Shabbat Weekly Dvar Torah

The Practice of Gratitude: Parashat Ki Tavo opens with Bikkurim, the offering of first fruits. Israelite farmers were instructed to take the first fruits of their harvest and bring them to the Temple in Jerusalem. They would present their baskets to the priest and recite a formal declaration: a brief retelling of Jewish history, from wandering to slavery to our arrival in the Land, culminating in gratitude to God for the Land and its abundance. But Bikkurim wasn’t just a personal act — it became a ritual of public celebration.

I was eight years old in Basel, Switzerland, the day I learned about the way places have layers. It was a chilly, autumn Shabbos, and my father and I were on a walk by the river. My father pointed out different sights as we walked: there is the house where his elementary school friend lived. There is the gate they walked through to get to school, there is the shop run by the woman rumored to be a witch. And there, he said, pointing to a small, shady area, is the place where they burned the Jews in the 14th century. The rest of the afternoon was like a double exposure... For the first time, I began to understand what it is like when something so beautiful becomes, while retaining all its magic, something terrible as well.

Life moves in cycles. The world around us is never static: days rise and fall, seasons turn, tides ebb and flow. Scientists tell us that even the tiniest parts of our bodies - every cell - operate on a circadian rhythm, a 24-hour clock that governs sleep, metabolism, mood, and even immunity. When we live in harmony with these rhythms, we thrive. When we ignore them, everything feels out of balance. The natural world preaches the same lesson. Trees shed their leaves in autumn, not in despair, but in preparation. By letting go, they conserve energy, store life within their roots, and ready themselves for renewal in the spring. What looks like loss is in fact a cycle of strength. The Jewish year is built on this wisdom of cycles.

It is a rabbinic dictum not to attempt to weigh the value of one mitzvah against the other. Rather than saying that this mitzvah is more important than another, we are to recognize that all mitzvot are grounded in our brit (covenant) with the Holy One and derive their authority out of our chosen response to God's will. And yet... it is hard to resist the temptation to create a hierarchy. So, at least in the popular mind, there are some mitzvot so central to Jewish identity that they are almost synonymous with Judaism itself. Lighting Shabbat candles, wearing a head covering, and kashrut, the dietary laws. So central, in fact, is kashrut, that it has become the way to refer to any action or person that is moral, upright, and proper. In that sense, it has even entered the English language.

Let’s be honest: sometimes it takes losing something to truly appreciate what we had. For many of us, gratitude only kicks in when the Wi-Fi drops… or worse, the phone drops (!), and we brace ourselves for the worst only to flip it over and realize it’s not broken. That moment of relief? That’s modern-day gratitude. On a more serious note, when health, mobility, or time slip away, the fragility of these things becomes starkly clear. At 50, facing a terminal neurological condition (PSP – Progressive Supranuclear Palsy) and having just experienced the first need to use a wheelchair, life has come into sharper focus. And I can honestly say I feel enormous gratitude for the blessings I have and continue to receive. It’s a perspective shift forced upon me one I’m not sure I would have arrived at on my own.

Each year, in the dog days of summer, our text and our tradition point us towards love. Coming out of the intense mourning of Tisha B’Av, we find ourselves poised at the nexus of Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort and Shabbat Vaetchanan, this Shabbat on which we read the Torah’s commandment to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength. And tonight, largely unnoticed outside of Israel, we’ll celebrate Tu B’Av…. And, while the modern celebrations mirror our Hallmark holiday, Tu B’Av appears in rabbinic literature and beyond as a day of comfort and healing, a return to love after the pain and grief of Tisha B’Av — commemorating tragedies in Jewish history and considered to be the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.

There’s a well-known story (apocryphal or true, we’ll never know) of Napoleon riding by a synagogue on Tisha B’Av (which falls tomorrow night through Sunday) and hearing wailing and crying from within. When he asked an aide what was going on, he was told the Jews were mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years before. His response: “A nation that cries and fasts for over 2,000 years for their land and Temple will surely be rewarded with both.” I heard that story for the first time at Camp Pembroke, the Jewish girls camp I attended from ages 9 to 19. And the main question that I remember thinking about the story at the time was: Why were they crying so loudly that Napoleon could hear them from outside!?!

Most of us remember playing hide-and-seek as children. I often thought of the game as one that revealed the difference between those of us who relished being “it” (trying to find their friends after the proper period of counting) and those for whom being “it” came with severe anxiety. As far as the hiders went, growing up was marked by being able to find ever more sophisticated places to take refuge. It was only when the cry of “Ollie Ollie oxen free!” could be heard that we knew it was safe to come out. And it all began again from there. This Shabbat we read the Torah portions Matot-Masei, which taken together, bring the book of Numbers to a close. Among the many matters discussed — such as the rules for entering a foreign city and the taking-on and annulling of vows — are the cities of refuge to be established once the Israelites settle in Canaan.