Ki Tavo – Gainesville
I sometimes wonder how many love songs have ever been written. Hard to know. So I asked ChatGPT and here is what I found:
On Spotify alone, there are millions of songs tagged with themes of love, heartbreak, romance, or relationships.
From ancient times to the present, poetry set to music, medieval ballads, classical opera arias, folk traditions, jazz standards, rock ballads, to modern pop and hip-hop, love has been central.
Estimates: Some music historians suggest that well over half of all popular songs ever written are about love in some form which includes romance, desire, heartbreak, longing.
Millions of songs. And that doesn’t include the ½ million break up songs by Taylor Swift!
Love is a big deal. But in this week’s Torah portion, love isn’t enough. A relationship is only as good as the honesty and focus that goes into it. The passion often fades and the relationship changes. Love changes because sometimes the past isn’t enough to sustain the future. And what is true about people is also true about God. We see that in our Torah portion when the text says, “These are the terms of the covenant which the Eternal commanded Moses to conclude with the Israelites in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant which He had made with them at Horeb” (Deut. 28:69).” Since our tradition teaches that no work is extraneous in the Torah we carefully read it and are prone to wonder why the Torah uses the word ‘addition’ as in ‘in addition to the covenant He made with them at Horeb.’ The Torah is telling us something important: the covenant at Sinai was the passionate love of symbolized by the smoke and fire at Sinai. But now the relationship has to change because both God and the Jewish people have evolved.
Remember, these are essentially Moses’ last words to his people. And it is here that he is telling them to rethink the covenant. He does this by dividing the people into two groups and stationing them on mountains facing each other, one group on Mt. Gerizim and the other group on Mt. Ebal. And then the priests were to say in a loud voice a recitation of the blessings and the curses – the good and the evil – that each group would respond ‘Amen’ to. And what were the blessings and the curses? They were the basic building blocks of a functioning society and community. The setting was important: the two mountains stood apart from each other with a valley between them. The image was the lesson: if you ignore these basic building blocks of this new society, a divide – a gorge – an unbridgeable gap – will keep you divided and there will be no community. Blessings and curses are shared and when that happens, our awareness of one another and our responsibility to one another is heightened. The covenant at Sinai was our marriage to God. The covenant at these two mountains is our covenant to one another.
This mutual accountability requires that we are mindful of each other. We are not just a collection of individuals; our future also depends upon our capacity to live as a community, a well-formed collective entity. The Israelites became a people in the full sense of the word only after the covenant on the plains of Moab: “To enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God, which the Eternal your God is concluding with you this day, with its sanctions: in order to establish you this day as God’s people and in order to be your God, as promised you … ” (Deut. 29:11-12).
When there is so much at stake on the journey toward the future, the opportunity to pause and renew our commitments not only to God, but also to each other can be the difference between floundering and flourishing. All commitments—all covenants—are regularly in need of reexamination. And in order to embrace the future together it is quite possible that the covenants of the past will not be enough.
Especially at this time of the year, we too need to renew our commitments and our understanding of covenant and mutual responsibility. We are about to begin a new year with a new focus to all our relationships: with God and with each other, with Shir Shalom and with the greater Jewish community.
In a sense we are all standing on our own mountains. Often each of us is concerned only with our own tasks and priorities. The Torah portion is telling us that being Jewish is about more than embracing our own blessings and avoiding our own curses: it is about showering blessings on the community and ameliorating the curses. Judaism is about bringing the mountains closer together and building something so much greater than its parts. It is sense of love and joy that Shel Silverstein wrote in Where the Sidewalk Ends:
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer …
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
The upcoming High Holidays are our mountains where we pray for blessings and no curses. And they are more: they are an invitation to share the Amens with our congregation and to refresh and renew the covenant of a shared future for our community as we move into the future. These upcoming Days of Awe invite us to dream, to come in, to be a wisher, a hope-er, and a pray-er. Let us spin some golden tales of vision and, in creating that vision, make a vision of our community in this holy place that embodies a covenant of mutual blessings.
