TORAH SPARKS
Parashat Ki Tavo
September 2, 2023 | 16 Elul 5783
Torah: Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8 Triennial: Deuteronomy
26:1-27:10
Haftorah: Isaiah 60:1-22
Very Good Indeed or Horrid
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
Our parashah opens with us giving the first fruits to God and declaring our allegiance to God. In return, God sets us above all other nations as praise and as name and as glory. Near the end of our parashah, we find a similar three word list of what we will become if we don t observe God s commandments. In the midst of a long list of terrible curses, we read that we will become as horror, as a proverb, and as a byword among all the peoples amongst whom we are exiled. The first set is clearly good and the second set is clearly bad. But what exactly any of the words mean and why they are juxtaposed with each other is unclear.
Both of these descriptions depend on God s original blessing to Abraham. In Lech Lecha, Abraham is to leave his thrice-described homeland so that God can bless him, make his name great, and he can be a blessing. The passage continues, explaining that Abraham will be a blessing because God will bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse Abraham. In our parashah, full of blessings and curses, our fate also determines the fate of the world. When all is well, we reflect God back into the world, elevating the nations above which we have been placed. When we choose not to reflect God s presence back into the world, our very existence becomes a curse to other nations, our downfall presages theirs.
The question remains, however, of what exactly each of the words used in the phrases in our parashah means. Elsewhere in the Tanakh, we find God making or setting us for two out of the three words used in these phrases. Once in Jeremiah, all three words are listed together but in a different order.
The first of these words is praise, tehillah. Often, particularly in Psalms, Tehillim, we offer our praise to God. God is praiseworthy, even awesome in praise, as we say daily during Shacharit. Indeed, it is through our praising that God is enthroned, as we recite in Psalm 22 on Shabbat. In our parashah, God turns us into God s praise. The ultimate sign of covenant is God creating us as the partner that God needs, enabling us to fulfill our side of the deal. God is praiseworthy, and we are God s praise.
The second word is name, shem. This word often connotes remembrance, perpetuity. Those with a name have a history and a future. They cannot be forgotten. In Deuteronomy, it is used most often in the phrase the place where God will put his name, meaning the site of the future Temple. For God to make us a name, particularly in the context of bringing our first fruits, is for God to inextricably link God s home with our existence.
The final of the good words is glory, tiferet. Together with shem, this word appears often in discussion of the Temple. We sing them out gloriously during Lecha Dodi, imagining the beautiful state of our covenant with God. Like tehillah, tiferet is also frequently mentioned as an attribute of God. In this covenant, God grants us God s own attributes.
If the three positive words show us as radiating God’s presence into the world, the three negative words show us as looking at ourselves from a distanced viewpoint. Rather than our existence stemming from God, our perception of ourselves comes from how others see us. We look at ourselves through their eyes instead of God s eyes.
The first negative word is horror, shema from shemem. This plays on the idea of shem, name, in the positive word. What should have been our perpetuity becomes our destruction. Our very name becomes a pit of despair. What was the place of God s house becomes the undoing of creation, total annihilation.
The second negative word isproverb, mashal. We who were once God s tehillah have become God s mashal, we have gone from praise to warning tale. In the Torah, we find this word in the mouth of Balaam, uttering warnings to Moab.
The final negative word is byword, shnina. It comes from the root shin-nun-nun, meaning to sharpen, giving rise to its meaning as a sharp word or taunt. It appears just three times in the Torah, all in Deuteronomy, tracing a terrible progression from love to warning to death. We read it first in the Shema, here meaning to teach in you shall teach them to your children. It appears next in our parashah, and finally in the Song of Moses when God speaks of whetting his sword on his enemies. We who were once God s tiferet, God s crowning glory, have become the object of God s sword.
Of course, God gives us a choice. We can choose to be praise, to be a name, to be glory. And God lets us choose again and again and again, even after we ve become a horror, a proverb, and a byword.
Parashat Ki Tavo Self-Study
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Questions for the
Table (From the Archive 5778)
The parashah contains ceremonies to be carried out in the land that God gives us. It also contains the blessing and curses that could befall us should we fail in our relationship with God while living in the land.
- We are commanded to bring from the beginning of all the fruit of the earth that you will bring from your land that the LORD your God gave you (26:2). What does this mitzvah stress, and why?
- The basket of the fruits are placed in front of the altar. Why?
- Once the people are in the land, they will perform a ratifying ceremony of blessings and curses on the Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal (27:9-26). Some of the warnings/curses seem basic enough to deserve to be among the few mentioned, such as prohibition against idol making, or murder. But why do you think that warnings against things such as tripping a blind person on the way were included in the list?
- This parashah contains one of the two lists of blessings and curses that conclude covenants in the Torah (the other is at the end of Vayikra). In the blessing section (28:1-14) we are told that if we follow the LORD s mitzvot the fruit of your belly, fruit of your land, fruit of your animal will be blessed (v.4). What does the order tell us about the priorities of the Torah? (For an extra challenge, look at v.11. What does that add?)
- 28:15-68 are the horrible things that will befall us should we not follow the mitzvot. This very long section is usually read in a hushed voice (but loud enough that we can hear it). Why? All of this is included in 1 Aliya, but the Aliya does not begin there, but rather in the middle of the blessings. What might be the logic behind that?
Aninut and Aveilut: Two Periods of
Mourning
Rabbi Joshua Kulp
The Halakhah in the Parashah
In this column I have frequently expressed the importance of understanding how rabbinic law is shaped by exegesis and is not only the result of how rabbis wish Jewish law to be carried out. The interplay between rabbinic exegesis and rabbinic legislation is a fascinating and important topic and I believe that it helps us understand many of the details of the halakhic system we have inherited. A single verse in this week s parashah offers us such an opportunity.
