The parsha (Torah portion) we read this week is quite a doozy. After being told, in earlier parshas, to remove the inhabitants of the holy land because they behaved poorly, we are now told what will happen to us if we behave poorly. It is not pleasant, but then I am getting ahead of myself. The parsha starts off innocently enough with the description of the ritual of bringing the first fruits to the temple. It then goes on to describe the ritual that the people are to do upon entering the land. This includes writing the words of the Torah onto large stones and creating a stone altar without using any iron on the stones, and then offering sacrifices on the altar. The tribes then get divided and put onto two hills, one hill for blessings, and one for curses. The tribe of Levi then tell the people what acts will cause them to be cursed, to which the people respond, “Amen.” They are then told how they will be blessed if they keep the Torah, and what will happen if they do not keep it. The parsha ends with Moshe reminding the people that haShem has done a lot for them: she has taken them out of Egypt, provided food and drink, prevented their clothes (and shoes) from wearing out, and helped them to defeat a couple of kings just a short time earlier.
Ok. This is all fine and dandy, but what is the real message here? To me, the message can be summed up from a line out a gospel song, Amazing Grace: I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.
The parsha starts out with the ritual of taking our first fruits to the temple to give them back to haShem. And why not? After all, god is the one that provided them. The least we can do is say thanks and return the favor a little bit. What is interesting though, is the words one speaks during the ritual. It can be interpreted as, “My ancestor was an abandoned Aramean who went to Egypt and lived there in a small group and there became a great and big nation. The Egyptians oppressed us and treated us badly and imposed hard labor on us. We shouted to haShem, the god of our forefathers, and haShem heard our voice and saw our affliction and our toils and the pressure on us. And haShem took us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an extended arm and with a great display and signs and proofs. And he brought us to this place and gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. And now I have brought the first fruit of the land that haShem has given me…”
After the Torah says what the person is to say, it then tells the person to rejoice. What we are seeing here is a ritual to remind us that if we (as our ancestors) were lost and abandoned, we will never forgotten. And all it takes is to remember the creator, and to reach out to the creator, and he will respond and “find” you and bring you to a good place, a place flowing with milk and honey and lots of fruit for your labors. And to say this, and then to rejoice, for it is not enough to follow the Torah; one must also do so with joy. How do I know this? Because in Devarim/Deuteronomy 28:46-47, in the middle of the curses, it says, “This will happen to you as a sign and a proof, and to your children forever, since you did not serve haShem your god with joy and a good heart.”
So, how does one get this “good heart?” It seems real easy now to follow the Torah out of fear. And from a place of fear, you certainly cannot also be in a place of joy. Well, the secret I see is in the word fear. It is a shame that English only has one word – fear. In Hebrew there are two: yirah and pachad. Pachad is the fear that is similar in meaning to the English word fear. This word is used in the description of the curses.
The fear of god, however, uses the other word, yirah. Two other words have a very similar root: norah which means awe, and ro-eh which means to see. Yirah means to be a little scared of something that you see is so awesome and powerful and makes you feel so small. A healthy respect might be another way to look at it. Let’s take fire for example. Most people are not afraid of it, but they are careful with it because they know the awesome damage it can do if one is not careful. For those who follow sports, in the 1992 Olympics, the Americans started using professional basketball players. They were known as the dream team. The other nations were in yirah, awe of them. But they still came out and tried their best to beat them. They weren’t pachad/afraid of them.
Where am I going with this? Well, if we forget about haShem and what she wants from us, all hell will break loose, and we will become pachad/afraid. In this place of fear, we are disconnected and lost or abandoned. Doing the mitzvot (commandments of haShem) out of this kind of fear does not help us connect (one of the meanings of the word mitzvah is to connect), and hence we still are not following the Torah. Somehow, we need to find a way to step back and SEE haShem as the most amazing presence in the world, because he is the world, and she can change anything, and give us anything. When we see that (“I was blind, but now I see” in the song), and feel humbled and in awe, we start to move from pachad/fear to yirah fear. Now we can start to call to haShem for help with the desire to reconnect with haShem via a healthy awe/fear and in that reconnection we start to feel the joy and this leads us home and to abundance, just as the ritual of the first fruits (and the song) says.
I bless you all to be able to move past the fear/pachad of haShem and the events and circumstances in your life and into the fear/yirah of haShem, to connection and joy with all the life and the oneness around you.
About the Author
Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.