• This Week's Torah Portion

I cannot tell you how an English folk song from 1925 made its way to a Jew-ish sleepaway camp in Pennsylvania in the 1980s, but I can tell you that we sang it with gusto:

“No matter where I roam, on land or sea or foam
You will always hear me singing this song
Show me the way to go home.”

Often, our encounter with Parashat Ki Tavo is focused on blessings and curses–the opportunities and consequences of following or not following God’s commandments are laid out in (sometimes gory) detail. But before all the blessings and the curses is an important moment of context setting in the very first verse of the portion: “When you enter the land that your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it…” (Deuteronomy 26:1).

Much of Deuteronomy to this point has been a reminder of our past mistakes. While couched as preparation for life in the Promised Land, we hear Moses trying to offer last lessons, hoping that we have learned enough to live the life God demands of us. In this moment, however, the focus shifts: we envision, for the first time, life as a settled people.

This vision, different from previous sections that deal with the Promised Land, is less about law, less about temptations, less about caution and worry. Here, for the first time, we begin to imagine the blessing of settling in. Rather than reacting in the moment, as a wandering people is forced to do, we can create a plan for our future. We can imagine planting, watering, sowing, and enjoying—not just our fields, but even more so in our lives.  What is the metaphorical planting in our lives to which we can turn when we feel settled, when we feel at home?

Within this parashah, the bikkurim ritual stands out as symbolic of this perspective shift. The ritual focuses on the bringing of the first fruits (bikkurim), the early blossoms of the harvest. Unlike the manna in the desert, where we are solely reliant on God, the moment of the first fruits marks a shift into our partnership; we are fulfilling God’s goal that we can till and tend the earth. Only a settled people can make this offering. Only when we have a land to till and tend, one we can watch and work throughout the seasons, can we celebrate the blossoming of these first fruits. In a liturgy familiar to many of us from the Passover Seder, we are to recite:

         “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the God of our ancestors, and the Eternal heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Eternal freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Chizkuni, a medieval commentator, highlights the perspective shift–reminding us that our wandering Aramean ancestor “had no house or land of his own; he was not even a resident in that country.” Sforno, another medieval commentator, underscores this plight, noting that the wandering Aramean “was for a while a wandering lost person without a home of his own, was not at the time able to establish a nation deserving or fit to inherit this land.”

Wandering has been the narrative thread from Genesis until this moment; we have traveled as strangers in a strange land. It is astonishing to come to this moment–to be settled people, to live and grow in the land, to tend it and enjoy its bounty. Above all of the blessings and curses is this: the blessing to sit and settle.

Dr. Eliezer Diamond of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in his 2018 Ki Tavo reflection, imagines a dialogue between two pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to offer the first fruits. He has them talking about their experiences, their years of wanderings, and their hopes and dreams. He ends with the same shift in perspective that our Torah offers us:

“It’s no small thing that I can grow my grapes and produce my wine, enjoy the life my wife and I have made together, and watch our children grow. It’s not a bad thing to remember this once in a while, to remember Who made it all possible, and to be thankful.”

And so, if we are lucky enough to be settled and safe in our lives, may we all pause to remember the small blessings—and the big ones—that help us create that sense of home.