As part of what is known as the tithe declaration (Devarim 26:1-15) the person bringing the tithes declares, ֨ ֜ ֗ which is usually translated as I have not eaten of it in mourning with the word ֜ being understood as mourning. This same word is found other places in the Torah. One place that helps us understand this context is Bereshit 35:18, where as she is dying Rachel names her son Binyamin, a word play on –the son of my dying. The simplest understanding of the verse in Devarim is that the person setting aside his tithes declares that he has not eaten of his tithes while impure due to contact with a dead body (see Tigay s comments in JPS Deuteronomy).
But the rabbis pay careful attention to language and would have asked why Devarim uses the word oni when there is a perfectly acceptable and more usual word available, , the Hebrew word used for mourning. Using the cue of Vayikra 10:19, where after the death of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron does not eat the sin-offering, declaring, See, this day they brought their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord, and such things have befallen me! Had I eaten sin offering today, would the Lord have approved, the rabbis invent a separate stage of mourning called aninut. Since Aaron declares today, the rabbis posit that this period of aninut is a one day period (Sifra Shemini 2:11). The tannaim (rabbis during the period in which the Mishnah was created) view this as a period in which one does not eat sacrifices or other foods similar to sacrifices (see for instance Mishnah Horayot 3:5). The relationship of aninut with burial is not at all clear in the mishnaic period. In sum, according to the simple readings of these texts, an onen cannot eat sacrifices on the day that a relative dies. This period lasts for one day. For the most part, there are no other rules in tannaitic literature about the onen.
There is, however, another set of rules regarding a person who has not yet buried a close relative. For instance, Mishnah Berakhot 3:1 exempts such a person from reciting the Shema or praying. Both Talmudim expand upon this rule (Yerushalmi Berakhot 3:1 and Bavli Berakhot 17b) culminating in the latter positing that one who has yet to bury his deceased relative is exempt from all of the mitzvot in the Torah. The main point of these texts seems to be that a person who has the responsibility to bury the dead does not have the mental capacity to focus on other mitzvot that require proper kavanah, intent. In addition, these texts teach that he should not be sitting down to a feast when he should be occupying himself with the dead. But these texts do not use the word onen. The person is simply called someone who is responsible to bury his dead.
To summarize what we do and do not know from rabbinic literature. There is a seven day period of avelut which is the period we are most familiar with. During this period there are various restrictions (bathing, laundering, shaving, sexual relations and others) but the person is obligated to perform mitzvot. Before burial, one who has the responsibility to bury the dead is exempt from certain mitzvot (Mishnah and Yerushalmi) or all mitzvot (Bavli). And an onen, a status that lasts for one day, does not eat sacrifices or other foods similar to sacrifices.
Already in the Talmud we see a certain confusion between the latter two categories. For instance, in Bavli Moed Katan 15b, as part of a long and unusually structured passage about the mourning prohibitions, we read the following: A mourner (avel) may not send his offerings to the Temple, as it is taught: Rabbi Shimon says: A peace-offering [shelamim] only at a time when he is whole [shalem] but not at a time when he is an onen. The sentence begins by referring to an avel and ends by calling him an onen. There is also eventual conflation between the category of onen and the category of one who has the responsibility to bury his dead. This makes sense because if aninut is restricted to the first day, this will usually overlap with the time in which burial occurs.
In the post-Talmudic period this leads to one of the bigger disputes over mourning whether it is a law anchored in the Torah (deorayta) or in rabbinic legislation (derabanan). The Geonim, and in their wake R. Alfasi (11th century) and the Rambam (12th century) rule that mourning has the status of Torah law on the first day, whereas the Ashkenazi rishonim separate aninut from avelut and rule that only the former is from the Torah. Aninut becomes thoroughly conflated with the period before burial and thus, in a broad stroke, we end up with two separate periods aninut the period before burial and avelut the period after (see Shulkhan Arukh Yoreh Deah 398).
The separation of what we call in general mourning into two periods (I m not getting into sheloshim, the thirty days) is thus originally anchored in exegesis of one word in our parashah, and in the rabbinic separation of the period before burial (not called aninut in early texts) and after burial. But there is also a deep psychological basis for this separation, already expressed in some of these texts as well. A person who has not yet buried their deceased loved one is (or should be) totally removed from any other responsibility. He/she is not fully able to participate in this world and therefore cannot perform mitzvot properly. But after the primary responsibility of burial has occurred, while the mourner is grieving, she has said good-bye to her beloved relative and can pray, put on tefillin, etc. There is also a practical element to this: Burial is a primary mitzvah in rabbinic thinking. A person should be fully focused on this responsibility and not occupied with any of his/her other duties to God or other human beings.
The complicating factor, that space prevents me from fully discussing, is what to do when the person has not yet been buried and yet the mourner is not occupied with burial. For many reasons this has been a problem that has plagued poskim for over a millennium. For many centuries professionals have dealt with burial and once the body is turned over to the hevra kadisha, a person no longer has to worry much about the physical responsibility to make sure that the body is buried. And with the invention of refrigeration and the ability to communicate and travel long distances, burial is often delayed for several days. Does a person remain an onen for three, four days, exempt from all mitzvot even if they are not actively taking care of burial matters? This is too complicated of an issue to get into, but a general rule would seem to be that if the person is still involved in some way with the preparations for burial, then yes, she remains an onen until burial not performing mitzvot, not counting in a minyan, etc. But if this period is going to be very protracted (for instance the body needs to be transported a long distance) then this rule might be suspended. In such cases, I would advise asking a local rabbi for advice, since individual circumstances can lead to different resolutions.