Parashat Ki Tavo: The Story Is Not Over

This week’s parashah begins with two words that seem to announce nothing more than the end of a long journey: “Vehayá ki tavo” — “And it shall be when you enter…”

When you enter the land.

When you finally reach that place that, for so many years, seemed so far away.

But the Torah does something surprising. Instead of telling us what to do when we arrive, it first teaches us how to look at that moment.

The farmer gathers his first fruits, places them in a basket, and brings them to the priest. He could feel proud and think, I made it. And yet, before speaking about his harvest, he must tell a story—but not just any story.

He must begin by saying: “Arami oved avi” — “A wandering Aramean was my father.”

He remembers his ancestors, the descent into Egypt, slavery, suffering, the cry to God, liberation, and finally the arrival in the Land. Only then can he say: “And now, behold, I have brought the first fruits of the soil that You, Adonai, have given me” (Deuteronomy 26:5–10).

The Torah seems to be telling us that no one arrives alone.

Behind everything we accomplish, there are people, opportunities, teachings, and generations that made our arrival possible. That is why the fruits we hold in our hands are never entirely ours.

And here a question emerges—one that can accompany us far beyond this ceremony:

What do we do with the fruits we have received?

Because arriving is not simply about reaching a destination.

We can arrive at a position, at recognition, at a new stage of life, at a stronger community, at a family, at a profession. But every arrival carries with it a responsibility: to decide what we will do with what we now have.

A congregation can look at itself in exactly the same way.

When a community grows, when new projects emerge and more people become involved, it is easy to say, We made it.

But a community is never built through a single person’s effort, nor does it belong exclusively to those who are here today. Every generation receives something from the one before it and has the obligation to pass it on to the next—richer, stronger, and more alive.

The fruits are not meant to be locked away. They are meant to bear more fruit.

But Ki Tavo teaches us something even deeper. It does not merely ask us to remember where we came from. It forces us to think about the story we tell about what we have lived through.

The declaration of the bikurim does not simply say, “Our ancestors were slaves.”

It says: “We were slaves. We left Egypt. We came to this place.”

The story of those who came before us becomes part of our own identity.

And yet, a story can be true without being the whole truth.

We can define our lives by a single experience:

I am the one who failed.

I am the one who was hurt.

I am the one who lost.

I am the one who had to start over.

All of those things may be true. But none of those sentences contains an entire life.

Nations can fall into the same trap. When we reduce a person or a community to a single story, we stop seeing them in all their complexity. A story may be true and, at the same time, become a way of blinding ourselves to everything else.

There is a detail in Ki Tavo that can help us understand this.

The commentators asked why, when presenting the first fruits, the formula recalls Egypt and the arrival in the Promised Land, but says nothing about the forty years in the wilderness.

And this is striking.

Those were years filled with miracles—with manna, water, and divine protection. Yet that entire period is left out of the declaration.

Rabbi Isaac Luria, the great rabbi who transformed the world of Kabbalah in the sixteenth century, connects this omission to the sin of the spies.

The forty years in the wilderness were the consequence of having rejected the possibility of entering the Land. The bikurim represent precisely the opposite movement: now a person is standing in the Land, holding its fruits in his hands, able to give thanks for something that an earlier generation had been unable to recognize

.

The connection becomes even more powerful when we remember what the spies brought back from their mission: grapes, pomegranates, and figs.

The very same fruits that had once been used to inspire fear and despair now appear in the hands of someone who has entered the Land in order to give thanks.

The fruit did not change.

What changed was the way it was seen.

Perhaps that is one of the great teachings of Ki Tavo.

There are many things in our lives that we cannot change. We cannot rewrite what happened to us.

But we can change the way we build our relationship with what happened to us.

This does not mean denying the past. The Torah never asks us to forget. Quite the opposite: it asks us to remember. But remembering does not mean becoming prisoners of what we remember.

And this teaching takes on special meaning during Elul, as we approach Rosh Hashanah.

Elul, the final month of the year now coming to an end, is a time to examine our actions—but also the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Teshuvah cannot erase what happened. It cannot make a wound disappear or turn back the clock. But it can allow us to look at our story from a different perspective.

We can take responsibility for our mistakes without becoming our mistakes forever.

We can acknowledge what others did to us without allowing what they did to determine forever who we are.

We can say: This is part of my story. But it is not my whole story.

And my story can change. It can become better. It can inspire others to grow. It can allow us to take what was good in our own story and share it with others as we build a future together.

That is why the ceremony of the bikurim ends with a sentence that could easily go unnoticed:

“And you shall rejoice in all the good that Adonai your God has given you” (Deuteronomy 26:11).

After remembering the past, the person returns to the present. He looks at what he is holding in his hands and discovers that there is also a reason to rejoice.

That is what we do as we approach a new year. We bring our own basket. There are fruits we are proud of, and others that bear scars. There are things we would gladly do again, and others we wish we had done differently.

But the question of Elul is not whether our harvest was perfect. The question is: What will we do with it?

We can remain focused on what was. Or we can use what we have received to build what can still be.

The prophet Isaiah tells us: “Kumi ori” — “Arise, shine.”

It does not mean that darkness does not exist. It means that we must not allow darkness to become the only story we are able to tell.

We have come this far. Now we are holding our fruits in our hands.

The question is not only what have we received? The deeper question is:

What fruit will we leave behind for those who come after us?

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Gustavo Geier