Ki Tavo
Deuteronomy 26:1 – 29:8
This week’s Torah portion begins:
“When you enter the land that the Eternal your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the Eternal your God is giving you, put it in a basket, and go to the place that the Eternal your God chooses to have His name dwell… You shall then recite [a prayer] before the Eternal your God… You shall leave [the basket] before the Eternal your God and bow low in the Presence of the Eternal your God.” (Deut.26:1-10)
As we rapidly approach Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, Torah lays out for us a threefold path to meet the moment in its fullness: bring a basket of your fruit, pray, and bow. In 21st-Century America we no longer come to moments of solemn convocation such as the High Holy Days with baskets of fruit from our land, but today’s equivalent might be to engage in these awe-inspiring holidays by bringing to them an honest assessment of our personal work this past year, the true fruits of our personal harvest.
What about that injunction to recite a prayer? The “prayer” in this week’s Torah passage isn’t so much a prayer as it is a prayerful précis of our journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. For many of us, the experience of prayer—especially during the High Holy Days—is similarly formulaic. It consists of reading pages and pages of prescribed praises and plaints that come to life for us only because of the familiarity of the melodies that accompany them. And so our challenge is to enter into prayer on these High Holy Days with a different intention, a different goal—that of letting our hearts crack open. Kabbalah describes our hearts as being sheathed by klippot, husks or shells. Our mystics teach that through the practice of mitzvot (mindful living), meditation, and focused prayer, we can crack the klippot and open our hearts incrementally to uncover the Divine sparks hidden within.
It is our task to come to the upcoming High Holy Days with the kavanah, the intention, of bypassing the ego’s resistance to spiritual surrender so that we may “bow low in the Presence of the Eternal” and enter into prayer with both humility and receptivity. True prayer is that which is allowed to flow from the heart, not from the mind. Merely repeating words from a prayer book won’t do. We are to enter into prayer the way Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav did, by engaging God in raw, unadulterated straight talk—the way we would with a best friend—honestly, sincerely, and genuinely. Through the deep surrender and profound letting go that accompany such an experience, we can breach the shells around our hearts and discover, through the fissures, the light of Being, the light of Love and Compassion bursting forth from within.
I offer that we come to the High Holy Days with the basket of our life-review in hand and, on our lips, just one humble prayer: “Ein Banu Maasim”—“Holy One, we have too few good deeds.” I suspect that as we bow—perhaps during the Great Aleinu—in that space of profound humility, we will find the tightening around our hearts begin to release, and our words, steeped in the light of Love, will be carried along to reach the soul-level. There, liberated from the stranglehold of the ego on our life, we will be able to open ourselves to the possibility of deep transformation.