At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, Moshe tells the Children of Israel that when they enter the land and grow crops there they must bring the first fruits to the Temple. When the farmer brings this basket of first fruits he has to recite a four-line summary of the history of the Jewish people, ending by connecting it to himself, “an Aramean tried to destroy my father, and he [Jacob] descended to Egypt…and God took us out…and brought us to this land…and behold I bring the first fruits.”    

Why, at this moment of joy and accomplishment, must the farmer summarize all of Jewish history in a few lines? Why not just recognize God’s goodness in the present and be grateful in bringing the offering?   

I think the answer is that as a people we cannot just freeze-frame and live in the present. We are a people with a complex and ever-changing history. The changes that take place are unpredictable and often surprising turns of 180 degrees. We see this reflected in the history which the farmer recites: Jacob runs away, Jacob is successful, Laban wants to destroy him, Jacob descends to Egypt, all seems lost, we are perishing under Pharaoh, and God takes us out of Egypt and to the Holy Land. We get to the land and must fight many wars, a complex, whiplash-like history, but now the farmer stands here in this moment of great joy.  

For the Jewish people, we have history and the present. Both are constantly changing. A great rabbi once pointed out that on the saddest day of the year, Tisha B’Av, we don’t say the sad prayer of Tachanun, which we say each day, and at the moment of our greatest joy, a wedding, we break a glass and remember the destruction. We are never just one-sided, never so joyous with abandon that we forget the downs of history and never so sad and hopeless that we forget that even in those moments the seeds of redemption are germinating. Jews are complex—it’s never, even in our moment of great accomplishment, one or the other.   

A few years ago, just after attending the signing of the Abraham Accords on the White House lawn, I preached that this was the messianic era that Maimonides describes in the Mishneh Torah, a natural process in which the Jewish people gain sovereignty in the land of Israel and achieve peace with their enemies. We had sovereignty, a surprising peace was developing and the ancient prophecy that the Ten Tribes would return was coming to fruition from unpredictable lands all over the world.   

The past two years have brought their own ups and downs—the tragedy of October 7th with its inexplicable intelligence blunders, the horrific taking of Jewish hostages, destruction, death, and loss—and yet in the middle of all of that, only a few months ago, Israel virtually redrew the map of the Middle East. Iran and Hezbollah, which had threatened to destroy Israel many times over and had the capacity to do so, were rendered by Israel’s intelligence and military a pale shell of their former selves.  

The situation, a microcosm of Jewish history, changes each week, from peace accords with our enemies to threatened reversal of that peace, from Jewish weakness to strength, from Jewish success in the diaspora to widespread antisemitism, up and down, up and down, as if Jewish history has been set on warp speed.  

So we must take a lesson from the farmer in this parsha. We must recite the ups and downs and be cognizant of them, but we must end the declaration with joy for this moment and for God’s grace. Then we must promise to share the bounty with others who may be in need, for this is true joy: “And now I bring the first fruits of the land which You, God, have given me. …And you shall be joyous in all the good, which God has given you and your household, you and the Levite and the stranger who is in your midst.”