This week, I was speaking with my friends Frank and Marcy, who have been active as leaders at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Frank, by the way, was a high school classmate of mine and valedictorian of his Hebrew school graduation class at Kehilath Israel synagogue. I told them I would be offering this D’var Torah this morning. Marcy mentioned that there is so much to discuss in Ki Tavo that is especially related to congregational life at this time, as donations are received in a constant flow for various purposes, including remembering loved ones who have died, with the names to be included in Yom Kippur memorial books. Rhonda and I have remembered our parents through such donations in not one, not two, but three congregations, two where I served as rabbi and the one where we are now members, B’nai Jehudah.
I believe that people who make these and other donations are not unlike the Israelites who were commanded, at the beginning of Parashat Ki Tavo, to bring the first fruits of their produce to the ancient Temple and to declare before the priest that they had entered the land that God had assigned to their ancestors. Their expression of thanksgiving continued with a recitation of the history of their people, beginning with the words, ARAMI OVED AVI,
The Plaut Torah commentary sees that phrase, often translated as “My father was a fugitive or wandering Aramean,” as difficult to truly comprehend. The commentary then explains: “There are complex grammatical questions that render an undisputed interpretation [of that phrase] impossible— but then perhaps such is not necessary to obtain. The Torah is repeatedly ambiguous. Here, thanksgiving is to be rooted in the past, with its glories and its difficulties. The facts of near destruction in ages gone by (or in recent memory, as the case may be) were set down as necessary recollections for an Israelite's thanksgiving. Whether the danger to survival came to an Abraham or to a Jacob, whether the ancestor was threatened or merely lost (physically? spiritually?) is less important than that the past needed to be seen as impinging on the present, and that God's beneficent guidance needed to be rehearsed from generation to generation.”
Remembrance of our origins and our ancestors offers us an anchor, a beginning point from which we can express our gratitude for the good in our lives. Last Sunday, I was standing in the Nemitoff prayer space at B’nai Jehudah with the fifth grade students and their core subject faculty. Surrounding that space are the congregation’s memorial plaques. The students had asked the teachers about the presence of stones placed next to some of the plaques, and asked me, as their Hebrew teacher and resident retired rabbi, to describe their significance. I informed them that family members had made special contributions to the congregation for the plaques to be placed in that space. I also noted that each stone served as a sign that the loved one named on those plaques had been remembered by someone. I then showed them the plaques for my parents and my wife Rhonda’s parents by taking stones available in a container up front and placing the stones on notches by each of those four plaques as an act of gratitude and remembrance.
It was only later that I realized that I needed to use words in some way to ritualize my act of placing the stones, at least for myself. After we returned from T’filah, with this class that is reviewing the ALEF-BET, I wrote the letters TAV, NUN, TZADEE, BET and HAY on the whiteboard and asked the students to identify the letters. I then taught them the Hebrew phrase associated with those letters and translated it, “May their souls be bound up in the bond of life.”
Now, I realize that it wasn’t only the act of my family expressing gratitude by donating those plaques that was significant. What was even more important was fact that the presence of those plaques had fortuitously offered me a teachable moment for this new generation of Jewish children regarding honoring the memory of loved ones by being thankful for their influence upon our lives.
So as we continue to grow our own legacies, may we be like our ancestors, who searched for and found safe harbors to keep their families and Judaism vibrant and thriving, as we now bind our souls together to bring to our people and to this world more wisdom, goodness, love, hope and peace.
