This weeks Torah portion from The Temple Institute... This Place (Deuteronomy 26:9) Elul 17, 5774/September 12, 2014 Where are you? I am in this place. A straightforward question and a straightforward answer. This the story of man and G-d, of G-d and man. This is the beginning and the end and the beginning again of mans relationship with G-d. Of G-ds relationship with man. All the rest is commentary. The only thing is that G-d asked that question of man way back in Genesis 3:9, way back in the garden of Eden, way back in the beginning. And man only answers G-d in this weeks Torah reading of Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy chapter 26 verse 9, twenty six generations and thousands of miles later. What happened in between? What happened in between was mans exile from Eden and the distancing between man and G-d, generation after generation. What happened in between is the narrative, the confession as our sages describe it, the declaration that our pilgrim to the Holy Temple recites before the kohen, before the altar, in this place: An Aramean sought to destroy my forefather, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a small number of people, and there, he became a great, mighty, and numerous nation, and so on and so forth, the pilgrim describes Israels long journey into the dark night of exile in Egypt and back into the light of return to this place... this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (ibid) We recite this confession of crime and punishment, of exile and redemption, of love lost and regained because it describes the entirety of our human experience and because without expressing our recognition of who we are and where we have been and of the reality of this place in which we now exist, then the magnitude of the gesture of placing the first fruits at the foot of the altar will be lost upon ourselves and we will be doomed to retrace our steps and relive our history of exile and return until we get it right. For the first fruits of the blessed land of Israel that we have labored over with love and diligence, which we have marked and tied with a ribbon, and which we have harvested and brought over hill and valley until we have reached this place and placed it before the altar built upon the place from which G-d gathered up the dust of the earth to form Adam, these first fruits are none other than the first fruit that Adam took, that was not his. And now we return to G-d the fruit we took against His will. And now, and only now, after all these many years, after all these many generations and after all these many wanderings, we can answer G-ds question: Where are you? I am in this place. Back where it all began, the place of the Holy Temple on the mountain called Mount Moriah, is the place of the garden of Eden, the place of Adams birth. Back to the garden. And as we place our first fruit before the altar, and utter our statement of recognition of who we are and where weve been and of this place to which we have now returned, our life on earth, as G-d intended it, begins. And He brought us to this place, and He gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (ibid) Does this land, the land of Israel exist within this place, the place of the Holy Temple, as our pilgrims confessions suggests? Geographically, it would seem the opposite is true. Surely the singular place of the Holy Temple rests upon the much greater expanse that is the land of Israel. But in terms of G-ds intention, the opposite is true. The land of Israel exists because of and on behalf of the place of the Holy Temple. This is the meaning of G-ds enigmatic instruction to Avraham, as he directed Avraham and Yitzchak to the land of Moriah, (Genesis 22:2) a land that does not exist unless we understand it as the extension of, the first fruits of, Mount Moriah, place of the Holy Temple. Our pilgrims confession sums up succinctly, poetically and painlessly six troubled generations in the life of the nation of Israel. But later in our reading of Ki Tavo we come across the admonitions which spare none of the horrors that await us should we ever leave this place again. The place of the Holy Temple is not a stopover on a longer journey, as our father Yaakov discovered. It is time that Israel today wake up from two thousand years of exile and declare just as Yaakov did How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of G-d, and this is the gate of heaven. (ibid 28:17) Israel is surrounded on all sides by demonic beings who would gladly inflict upon her the ghastly and gruesome admonitions that G-d spells out so clearly in Ki Tavo. But G-d has led us by the hand back to this place of safety and of strength. Surely it is His intention that we set again before the altar our first fruits, the very best of who we are, the very finest of all our efforts, and become the people and the nation he intended us to be.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 14:05:27 +0000
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