The First Fruits of Showing Up

Last night — September 11th, twenty-four years after the date seared into American memory — I sat in a room in Atlanta and watched a member of the Israeli Knesset take questions from a crowd that was not in a gentle mood.

MK Ohad Tal, Religious Zionism party, had come to speak to our community at an event I'd helped Cheryl Dorchinsky and the Atlanta Israel Coalition put together. The topic was the war with Iran — the Twelve-Day War this past June, some of us have been calling it the babushka war — and the general state of things in Israel.

The questions were pointed. How secure is the north? What about the hostages? What happens when the next round starts?

Tal answered them one by one, without notes. Some answers satisfied. Some didn't. The room stayed until the end.

I drove home thinking about what it means to stand before a community and give an account.

The parsha this Shabbat is Ki Tavo — Deuteronomy 26 through 29 — and it opens with one of the most compressed, striking rituals in the Torah: the bikkurim, the first fruits.

Here's the setup. You've entered the land. You've planted. You've harvested. Now you take the first of what the soil gave you, put it in a basket, carry it to the Temple in Jerusalem, hand it to the priest, and say something. Not a prayer. A declaration.

וְעָנִ֨יתָ וְאָמַרְתָּ֜ לִפְנֵ֣י ׀ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י וַיֵּ֣רֶד מִצְרַ֔יְמָה וַיָּ֥גׇר שָׁ֖ם בִּמְתֵ֣י מְעָ֑ט וַֽיְהִי־שָׁ֕ם לְג֥וֹי גָּד֖וֹל עָצ֥וּם וָרָֽב׃

You shall then recite as follows before the ETERNAL your God: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation.

— Devarim 26:5

The declaration continues: the Egyptians oppressed us. We cried out. God heard. God freed us with a mighty hand and brought us to this place, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now — here are the first fruits.

If the words sound familiar, they should. This is the core text of the Passover Haggadah. Every spring, at every seder table from Brooklyn to Buenos Aires, Jews recite a version of this passage.

But in the parsha, the context is different.

At the seder, the community recites it together. In Ki Tavo, a single farmer says it — standing alone in the Temple courtyard, basket in hand, speaking to a priest.

One person. One basket. A whole national history compressed into a few sentences.

I was nothing. I was enslaved. I was freed. I arrived. Here is the fruit.

That's what Ohad Tal was doing last night, in his way. Standing in a room in Atlanta and reciting, in contemporary terms, the compressed version of where Israel has been. October 7th. The war in Gaza. The northern front. Twelve days of direct war with Iran. The hostages. The losses. The gains. And then taking the questions — the hard ones, the ones without clean answers — because standing before a community and giving an account is what you do when you've arrived somewhere, even if the arriving isn't finished.

Ki Tavo means "when you come." Not "after you've come." Not "once you've settled in." When. The declaration happens in the middle of the process.

You're still planting. The land is still new. But you bring what you have and you say: here is what happened to get me here.

And then the Torah does something I keep returning to. After the declaration, after the tithes, after the entire recitation of national suffering and divine rescue, comes this:

וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֣ בְכׇל־הַטּ֗וֹב אֲשֶׁ֧ר נָֽתַן־לְךָ֛ יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ וּלְבֵיתֶ֑ךָ אַתָּה֙ וְהַלֵּוִ֔י וְהַגֵּ֖ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר בְּקִרְבֶּֽךָ׃ {ס}        

And you shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that the ETERNAL your God has bestowed upon you and your household.

— Devarim 26:11

V'samachta b'chol hatov. You shall rejoice in all the good. The joy is commanded — and it follows the suffering.

You don't rejoice because you've forgotten the Aramean wandering, the Egyptian labor, the crying out.

You rejoice because you remember all of it, and you're still here, and the soil gave fruit.

The Levite and the stranger — the ger, the one who doesn't own land, the one who depends on the community's welcome — they are included in the celebration. The joy is not private. You brought one basket, but you share it.

Two days from now, in Manhattan, an Israeli singer named Akiva will take the stage at the United Palace Theatre for a concert in partnership with Yeshiva University.

Akiva grew up in the hills of Samaria. His father was a chazzan. He blends liturgical melody with contemporary Israeli sound — selichot and shofar alongside songs that pack stadiums in Tel Aviv. Three thousand people are expected. Rosh Hashanah is days away.

An Israeli artist carrying the first fruits of where he comes from into a room full of Jews in New York, in the final days of Elul — that is bikkurim in a different key.

The basket looks different. The declaration is a concert. But the structure is the same: here is what the land gave me. Come share it.

Ki Tavo always lands in Elul, the month of preparation before Rosh Hashanah. The shofar is blown every morning. The inner accounting has begun.

Two weeks from now we'll stand before God and recite our own compressed histories — what we did, where we fell short, what we're asking for.

But before all of that, the parsha says: rejoice. Name the suffering. Recite the history. Bring what you have. And then — v'samachta — find the joy in all the good.

Last night, after the last question, after the pointed exchanges and the complicated answers, something shifted in the room. People stayed to talk. They shook Tal's hand. They thanked Cheryl. They lingered. It looked, from where I stood, like a community that had just brought its basket to the front of the room and was working out how to share what was in it.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham