Ki Tavo: Wedding, Wedding and a Triple
By: Suri Davis
I was zocheh to attend three weddings this week of dear friends. Yehudah Furst, son of Tzippy and Elie Furst in Baltimore, MD. Tess Barbanel to Yosef Meir Rubel, children of Lewis and Lauri Barbanel and Shuly and Alan Rubel. And IYH tonight, the wedding of Yisrael Goldberg to Annie Zisholtz, children of Rita and Daniel Goldberg and Michelle Zisholtz, whom I have known since my Stern College days.
A perfect prelude to Ki Tavo. The Jews are about to enter the land of Israel after wandering in the desert for 40 years, having sinned with the golden calf. They went through a lot in the desert, they built their inner wherewithal, grit. G-d remembers with grace that they followed Him in the desert, and when he gets angry at us, He lets us know that He remembers the days when we were like a bride to Him, new love, our following him in the desert, in uncultivated land. From the time we are born, until we meet our bashert, we date, we plan the wedding, our experiences form who we are and whom we seek to build a home.
G-d welcomes us into His homeland, Israel. And there is a promise of great wealth, material and agricultural wealth. And when we reap our fields, lest we think that our power and efforts solely granted us our bounty, we are commanded to bring the first of our produce to the Holy Temple and give it to the priest in the temple, and then we have a statement to say: Jacob escaped Lavan who wanted to kill him, he went down to Egypt with his family, who were few, and he became a great, mighty and populous nation there. The Egyptians treated us cruelly and imposed hard labor on us, so we cried out to G-d and He heard our voice and saw our affliction and our oppression. And G-d took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with great awe and with miracles (Deuteronomy 26:5). Then we say to G-d, in recognition of Your kindness, I bring you the first of my fruits…then the giver prostrates himself on the floor before G-d. This is what it means to build a bayit neeman byisrael/a faithful home in Israel. Respect for each other and a recognition of how we bond, the give and take of marriage.
Yet as the Jewish ceremony ends, we sing mournfully, “If I forget thee o Jerusalem, then let my right hand forget its skill” in commemoration of the destruction of the holy Temple and the groom breaks a glass in a reminder that the holy temple is still in disgrace having never been rebuilt. The rabbis tell us that for every generation in which the holy temple is not rebuilt, it is as though it was in that generation that the temple was destroyed. Why must we mar the beauty and happiness of our wedding ceremony with the memory of the destruction of the holy temple?
Because established Jewish communities where living a religious life is easy, we tend to want life to stay copacetic, the way it is. If we don’t feel that there is something missing, if we don’t miss the temple, then we will not work to have it rebuilt. Rabbi Zev Leff once asked why the Jews of Worms Germany were killed by the crusaders. He believes the answers lie in the fact that in the time of Ezra and Nechemiah, when they asked all Jews to return from exile and rebuild Israel and the second temple, the Jews of Worms replied that there were happy in their own Jewish community and did not return to Israel. So, says Rabbi Leff, the crusaders left the comfort of their homes to fight for the land of Israel, they destroyed the Jews of Worms, who would not leave their homes for the sake of Israel.
Even as we enter G-d’s homeland, and He bestows upon us his bounty, as we bring the first of our fruits to G-d, we remember our humble beginnings in Egypt, and how G-d took us out with miracles, and that we are beholden for him for all we have. Yet, we must always remember there is a great hole in our lives, and we must never forget that we are not in a rebuilt Jerusalem, and that we have to make greater strides in devoting ourselves to others and to G-d, so we may see the holy temple rebuilt speedily in our time.
Good Shabbos.
-Suri