We are drawing near to the high holiday of Rosh Hashanah. As always, we are faced with vivid imagery. Our fates are to be inscribed in a great Book – either a Book of Life or a Book of Death. Our fates are in our hands.
So how do we as individuals and as a nation find ourselves in one of those books or the other?
One route might be heartfelt prayer and begging. But our Rosh Hashanah prayers don’t seem to fit this formula. Another might involve vowing – without vowing – that we’ll do better next year. But again, the Rosh Hashanah prayers don’t reflect this.
In fact, this week’s Torah reading can help us understand the road towards Life and Blessing.
As on Rosh Hashanah, this week’s reading features blessings and curses. But it also features a core set of mitzvot directly related to each. We also see a new covenant; a covenant that speaks to national life unlike any other.
The Torah portion opens with an incredibly unusual offering. We are commanded to offer the fruit of the ground. But in almost all cases, fruit are conceived as gifts of G-d. They require minimal tending and they carry on from generation to generation. We are not allowed to eat a young tree – we are disassociating the act of planting from the tree’s production. The tree’s produce is Hashem’s produce. Because they are Hashem’s, we are forbidden from offering fruit as offerings – they come from Hashem and do not represent our own creative effort. Adam had no domesticated animals, birds or grains. Because of this, his ability to connect was limited. He could offer nothing of his own effort; the results of his imitation of G-d’s acts of creation. Adam needed to experience risk in order to be a creator.
Here, we are not commanded to bring grain or animals – we are commanded to bring the fruit of ground. It is not from trees, so it represents our own production. But it is ‘fruit.’ The wording of this offering represents a tremendous merging of our own production and Hashem’s. It is a recognition that our production exists symbiotically with the blessings of Hashem.
This offering is followed by a group of mitzvot that blunt real-world risk and divorce holiness from real world risk. We are creating a reality without loss and destruction.
Our national goal is to defy the real-world presence of risk and aim for something better: a world of human productivity and timeless spiritual connection built on that productivity – without the risk and fear that Adam faced.
When we understand that our gifts come from Hashem and a we demonstrate our dedication to combating the risk in our post-garden world, we find something remarkable. The storehouses of heaven are opened and a new word applied to the Jewish people. We become are elyon – supreme.
It is a word used to describe Hashem in the context of other gods.
We are starting to become the analog of Hashem in this world.
However, the reading doesn’t end here. We are human, we do have human limits. Our national status is protected against these limits. How? Just as we saw in the prior parsha, human imperfection is smoothed over by national law. The metaphor here is beautiful. We plaster stones with the words of Torah. Stones, like people, are imperfect. But law, like plaster, can compensate for our natural failings. For this to work, it must be continually reconstructed – just as letters carved into plaster must be reconstructed. The law must be living.