Torah Posting: כי תבוא
We’re getting down to the wire here, and Mosheh still has a lot of specifics to convey about this complex operation to move these hundreds of thousands of people into a new and currently occupied land, whereupon an enormous set of exacting laws governing every aspect of life, including a whole new religion, will kick in. To do so, he relies heavily upon a well established strategy: carrots and sticks.
In this parashah, Mosheh goes into much more detail about rituals upon entering the land, much of which we’ve gotten the gist of but not the specific formulae. This includes the blessings and curses to proclaim aloud upon entering the land, which we heard about three parshiyot ago. It also includes some core offerings and observances we’ve been hearing about for ages. It’s almost time for the people to actually do these things, and this parashah gives them a sense of what they’ll really be like to do.
One of the first acts the people must do upon settling in the land is bring the first fruits of every one of their crops to the Temple in a basket. Upon presenting the basket to the Levite on duty, each person shall make an explicit verbal declaration of having entered the land God promised them. The Levite will then take the basket and place it before the altar, and then the one making the offering is to recite a long and strangely personal formula about their father being a “toiling Aramean who went down to Mitzrayim” and so on.
This text is read as part of the Hagadah at every Passover table. It’s clearly important — it’s essentially the first prayer at the Temple that every person is supposed to offer — but it’s so ancient and obscure that traditions disagree on whom it’s even about. It’s surely either about Lavan or Ya’akov, and that disagreement is over what the word “אבד” means here. Rashi’s interpretation is that it means “an Aramean (i.e. Lavan) [tried to] destroy my father (i.e. Ya’akov), who then went down to Mitzrayim, etc.” Ibn Ezra notes that אבד is conjugated as an intransitive verb, and so it must mean “My father [i.e. Ya’akov] was wasted/perishing/impoverished when he was in servitude in Aram [i.e. to Lavan],” and thus Ya’akov is referred to here as a (temporary) Aramean. Seems to me it’s also quite possible this passage reaches so far back into the deep past of these many intertwined peoples that it’s going to be really hard to say for sure.
Either way, the rest of the story to be recited at the Temple sounds familiar enough. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us, we cried out to God, God freed us with a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, and lots of signs and wonders, bringing us to this land flowing with milk and honey, and now I bring before God the first fruits of this land God has given me. Upon completing the recitation, the offerer shall bow low to the ground. Then they, their family, the family of the priest, and the strangers in their midst shall enjoy the bounty together.
A similar ritual is then defined for bringing tithes to the Temple in the third year. This time, the formula is a testimony of having properly consecrated this portion and done the proper things with it, including feeding the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow with it, but also having stayed ritually pure while handling it. Given all that, the offerer prays to God to bring down blessings upon the people and the land.
Mosheh then explains that these offerings constitute a two-way affirmation: This person affirms that God is sovereign, and God affirms that this is God’s treasured people.
Next, Mosheh gives the elders a significant religious assignment. Upon crossing the Jordan and entering the land, they are to erect large stones, coat them with plaster, and inscribe all the words of the Torah on them. Much like in the case of the tablets Mosheh carried down from the mountain (twice) and put into the Ark, I find it important and instructive to meditate upon the question, “Which ‘all the words of the Torah’ does that mean, exactly?” The typical and most sensible take is that it means the 10 commandments, but it seems from context in many cases that everything God said to Mosheh while he was on the mountain counts, and in many more contexts — in which I would include “all of Orthodox Judaism, by and large” — those words are taken to be identical with all of the words literally written in the Torah scroll. Those are some big tablets (or small letters).
If you try to understand this rationally or literally, the way many people foreign to the Torah’s culture (even some Jewish people) do, you will fail. It makes no sense that Mosheh received this entire text, word for word, in the middle of its action and then continued to participate in it without ever saying a thing about knowing all this already to anyone, even God. You have to understand what “this Teaching (Torah)” means in a mystical sense. It’s all Torah. All truth is Torah. The Torah is that which God reveals about the universe in relationship with earthlings. Everything is a facet of it. The sages teach this in various ways. Rabbinic sources talk about there being “70 faces to Torah.” The Ba’al Shem Tov taught that everyone’s Torah is unique. This is the Jewish relationship to Torah. “The Torah” is not a book. But is the book the Torah? Yes.
So, whichever “all the words of this Teaching” they are, they are to be inscribed upon these stones, and there an altar is to be built of unhewn stones — no tools allowed. Upon that altar, the people shall make offerings and eat of them there.
After that, Mosheh and the priests get really serious and tell the people to listen up. The tribes are about to be given their choreography for where to stand on these mountains when the big introductory blessings and curses we heard about earlier are spoken. Then, with the Levites present, Mosheh gives the exact wording of these proclamations, with each line followed by the instruction for all the people to respond, “אמן,” “affirmed.”
The first curse is about making idols. Some of the others are also 10 commandments in a different order. Others are more particular restatements of laws we’ve gotten since then, like moving a neighbor’s landmark or misdirecting a blind person. Many of them are about specific acts of incest. It’s a fairly strange cross-section of Torah laws that make it into the curse litany, not exactly a greatest hits. But it concludes with cursing the one who will not uphold the terms of this Torah, which is a sensible note to end on.
Then it turns to the blessing section, and this part is really beautiful. Each line of it works on its own, and indeed many of them are used on their own traditionally from one Jewish person to another. Then we have to go back to the cursing, though, for some reason, and a mirror image of that blessing section is given full of scary curse images, such as:
וְהָי֥וּ שָׁמֶ֛יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר עַל־רֹאשְׁךָ֖ נְחֹ֑שֶׁת וְהָאָ֥רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־תַּחְתֶּ֖יךָ בַּרְזֶֽל׃
“The skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron.”
— Dvarim 28:23
It gets scarier from there.
This section actually goes on much longer than the blessing section, and it is the first instance of what will in later books of Tanakh become something of a genre. It prophetically warns about the nation being conquered by foreign enemies who speak foreign languages, the crumbling of walls, the people being scattered to the ends of the earth and not finding rest or peace among the nations, pining and yearning for redemption, and so on. It gets very specific and gross, though still gripping to read, in my opinion. At the end of this section, the text describes this as the terms of a covenant that is additional to the one made at Horev, i.e. Sinai. See, ✌️“dEUteROnOmy”✌️ is not just a “repetition.” It’s an update that brings the ancient creation story we’ve read so far together with the prophetic destruction story to come in the rest of Tanakh.
Now Mosheh starts to speak more personally, from the heart. He harangues the people to remember all the things he’s led these people through, and how God provided for them despite their stiff-necked resistance (and also punished them harshly for it sometimes). Once again, Mosheh implores them to keep these commandments with all of that firmly in mind.
🪦
