The bikkurim declaration (Deuteronomy 26:1-11) speaks of making a journey from Mitzrayim to eretz zavat halav udevash, to a land flowing with milk and honey. This is the journey we make in life, not once, but many times over, sometimes a thousand times a day, from Mitzrayim, a place of narrow straits, to a land of ease and flow.
In Mitzrayim, we hold ourselves rigid and constricted; we can feel the tension in our bodies borne of work and stress, of relentless effort and tight control. We were in Mitzrayim, but now, as we come home – bati el ha’aretz, “I have come home!” the bikkurim pilgrim declares – as we come home inside ourselves, now we come into a different type of a land, our true homeland, a land which flows with milk and honey. There is flow here and ease, a sense of letting go and allowing reality to unfold without our control, effort or expectation, just letting it all flow as it will; we work, yes, but our work does not resist the river, but instead goes along with its current. We float along in this river, letting it go where it wants to go, trusting it, trusting that we will be provided for, that there will continue to be milk and honey as we need it.
Or perhaps we are ourselves a land flowing with milk and honey. We can feel the places of tension in our body, their tightness, their frozenness, their hardness – kashah, hard like the work in Mitzrayim – and we can let all that tightness and hardness dissolve into a sweet creamy flowing river. You are not Mitzrayim, as you thought all this time. You are an eretz zavat halav udevash. Let your whole body feel that softness.
Eretz asher Hashem Elokekha noten likha. This is the true home that God has given you. It is a matanah, a free gift. You don’t have to effort to receive this flow, but simply to relax into it as a free gift. It is your yerushah, your nahalah, as the Torah says here – it is your inheritance, your birthright – to come home to this place of ease and rest inside you. You belong here.
This is a place of grace and gratitude. In our everyday Mitzrayim lives, we struggle and strive and so it often feels to us that it is our efforts that produce results. But here, in our true home, in the land flowing with milk and honey, in the place inside ourselves where there is ease and flow, we know that it is not us, that we don’t really produce anything in this world on our own. The fruit we bear came to us as a gift; we are channels for the divine; whatever we accomplish is only because we have allowed the divine flow to work through us. We let go of our baskets of produce – we know they don’t belong to us – we put them down in the river and let them go where they may, knowing they are a part of the divine river that flows through all of us. We own none of it. We give thanks in joyful song for having a home in this divine river.
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