A Sermon for Parashat Ki Tavo
August 28, 2026
Imagine a farmer in ancient Israel. He has walked days to Jerusalem, a basket of first fruits balanced on his shoulder — figs, dates, pomegranates, the literal fruit of his labor. He hands the basket to the kohen, the priest in the temple. But his obligation is not yet done. To complete the ritual, the Torah tells us that every farmer must say the following when bringing the sacrifice:
” אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י Arami oved avi — my father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a great nation… And the Egyptians dealt harshly with us… and we cried out to the Lord… and the Lord brought us out of Egypt.”
Seems like a strange commandment, doesn’t it? You’ve come to drop off some fruit and make your tithe but then this kind of strange declaration that has nothing to do with fruit. Why does this tithe and fruit deposit require a history lesson?
This is, in reality, an essential Jewish characteristic. It is the moment historical memory becomes ritual — and Ki Tavo is where the Torah shows us how that transformation happens.
Look at how carefully the commentators read this declaration. Let me give you few examples:
Rashi, commenting on “Arami oved avi,” reads the word oved not as “wandering” but as “destroying” because the word oveid Alef, Bet, Dalet is the root of the word for both wandering and destroying! Rashi understands the verse to mean: an Aramean, Lavan, sought to destroy my father Jacob. The farmer isn’t just noting a fact of ancient geography. He is invoking a moment of mortal danger and rescue, and tying it to the fruit in his hands.
Abraham Ibn Ezra reads oved differently — Jacob himself as the wanderer, the refugee with nothing, who arrived in Egypt with a handful of family members. Two readings, but the same underlying claim: the prosperity in your hands today has a genealogy of vulnerability behind it, and you are obligated to say so out loud.
The Ramban – also known as Nachmanides – explains the deeper purpose of this whole ceremony: it is designed to produce הכרת הטוב hakarat hatov — not gratitude as a private feeling, but gratitude as a formal acknowledgment. In other words, the farmer who brings the tithe fruits must connect this season’s harvest and its command to tithe to a chain of events that began in slavery. But why? Simply so that he never mistakes his own hands for the source of his blessing. And the Sforno adds: the point of reciting the story, rather than merely feeling thankful, is that feeling fades — but words, repeated in fixed form, do not.
That’s the whole innovation, actually. The Torah does not command the farmer to remember. It commands him to say. Memory, left alone, is fragile. Take a look at how too many people distort history and claim it as a truism to support their politics. In truth memory often depends on mood, on generation, on who happens to still recall the story. Ritual doesn’t depend on any of that. The Torah takes a memory and locks it into structure: fixed words, fixed time, fixed action, repeated forever, whether or not the farmer that year happens to feel moved.
And here’s what I find remarkable: this exact ceremony becomes the template for the ritual most Jews around the world will observe just months from now. By now you probably have recognized that this declaration is the very first part of the retelling of the Passover story in the Hagaddah. The rabbis of the Haggadah didn’t compose a new telling of the Exodus for Seder night. They reached back into the first-fruits declaration of a farmer standing in the Temple courtyard and said: this is the text. This is how a Jew tells the story.
Which means the pattern in our parasha — private memory, formalized into fixed liturgy, performed annually, by everyone, regardless of feeling — is not a one-time biblical curiosity. It is the founding template of Jewish ritual life itself.
And once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere in Jewish practice, right up to today.
Every Yom HaShoah, we do not simply feel sad about the Shoah. We ritualize the memory: sirens sound in Israel and everyone stops and gets out of the their cars even if they are on a highway to stand silently for two minutes, candles are lit, names are read aloud in fixed ceremony across Israel and the Diaspora — memory converted into structure so that it survives the fading of living witnesses.
And the very next morning, Israel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut – Israel Independence Day. From profound memory of grief to the memory of elation and freedom. That whiplash transition from grief to joy is not accidental. It mirrors precisely the structure of our farmer’s declaration — “we cried out… and God brought us out” — sorrow and redemption bound into a single, repeated liturgical motion.
Every Tisha B’Av, so many Jews sit on the floor and read kinot — poems of destruction, some written a thousand years apart, all folded into one fixed annual ritual, so that the memory of churban does not depend on any single generation’s capacity to still feel the loss firsthand.
Even Yizkor, four times a year, takes something as private and unstructured as grief for a parent and gives it a fixed text, a fixed moment, a fixed place in the service — because the Torah already taught us, in this week’s parasha, that if you want a memory to survive, you cannot leave it to memory alone. Memory is malleable. Ritual is fixed. And although the ritual itself may evolve to meet new realities, the core of the ritual never changes.
So here is the charge Ki Tavo leaves us with. The Torah could have simply said: remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and be grateful. Instead it built an entire ceremony — a basket, a walk to Jerusalem, a fixed declaration, repeated by every farmer, every year, forever. Because our tradition understood something profound: memory that isn’t ritualized eventually dies with the generation that lived it. Memory that is ritualized outlives all of us.
The question this parasha leaves each of us with is simple: what memory in our own lives — personal or communal — still depends on only our feelings to survive? And how long will that feeling last? The Torah offers us that challenge. How can we give that memory the dignity our ancestors gave theirs: not just a feeling, but a form; not just a memory, but a ritual.
Jewish tradition has given ritual to memory, a form to follow so we remember who we are and where we came from. The Torah commands: “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children:” Jewish history is our story. The Torah invites us to re-enact it every day in some way or another. We are the great actors of the Jewish drama and, without us and our ritualized memory, the drama becomes unrecognizable. So embrace the drama. Ad lib if you wish. But always keep in mind that when you tie memory with ritual, you become the main character in the great play we call Judaism and the great cast we call the Jewish people.
Shabbat Shalom.
