pushing outside of their systems, the trauma.
These days many new books are scheduled to be published around October 7. Testimonies. Stories. Poetry.
We humans are creative animals. Including in our dark side.
We are very creative when it comes to inflicting pain to each other.
But we also do have one thing for ourselves, and this helps us survive our very dark side: the capacity to put things at a distance.
Naming what has happened is a way of putting it at a distance, of making sense of it. And then re-telling it to each other is a way to (re)connect-with ourselves, and with others.
By doing so we give ourselves an opportunity to identify with each other, and to build the only thing that can save us from the cycle of violence: empathy.
And then we get to build one more thing, one that can help us connect further: collective memory.Judaism’s foundational myth- Israel’s founding cultural memory, is the remembrance of a collective experience of slavery and oppression, and then of our liberation from it.
If, as the Rambam invites us to do, we remember to read Torah stories as a parabols, it becomes applicable to all stages of the journey of human life:
Birth is painful. We need to break through the matrix of the womb and it’s bloody. Breaking up from a toxic relationship, leaving a difficult job, is painful.
And then we journey through a desert- the emptiness after leaving the known, the space to build ourselves which contains a great promise but which is so uncomfortable, and sometimes hostile.
And then we have to conquer the new land. Even what awaits us needs to be fought for. Even what is meant for us we need to win, and to deserve.And then we are there. And then we start building.
This is the story of the Bnei Israel throughout the chumash, the story we are recapitulating in the book of devarim as we are about to bring this book and this journey of origins, to a close.Today we need to recap our journey since October 7. This was a new Bereshit.
This year has been its own book.
We have a new story to tell.
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