פרשת כי תבוא

פרשת כי תבוא

ולקחת מראשית כל-פרי...

That you shall take the first of every fruit…

                The first מצוה that is talked about in this week’s פרשה is the מצוה of ביקורים (the bringing of the first fruits to the כהן as a tax to ה'). רשי points out that when a Jew brings the ביקורים, the need to do it בשמחה. We need to be happy when we are giving away the first of out fruits. 

                Now, this is an interesting idea. Not only do we need to give our hard work away but we need to be happy about it. It seems kind of strange. Why do we NEED to be happy? Another question is, why is this פרשה of being בשמחה during one of the scariest parts of the Jewish year? This is the time of year where the Jewish people as a whole and each individual is judged and written in either the Book of Life or the Book of Death. This period should be (and hopefully is) full of תשובה and fear. So why is there a פרשה talking about being happy?

                I believe that these two questions are connected. We need to realize that whenever we are judged by ה', it is His ULTIMATE KINDNESS.ה' created us, we are His servants. When a slave does something wrong the master doesn’t need to forgive him, he can punish him any way he wants. However when the master does forgive, and doesn’t punish the slave, that slave is eternally grateful. ה' is our master, not only that, He is the only master who knows everything that we do, everything we think, even everything we may do in the future. ה' could easily say, “well he is behaving badly, you know what, his time is up”, and guess what… Game over, that’s it. However, He doesn’t do this. Not only does He not do that, but ה' doesn’t even judge us with everything He knows about us. He judges only with what the מלחים bring against us. I would say that is pretty kind. Therefore as afraid as we are during this period we are also very happy.

                There is a similar situation when it comes to ביקורים. ה' controls our farming. He could very easily watch us do all of our hard work and toil away for nothing. We may pour our blood sweat and tears into our farms, and not grow any produce. However, ה' doesn’t do this. The only way we CAN bring ביקורים is if our produce grows. When it grows, we are בשמחה because we know that at least this year we have a way of making our money, and we have food to survive on. What do we have to pay for that? Basically nothing, all we need to do is bring the first fruits to the כהן.  We need to and even choose to do this because it is the small price that we need to pay for our success.

                אי''ה all of us will be able to be successful in our lives and be able to happily pay our small debt to ה' no matter what we do.

Have an Amazing Shabbos

Yoni Spigelman