Shabbat Ki Tavo: You Need Ritual

וְהָיָה֙ כִּֽי־תָב֣וֹא אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֙ ה’ אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַחֲלָ֑ה וִֽירִשְׁתָּ֖הּ וְיָשַׁ֥בְתָּ בָּֽהּ

When you come into the land that your God ‘ה is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it (Deut. 26.1)

The start of this week’s parashah records a very early (as far as our evidence goes) example of ancient Israelite ritual with formal wording. Most of our earliest official ritual, in the form of the sacrificial cult, is silent. As my teacher Professor Israel Knohl showed in his The Sanctuary Of Silence, the theology of the priesthood imagined HaShem to be beyond communication in words.

The Deuteronomist, as scholars refer to the final hand that shaped the Book of Deuteronomy, expressed a very different understanding of our relationship with HaShem, one that required of us words. After all, as the great medieval sage Maharal put it, we are hai medabbeyr, the life form that talks. 

The ritual with words that we are to enact is described at the start of parashat Ki Tavo as a personal recognition of one’s harvest. We are to take the first fruits – not literally fruit but any “fruit” of one’s labors – “and go to the place where your God יהוה will choose to establish the divine name. You shall go to the priest in charge at that time” (Deut. 26.2-3). 

We are at that point to recite a prescribed formula of gratitude, which is interesting in and of itself, but I’d like to focus upon the act of gratitude. This is key to the value of religion, or spirituality if you prefer: not only a form of mindfulness, but a way to express it that is  understood and shared by others in your community. 

We all need moments of ritual. A good ritual doesn’t make us feel better, necessarily, but it does help us feel the moments of our lives that are significant. How lacking is the situation of a family with a newborn who have no way to formally mark the birth; all they do is go home and start changing diapers and losing sleep. Jews and others with a significant inherited culture have a ritual to welcome a new offspring which has been practiced for many generations as a celebration that also helps the new parent/s feel part of something, supported and held.

Death ritual in our day is even more necessary. A culture like ours that not only desperately tries everything not to look old and insults the memory of many dead by characterizing them as having lost a battle with some illness is not well suited to support healthy grieving. Funeral home directors tell stories of people asking for the cheapest possible way to dispose of a loved one, and then not even returning to pick up the ashes of the cremation. This is for Jews a hilul HaShem, the worst kind of desecration. We Jews are lucky to carry within our culture a dense framework of supportive death and dying ritual.

The more meaningful, living ritual, the more meaningful the living of our lives. Often, we find that an ancient ritual is actually more profound than something we might invent on our own. Is it the sense that we belong to something more and bigger than ourselves? Secular parents seek out traditional brit mitzvah; queer couples opt to walk down the aisle to get married.  And we all love a birthday party. 

Every year we Jews prepare for Sukkot, the harvest festival that takes place five days after Yom Kippur. It was once the greatest of Israelites holidays, lasting for a week of all-out celebration. We in our day need to bring it back out of the shadow of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. In Sukkot we are mindful of the harvests we celebrate in our lives: of the work of our hands, of the projects we’ve dedicated ourselves to, and of the abundance that exists all around us. No matter the privations of our situation, we can choose to see and celebrate abundance and our luck to be part of it. 

When you come into the land of Sukkot this year, and you find your sense of home and you realize all that you possess, take time for a ritual of gratitude: join your community and its ritual, and/or practice your own version of Jewish mindfulness and thanksgiving. Don’t let anxiety or busyness distract you from your soul’s need to know that you are home, and to name the blessings of abundance that you know.