Ki tavo el ha’aretz, the parsha begins – “when you arrive in the land,” and then proceeds to describe the mitzvah of bikkurim, of bringing one’s first fruits to the Temple. Ki tavo el ha’aretz, when you arrive in the land. Like us, the people addressed here have not yet arrived; they still stand in the desert, unsure of their ability to complete the task, uncertain of their destiny. And it is into this space that the Torah asks them to imagine the ceremony of bikkurim, to imagine already having conquered and settled the land, already having planted and harvested and borne fruit, to imagine bringing it now in joyous thanksgiving to the Temple, to imagine themselves past all the obstacles and challenges ahead and to see through to the end – to see through to the fruit of their labors that have not yet even begun and to see all the way to the celebration and the deep gratitude that will follow.
It is like fantasizing, one of the people in my meditation groups said this week, allowing yourself to enter a fantasy land of what could be. Indeed, it is fantasy, but it is fantasy with faith. Ki tavo, the Torah says, “when you come,” not if you come. There is a sense of knowing, of trusting that this good end is where we are going. And perhaps this is how we make it a reality in this moment – by Imagining it, by fantasizing about it and yes, by really believing that it will transpire, seeing and trusting it so completely that it becomes, in a way, already here.
Sometimes all we can see before us are the obstacles; we get so mired in the muck of struggling to move forward that we don’t see through to the end, don’t believe there ever will be one. But holding that fantasy in faith before us, the fantasy of total teshuva (return), the fantasy of really coming home – ki tavo el ha’aretz – to ourselves and to God, the fantasy of awakening to the truth that we are already home – when we hold all that in faith, when we keep it like a lightpost by our sides through the dark nights, then what we discover is that we are actually already in the land, already bearing its fruit, already singing out to God – bati el ha’aretz! I have come home!
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