Ki Tavo, כִּי-תָבוֹא "When You Come In"  Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8

The World Sits 5783

Poetic notes on the parashat Ki Tavo*

The world sits on the point of a pin,

the point of a pin that has been sliced and diced

and shattered by sin

All the frightened elements of the world 

are in a vibrating spin

Even if Humanity could be in perfect unity,

a being at one with itself and with the heavens and earth,

even if its self-love and self-awareness

could be as great as a galaxy,

or a galaxy of galaxies,

for all of this, if Humanity were yet without God

Humanity would be nothing more than shattered glass

and lonely tinkling splinters

Why do the nations rage

and the people imagine a vain thing?

They distract themselves

from the pain of their great loneliness,

the gripping pain of isolation 

that the Godless human race is lost in

Humanity’s whole life is now lived 

in the prison of its sin

The few who are morally free

are feared as if they were a superhumanity

The nations have abandoned the true knowledge of God

They disparage his Torah,

never having learned that every mitzvah

is now a command to repent

Honestly, Humanity can’t say where its truth went

There are lies filling earth and skies

But all is normal, they think, in the everyday mind

The Godless say nothing is wrong

and no one is blind

They say,

that everything is all of one material kind

and will take billions of years to unwind

There is nothing, really nothing,

of concealed truth to find

Nothing is wrong with existence, they say,

while Israel is always breathing

what feels like the air of her last day

Only an eternal miracle keeps it from being that way

Yet her redemption is just one more breath away

The God of heaven and earth

is deep in her heart and deep in her lungs

She is the first-fruit of His acts,

the first harvest of His righteousness

She returns to Him the tithe of life,

the tithe of her thankful beating heart of faith,

the tithe of the birthpangs of her soul,

born of her exhausting labor and dwindling strength

She returns a tithe to His agents,

to the Levite, to the destitute, to the widow

and to the stranger in her midst

Hear Oh Israel, The Lord, the Lord your God is one

It is only Israel who hears 

Many things can be said about God by his children

many things perceived by the natural mind,

some things perceived with divine inspiration

All of them are only conversation among the many,

among the little children in the classroom

God will quietly listen to all

God will consider all they have to say 

He will be pleased with the conversation 

His breath will then silence all

Then He will speak

and all thought will be new

Adam crossed a restricted bridge

to a dead man’s curve

He crawled down a dead end road

She slid down a suicide rope

Eve sought to transform evil into good,

to change the poison of transgression

into the living water of the eternal mitzvah,

to sin that grace might race in

She exclaimed that God had shared his existence

and that therefore all things were possible for Adam

They could capture a star or split an atom

But God convicted her of dishonesty,

convicted her on two counts

She said, I will transgress and acquire repentance like a jewel

Repentance is the Jerusalem stone and she was no fool

Her sentence would be

that the way of repentance could only be found 

through death and captivity

In the second count she was found guilty

for having made a conspiracy with her husband,

to claim the earth as their own island

For this reason her sentence was passed

At last, no way of repentance would be open to her

Yet when she was tried she cried: I was beguiled

Then a way of learning was opened to her

A doubly impossible way of repentance

was created for her

Prophetically she saw Abraham wearing tzitzit

Adam saw her envision Abraham in spirit

and he called her Eve,

truly the Mother Of All Living

He saw that Eve became the very first

to take hold of the tzitzit of Abraham

Eve’s spirit said to Abraham,

“Let us go with you,

for we have heard that God is with you!”

Eve could no longer alone be

the Mother of All Living

She could not undo what she had done

She was a goy

and could not bring the whole world under one prayer shawl

She would have to be a handmaid of Sarah

And her husband’s fate was tied to hers

The best they could hope for was to have good manners

She had been beguiled

She was captured by the other side

She bore her children along the river side

that flowed with blood from the place of the garden

It flowed with judgment upon the nations

but was meant to have flowed with eternal life

Eve was shattered, scattered, torn and battered

like fragments of stars,

between the hand of her adversary

and the hand of her God

She sat on the shore and wept,

feeling that she was like grains of sand

crushed to dust by God’s just hand

Then she learned that through Sarah

and through Sarah’s son

she could be redeemed and again be one

Accordingly, a ship from heaven carried Israel away

down to Egypt on the world’s darkest day

The higher the tower the further it falls

Descent precedes ascent is one of God’s laws

Jacob fell down all the way to the feet of Pharaoh,

who was the ruler of sin and transgression

On their way back from the Egyptian snake pit

Israel would learn that the clothes of God’s justice fit

But nothing fits so well as God’s absolute mercy

From it are made clothes for every Jewish baby

These are the principles of teshuvah

These are the statues of salvation

Should God have built all things

on the principle of repentance?

Should God have desired

to make His dwelling place in the field of emptiness?

Should he have built on a rock in the realm of repentance?

Should God have been a shadchan

between Tzedek and Teshuvah?

Did God need them to make a home for him?

Was God once homeless?

Did God want a home that would be a hospital?

A place where the loneliest creature

could come and live, a place where those 

with the disease of loneliness would not die,

but come and live and love and no longer cry?

Did God desire a home

where the sinner could turn around

and suddenly find they were at home with God?

A place where his love could erase all sin,

and loneliness could never again creep in?

Indeed, God desired a home

where broken commandments

can become whole again

Eve was deceived

by the inferences of the serpent

She was quick to think 

that if she shared in the existence of God,

then she and her husband had to exist

She reasoned that this meant

that they were greater than death,

that they themselves breathed naturally with God’s breath

She thought her spiritual alchemy

could transform evil into good

Her husband thought he would help her

and do what he could

This was her rationalization for eating

the fruit of the tree that God had not planted

there where it grew in the midst of the garden,

whose fruit makes one as wise as the serpent,

that serpent whose prey is the dove,

whose heart is beating with a killer’s love

She imagined that God really intended her to do this

Her husband believed the same and gave her a kiss

They built a house of good and evil

and swept the floor of sin

and went out to find God and invite him in

But Israel built a house according to God’s word

Because they were his children they were corrected

And they listened and heard

Adam’s foolish rationalization for sin

was thrown in the trash bin

The lowest place possible in creation,

The place where God desired to dwell,

is the place where there is temptation,

but where it has been resisted and transformed

into a place of obedience to God,

if not at first, then by innocent teshuvah

This is in that place that God desires to build a house

that he might have a home in the lowest world

Is it not for this

that God desired obedience and repentance in Israel?

God said to Israel, Oh Israel, Hear!

With you I will build my house

Do not return to the ways of cursed Adam

Or to the death ships of Adam’s slavery

They will carry you again into Egypt

You were not in bondage there for the sake of your sin

But for the sake of Adam’s redemption

You went there on account of Adam’s sin

If you return, it will be on account of your own sin

With the help of God’s merciful hand

Israel obeyed and understood

God’s mercy to Israel is his justice toward Adam

Therefore God has given his trust to Israel, saying,

Build the foundations of My house!

For the world sits on the point of a pin

And time was thin

And the gate of repentance was too narrow

to let anyone in,

But now Israel is on her way home

And the gate for the nations to enter is just wide enough