Shabbat Shabbat Ki Tavo
You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below
Time To Understand
We share a home town, so local pride makes it natural that I have a slight soft spot for Gustav Holst, a musician and composer who was born 150 years ago today. You needn’t be a big classical music fan to have heard of Holst’s orchestral suite called The Planets: especially because he turned the main tune from the Jupiter movement into a hymn which begins ‘I vow to thee, my country’ – which some of us may know better as the World in Union theme, first used at the 1991 rugby world cup. The very first performances of The Planets, however, included only five of the seven movements, because the conductor (Adrian Boult) said it was such new musical language that “half an hour of it was as much as [the audience] could take in.”
This frustrated the composer, not just because it meant clipping his artistic vision, but because it meant finishing with Jupiter, which gives the work a definite happy ending. The intended ending is quite different: a wordless choir of female voices, singing slowly and quietly offstage, gradually fades away into silence as a door is closed between them and the audience; it’s the original repeat-to-fade ending. The effect is both unusual and unsettling, to express Holst’s sense that, “in the real world, the ending is not happy at all.”
The lack of a happy ending is on the minds of the medieval commentators who read the closing section of Ki Tavo: the text lists all the curses that will befall the Israelites if they disobey God, then shifts straight into a reminder of certain wonders that the Israelites witnessed with their own eyes. Deuteronomy 29 begins with Moses telling the people:
אַתֶּ֣ם רְאִיתֶ֗ם אֵ֣ת כׇּל־אֲשֶׁר֩ עָשָׂ֨ה יְהֹוָ֤ה לְעֵֽינֵיכֶם֙
you have seen all that God did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his courtiers and to his whole country” (Deut 29:1-2) – which includes הָאֹתֹ֧ת וְהַמֹּפְתִ֛ים, the signs and the wonders, also mentioned in Alicia’s reading from the scroll. Abarbanel, writing in late 15th century Italy, asks: why is there no reassurance to the people – after these curses – that that a happy ending could happen if they don’t disobey God? and why mention only these wonders? For Abarbanel, the signs and wonders shown to Pharaoh means the terrifying plagues, so he asks: why doesn’t Moses also mention the more positive wonders, like when God provided water in the desert? Why does even the miraculous food that was manna only get an indirect mention (that they didn’t eat bread while wandering in the wilderness)?
Perhaps this is because human minds have a real negativity bias, meaning that we dwell easily on the bad things and it takes a lot more effort to recall the good things that happen to us. Yet other commentators find a slightly different aspect more compelling: they consider the previous verse talking about the people seeing things with their own eyes and combine it with the third verse of this chapter, which says, “God has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear, עַ֖ד הַיּ֥וֹם הַזֶּֽה even to this day” (Deuteronomy 29:3). One simple explanation, taught in the Babylonian Talmud (Avodah Zarah 5b), might bring comfort to those of us taking on something new: it concludes from our verse that it takes a person forty years to fully understand their teacher’s mind and the wisdom of what they have learned. In eleventh-century France, Rashi draws on this Talmudic explanation and continues: because it takes such a long time to understand what you have seen and learned, that phrase “to this day” in the verse is a reminder that it’s only now that they are reaching this point of understanding that God will crack down on the Israelites if they go astray.
For b’nei mitzvah starting out on a new phase of their Jewish lives, and perhaps especially for those of us starting a new university year around now, this teaching offers some reassurance that you’re not expected to understand everything immediately, or to have your entire life sorted yet: it’s important to see and do things for yourself, but it may take you a few years, or a few decades, to make sense of it all. The question for many of us might be: how long will it take us to reach that point of understanding?
Perhaps more challengingly, we might ask, what would it take us to understand all that we have seen? Especially over the past year of seeing too much with our own eyes, including the awful wonders of harm done to one another by human beings: we may doubt that we will ever feel ready to have seen or heard them, let alone understand them.
It may be easier to get a sense of this with some of the more personal things that we struggle to feel ready for. This week the radio seems to keep ambushing me with Snow Patrol’s song ‘The Beginning’ – even the song title is appropriate for this time of year – which opens with these words: “Love, if you’re near, don’t tell it like it is / ’Cause I don’t know how to hear…” This reluctance to see or hear feels painfully familiar: attempting to understand means facing the possibility that we have messed up, so we put off and put off even that first stage of seeing and hearing; yet this is exactly our spiritual task between now and Yom Kippur, and our rabbis don’t want to let us off too lightly.
Commenting on that same verse from our portion, “to this day God has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear,” the commentator Ibn Ezra is harsher than Rashi: he concludes that this verse describes the Israelites’ failure to use the minds God gave them, so that even though they saw wondrous things, they didn’t truly attempt to understand. Targum Jonathan, an ancient Aramaic translation of Torah, spells this out clearly, saying that God gave the people “a heart not to forget, but to understand; eyes, not to blink, but to see; ears, not to be stopped, but to listen with” – yet they have forgotten, blinked, and stopped their ears until this day.
If that Snow Patrol song keeps ambushing me with hints of my failures, of the times I’ve not wanted to listen because I’m afraid of what I might hear, thankfully the chorus also suggests a way to try to do better than the Israelites. It even models some of the approaches we need to make to others in the next few weeks, by singing: “And if I made a mess of everything, dear / By being scared of what you give me / I am sorry unequivocally / I just don’t know how to love.” It’s an unusually clear example of admitting that we have made a mess, or failed to hear or see, and daring simply to say sorry. The question for each of us might be: what does it take to move from not knowing how to hear, or see, or love, to being able to say “I am sorry unequivocally”?
Frustrating though it may be, often the answer involves time. Just a couple of years after those incomplete performances of The Planets, Holst’s work was performed in full to an appreciative audience; it has gone on to become a standard part of orchestral repertoire, beloved as a characterful depiction of a whole solar system. Audiences and performers alike apparently just needed a little while to catch up with the composer’s intentions and develop their ability to understand what they heard. It’s a small example, but hopefully reminds us that we too may need time to process what we witness with our eyes and ears, especially when real life frequently doesn’t come to neat endings, let alone happy ones.
While we are living through events, large and small, we can’t always immediately understand them – so as we try in this approach to the High Holy Days to move towards the ability to make amends, I hope we can also try to see where giving ourselves a little more time might help avoid making another mess. If God can wait for the Israelites to gain understanding, at least according to the Rabbis, then perhaps we too can be patient with ourselves and with others who may also need time to come to understand where they have made a mess; and then we might be able to make real apologies that bring about real transformation. Perhaps then we will discover that we have ears to hear, eyes to see, and minds to understand, and as we learn to use all three, create happier endings for ourselves and for those around us; perhaps we will even learn how to love.
