Ki Tavo – summary
“Ki Tavo,” means “when you come”, and that means when you, as the collective Israel, come to the Land of Israel, the promised land. It opens with the declaration of the farmer bringing the first fruits to give to the kohanim in the Temple. We also read laws of 10% given to Levites and the poor; and how the blessings and curses on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval are supposed to be done – we read the general command for this back in Parashat Re’eh. The symbiotic relationship between God and us, being chosen and choosing, is also described. The portion then turns a bit sour, as we read a long list of rebukes, in the form of curses for breaking that relationship. The portion concludes with Moses telling the people that only forty years after their birth as a people, have they attained “a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”
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So tonight, I want to invite you to picture the farmers who bring the first fruits.
They have waited all season. They have watched the sky, worried about the rain, walked the rows at dawn looking for the first blush on the fig, the first swelling of the grape. And now the time has come. The land has given. They fill a basket with the first and the best of what they have grown, lift it onto their shoulder, and climb up to Jerusalem, to the House of God. They hand the basket to the priest. This is the moment. They have arrived. They have made it.
And what does the Torah command a person to say, when standing at the summit of such success? Not “Look what I have built.” Not “Look what I have earned.”
Storytelling. Story Telling Education and literature Business concept. Ability to tell stories.
Instead, these are the words placed in the farmer’s mouth: Arami oved avi. My father was a wandering Aramean. A perishing Aramean. Also translated as “an Aramean tried to destroy my father”. My ancestor, really, was a wanderer with no land, no security, no basket of first fruits — someone who very nearly did not survive. At the height of the harvest, the Torah puts in the farmer’s mouth the story of when there was nothing.
The tradition itself never quite settled what to do with Arami Oved Avi. Those three words sometimes are translated as “my father was a wandering Aramean.” But Onkelos, and the Haggadah, read those words as: an Aramean sought to destroy my father and mean by them that Lavan was out to erase Jacob. A father wandering, or a father nearly destroyed: two memories drawn from the very same verse. Even our founding line is remembered more than one way.
The declaration keeps going: you know the words, we say them every Pesach. Our ancestors went down to Egypt, few in number, and there became a great nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us, and afflicted us, and laid hard labor upon us. And we cried out. And God heard our voice, and brought us out with a mighty hand, and brought us to this place, this land flowing with milk and honey.
Listen to the shape of that story. Down, and up, and down, and up.
A wanderer near perishing. Then a great nation. Then slavery and affliction. Then crying out. Then redemption. Then a land flowing with milk and honey. It is not the story of a people who were always great. It begins with a parent who was lost. It moves through bondage and tears. Only then does it arrive at sweetness.
The Torah could have given us a cleaner story, but it didn’t. This foundational story, the one we are commanded to declare, the one around which the Rabbis built the entire Haggadah is a story of struggle and victory, of descent and rise, braided together and inseparable. And it turns out the Torah understood something that researchers would only measure three thousand years later.
A study came out of Emory University by two psychologists, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush. They set out to learn what makes children resilient, what helps a child weather stress and loss and disappointment. They built a simple set of twenty questions they called the “Do You Know” scale. Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness, or something hard, that your family lived through?
What they found was striking. The children who knew their family’s story were steadier, more grounded, better able to handle whatever life sent them. The “Do You Know” scale turned out to be one of the best single predictors of a child’s emotional health and resilience they had ever measured. But it went deeper than knowing. It was the kind of story that mattered.
Some families, they found, tell only an ascending story: we came from nothing, we rose, and everything has only gotten better. Some tell only a descending story: we once had everything, and we lost it. And yet they found out that the children who were the most resilient came from families that told a third kind of story, what the researchers called an oscillating narrative. It goes like this: We have had ups and we have had downs. We built things and we lost things. We buried people we loved and we celebrated people we got into our family. There were good years and terrible years and through all of it we held onto each other, and here we are.
That is the story that makes a child strong. Not “we made it.” Not “we lost it”. But “we have known struggle, and we have come through.”
Now let’s look back to Arami oved avi. That is an oscillating narrative. That is the story our tradition has been telling its children for three thousand years, precisely because it is the story that keeps a people alive.
So let me ask the question the season is already asking all of us. Rosh Hashanah is almost here. In these days of Elul we are meant to take stock — cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. We open the ledger of the year, of the life we lived. The days we made.
What is the story you tell about yourself?
Not the story of the posts. Not the one we tell at the dinner party to entertain. The story you tell yourself, about who you are, about the year behind you, and the years behind that. Is it an honest story? Or is it a story you have quietly, gently, edited?
Because here is the danger, and here is where we have to come back to Onkelos and the Haggadah, reading one verse two ways. We now know something about memory that our tradition intuited long ago: memory is not a recording. Every time we remember something, we rebuild it; every time we rebuild it, we change it, even if just a little. Memory is recreated each time we reach for it. And there is one editor always standing ready to help: pride. Pride sands down the rough parts, the ugly ones, the ones we would rather not have done. Pride quietly deletes the chapter where we failed, where we were cruel, where we were small, where we were lost, where our baser instincts took over. Pride takes an oscillating story and slowly flattens it into a smooth, ascending line: I was always right. It was always someone else’s fault. I have nothing to answer for. I did everything right.
And that flattering, flattened, all-good story is the enemy of teshuvah, of repentance, repair and return.
Because one cannot repair what one refuses to remember. We cannot turn back toward the good if we have convinced ourselves we never left it. Teshuvah requires the true ledger, one with both debits AND credits, one with both descents and ascents, one with both being lost and finding the way, with departures and arrivals. Teshuvah requires the courage to say: I was a wandering Aramean. I got lost this year. I hurt someone. I fell short. I could have done better. I was petty. And that honesty is not despair, it is exactly what makes repentance, repair and return possible.
The one who brings the first fruits does not stop at Arami oved avi. They do not end their declaration in the wilderness. They tell the whole story, all the way to milk and honey. But they can only taste how sweet it truly is because they have just spoken aloud the wandering, the affliction, the tears. Tasting the good means remembering the lack, the loss, the heartbreak.
So this is my blessing for us, as we walk these last two weeks toward Rosh Hashanah. May we have the courage to tell ourselves our whole story. The wandering and the arrival. The failures and the victories. The years we perished a little, and the year we cried out and were heard. May we refuse the flattering edit, may the honesty of that telling be the ground we stand on as we begin, once again, to return. Shabbat shalom.
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Shacharit
~ Look closely at the declaration for offering the first fruits. What are we supposed to say, and why? Where else do we know these words from? Why tell this specific story?
~ What is the idea of chosenness expressed in the parsha?
~ How do you see the connection between the first fruits declaration and the idea of choseness?