Ki Tavo
Deuteronomy 26:1–29:8

by Jen Smith

There is something wonderfully optimistic about the first day of school.

The backpacks are still clean. The pencils have erasers. The notebooks contain nothing but possibility. Parents take pictures on front porches, teachers welcome students into freshly decorated classrooms with renewed enthusiasm, and children walk through the doors with all kinds of hopes (and anxieties) for the year ahead.

Of course, by October, someone will have lost the lunchbox or the brand-name water bottle. But on that first morning, everything is still beginning.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, begins with a different kind of first day. In this portion, Moses describes the instructions for the Israelites upon first entering the Promised Land:

When you enter the land that Adonai your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil…
Deut. 26:1–2

These are the bikkurim, or the first fruits.

After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites will finally plant seeds in soil they can call home. And when the very first fruits appear, the Torah tells them not to eat them. Instead, they are told to put them in a basket to bring them to the Temple.

I imagine how difficult that might have been. After generations of slavery and forty years of manna falling from heaven, imagine growing something yourself for the very first time. You plant the seeds, tend the soil, worry through bad weather, and wait.  And then one morning, there it is: the first fig, the first grape, the first pomegranate.

Surely the instinct would be to pluck it immediately and admire what you made to feed yourself and/or your family.

But Torah asks for something different. Before enjoying the harvest, we are told to stop, remember the journey, and give thanks. The farmer is instructed to bring those first fruits before God and recites a brief history of the Jewish people: The declaration remembers slavery in Egypt, the harrowing escape to liberation, the seemingly endless journey through the wilderness, and finally, celebrates arrival in the land.

It is fascinating that at the very moment the farmer might feel most self-sufficient, the Torah asks him to remember that his story, or his family’s story, began generations before Exodus.

Yes, the farmer grew the fruit, but the ritual ensured the farmer would not forget that he did NOT create the soil, nor did he invent the rain, nor photosynthesis. The story didn’t begin with the famer, though his role is critical to the future. This is a deeply Jewish understanding of gratitude.

Gratitude is not pretending that our own effort does not matter, as Judaism certainly believes that it does. Rather, gratitude is recognizing that none of us accomplishes anything entirely alone. Every harvest grows from soil someone else helped prepare.

Which may be why Ki Tavo feels particularly meaningful as another school year begins.

On the first day of school, our children walk through the doors carrying their own little baskets of bikkurim. Some contain confidence, some contain curiosity, and some contain anxiety carefully disguised as indifference. Our children carry the lessons learned from parents and grandparents, teachers and coaches, friends and communities. They carry talents they may already know they possess, and other talents of which they may not yet be aware, like seeds germinating under the dark soil.

And none of us knows exactly what will grow.

Jewish mysticism has a beautiful way of imagining this potential. The Kabbalists teach that divine sparks are scattered throughout creation, waiting to be uncovered and elevated through the choices we make. Every encounter can contain a spark, and every person can reveal something holy. Even ordinary experiences like learning something new, helping a classmate, asking a difficult question, or discovering a talent, can become opportunities to uncover divine light.

Maybe that is one way to think about education itself. We often imagine education is about putting knowledge into a child. But Jewish tradition also asks us to consider what we are helping draw out, as there are already traces of the sacred within every human being. The task, therefore, of a teacher, a parent, a community, and eventually each of us for ourselves, is to help that hidden divine light emerge.

And that requires something Ki Tavo repeatedly asks of the Israelites: pay attention to your blessings.

Later in the portion comes the tochachah, the long and frightening catalogue of curses that may follow when the Israelite people lose their way. Buried within that difficult section is a surprisingly simple explanation.

Because you would not serve Adonai your God with joy and gladness of heart over the abundance of everything.
Deut. 28:47

The problem is not the absence of blessing, as there was abundance now. The real tragedy was that they stopped seeing it. Maybe that is one of the great spiritual dangers of adulthood. We become so accustomed to what surrounds us that the miraculous becomes ordinary or commonplace.

The new school year offers a small opportunity to resist that.

Because beneath the logistics, the alarm clocks, permission slips, carpools, homework, practices, forgotten water bottles, and endless emails asking us to download yet another app, something extraordinary is happening: Children are becoming.

They are entering classrooms today as people they have never been before, and they will leave this year changed. And so will we.

But Ki Tavo is not only about entering the Promised Land.

The Hebrew words ki tavo mean “when you enter.”  Not if you enter; but when.

There will always be another threshold: Another classroom, another season, and another beginning. It is a reminder that this is just another place where we must walk through the doorway without knowing exactly what awaits us on the other side.

Just as light is present before we can see what it will illuminate, and seeds contain a harvest that does not yet exist, Jewish mystical tradition teaches that every new beginning contains infinite possibilities that have not yet taken form.

Maybe faith is our willingness to cross thresholds without knowing what to expect, and to walk through the door, begin with a blank notebook, and trust that something sacred is just waiting for the right time to emerge.

Through that lens, our task as parents, teachers, grandparents, friends, and members of a Jewish community, is not to determine exactly what someone else’s harvest should look like, but rather to help them tend the soil.

It is our responsibility then to encourage curiosity, cultivate kindness, teach resilience, celebrate effort, and to remind one another that achievement without gratitude becomes hollow, and knowledge without compassion is incomplete. So, once we have tended the soil and the first fruits finally appear, we are commanded to pause long enough to notice them.

This week, as backpacks are packed and classrooms fill once again, may we remember that beginnings are holy precisely because we cannot yet see where they will lead.

May our children, and may all of us, enter this new year with curiosity over certainty, gratitude over entitlement, and the courage to discover the divine sparks hidden along the way.

May we remember those who prepared the soil beneath our feet and tend it carefully for those who will come after us. And may we have the wisdom, when the first fruits appear, to place them gently in our baskets and reflect on how far we have come, what has already begun to grow, and thank God we get to see the beautiful, miraculous harvest yet to come.

Shabbat Shalom.