** KITAVO: CREATING HISTORICAL MEMORY**
Parashat Ki Tavo opens with the mitzvah of bikkurim,which details the landowner’s obligation to bring to the Temple in Jerusalem abasket filled with the first fruits of his harvest.
The Mishnah describes how the farmer wouldenter his field when the fruit trees began to blossom, tie a piece ofreed-grass around certain blossoms, and declare, "The fruits which willgrow from these flowers are hereby designated as bikkurim!” Whenthose fruits ripened, he would place them in a basket and bring them to theTemple.
At the Temple, he would greet the officiatingKohen with the words:
“I am declaring [higad’ti] todayto the Lord your God that I have come to the Land which the Lord had promisedto our ancestors to give to us.”
Note that the farmer would declare, Ihave come to the Land, even if his own ancestors had lived in the Land formany generations!
Also note the verb higad’ti,which has the same root, meaning “to relate or declare,” as the noun Hagaddah,the Passover Seder text.
The Kohen would place the basket before thealtar. The farmer would then proceed to recite a five verse synopsis of theExodus story, beginning with the phrase Arami oved avi whichmeans:
“An Aramaean [Laban] tried to destroy my father[Jacob] - and he [i.e., Jacob] descended into Egypt…”
The reader may recognize these verses asconstituting the central passage in the Passover Hagaddah, through which werecount and re-experience the Exodus at the Seder. Our Passover Hagaddah quotesand analyzes only four of the five verses, ending with, “The Lord took us outof Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and with great awe and withsigns and wonders.” The famer bringing his bikkurim, however, wouldcomplete his synopsis of the Exodus with the fifth verse:
“And He brought us to this place and He gave usthis Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
The Hagaddah instructs us that “in everygeneration each person is obligated to view himself as if he personallyhad been redeemed from Egypt.” Evidently, as long as the Temple stood,the Israelite farmer in every generation also had to view himself as ifhe personally had entered the land of Israel!
The recitation of the Arami oved avi passageon these two occasions – at the Passover Seder and at the bringing of the firstfruits - thus reflects two co-existing aspects of our redemption from Egypt:
1. The neutralization of slavery,resulting in the personal autonomy of each individual;
- Theneutralization of homelessness, or exile, resultingin the autonomy of the nation as a whole.
Meaningful memory is only of personalexperiences, not of detached historical facts. Our redemptive experiences, asindividuals and as a People, define who we are in our relationships: toourselves, to God, and to the rest of the world. The mitzvah of retelling - andthereby reliving - the redemption story infuses these experiences into ourmemories so that, without obsessing on them, they inform our world-viewthroughout the entire year.
By extension, we must create opportunities inour family lives to re-tell -- and thereby re-experience - defining moments, sothat we, together with our loved ones, will acquire and retain an authenticsense of who we are.