Ki Tavó 5775 - English

Rabino Darío Feiguin

Congregación B´nei Israel, Costa Rica

Humility, Gratitude, and Joy

This week’s Parashah, Ki Tavo, is divided into two parts.  The first one is about the Mitzvah of the Bikkurim: collecting the first fruits of the Earth, the first crops, and taking them to Yerushalayim. 

The second part in this section of the Torah is a long list of blessings and curses.  Half the people stood on one mountain, Mount Gerizim; the other half were on Mount Ebal, and in the empty space in the valley, they gambled with life itself: the choice between making their life a blessing or a curse.  

In the Talmud, Tractate Megillah, page 31B, it says that Ezra the scribe decreed that this Parashah would be read in the month of Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah, when we are called upon to balance our soul, to be prepared to face our own existence before G’d on Judgment Day which is soon to come.   

It would seem that we read this at this time because blessings and curses do not only come from G’d.  From Him come life and health, sickness, and death.  But many times our lives become full of curses, not from a divine sentence from above, but from our lack of sensibility down here.  Injustice, hunger, unemployment, inequality, hypocrisy, and corruption are curses that are pretty close to us, product of a society that choses, perhaps by omission, to look for life on the wrong mountain.  

Do we contribute to the common good by offering a symbolic basket?

What do we place in our baskets?  Do we place in them the best fruits we have?  Or our leftovers?

What we bring, do we bring it with gratitude or because we have no other choice?  Do we do it willingly or by obligation?

Do we give our modern first fruits with joy or with resignation?  

I get the feeling that this Parashah, where we are told about bringing our first fruits with humility, gratitude, and joy, marks a path towards our own choice, not just of the Bikkurim, but to the kind of life we want to lead.  This is why we read it shortly before Rosh Hashanah, when we conduct our self-evaluation and decide if we want to stand on the place of blessing in Mount Gerizim or not.  

Today, nine days before Rosh Hashanah, I get the feeling that it is time to take a basket and fill it with Humility, Gratitude and Joy.  

I get the feeling that it is this choice which will bring us closer to a life of blessings.  

G’d willing, may it be so.