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

The World Sits 5782

Poetic notes on the parashat Ki Tavo*

The world sits on the point of a pin,

a point of a pin that has been sliced and diced

and shattered by sin

All the frightened elements are in a vibrating spin

Even if Humanity could be

in perfect unity, 

a being at one with itself,

and even if its self love and awareness 

could be as great as a galaxy,

or a universe of galaxies,

if it was all of this,

but without God,

it would be as shattered and lonely 

as an individual child lost and alone,

a lonely speck in a vast cosmic ocean

Why do the nations rage

and the peoples imagine a vain thing?

They distract themselves 

from the great pain of their human loneliness, 

the constant feeling that Godless Humanity is caught in

Humanity’s whole life is now in the prison of its sin

It has abandoned all true knowledge of God

Every mitzvah is now a command to repent

Honestly, we don’t know where truth went

But all is normal in the everyday mind

The Godless say nothing is wrong 

and no one is spiritually blind,

that everything is all of one material kind

and will take billions of years to unwind

There is nothing, really nothing, to find

Nothing is wrong, they say,

while Israel is always breathing 

what seems like the air of her last day

Only an eternal miracle keeps it from being that way

Yet her redemption is just a breath away

The God of heaven and earth

is deep in her heart and deep in her lungs

She is the first-fruit of all His acts of righteousness

She thankfully returns to Him the tithe of life,

the tithe of her beating heart,

the tithe of the birthpangs of her soul, 

also of her exhausting labour and dwindling strength

She returns a tithe to His representatives,

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

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 change evil to good,

to change the poison of transgression

into the living water of the eternal mitzvah

She exclaimed that God had shared his existence

and that therefore all things were possible!

She did it for the sake of her seed-body, her young

She thought she would forever be

the Mother Of All the young and free

But God investigated her tongue

And she was convicted of dishonesty,

convicted on two accounts

First, she was found to have said:

I will transgress so that I can acquire repentance like a jewel

For repentance is the foundation of the eternal world

For this reason her sentence was passed

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

And second, she said to Adam, I have done this, you do it too

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 and he called her Eve,

truly the Mother Of All Living

Adam saw that Eve would be a handmaid of Sarah

Adam envisioned Eve as she became the very first

to take hold of the tzitzit of Abraham

and to say to him, “Let us go with you,

for we have heard that God is with you!”

Eve could no longer alone be the Mother of All

She could not undo what she had done

She could be a goy like any or every goy

And her husband’s fate was with her

She had been beguiled

She was captured by the other side

along the river side

that flowed with blood from the place of the garden

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 strict hand

But then she learned that through Sarah 

and her son, and the son of her son,

she could be redeemed and again be one

Accordingly, a ship from heaven carried Israel away

down to Egypt on the very darkest day

The higher the tower the further it falls

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

the ruler of sin and transgression

On their way back from the Egyptian snake pit

Israel would learn that the clothes God’s justice fit

But nothing fit so well as God’s absolute mercy

These are the principles of teshuvah

Should God have built all things

on the principle of repentance?

Should God have desired

to make His dwelling place

in the realm of repentance?

Did God need a home?

Was God homeless?

What was the reason God desired a house?

Did God desire a house in order to give it life?

To build a living house…

A home having His eternal life…

A place where the loneliest creature

could come and live and not die?

Could come and love and not cry?

Where even the sinner could turn around

and be at home with God?

Where love could erase sin?

And loneliness could never creep in?

And broken commandments could

became whole again?

Eve was deceived 

by the inferences of the serpent 

to think that if 

she shared in the existence of God, 

then she and her husband necessarily had to exist 

She thought this meant 

that they were even greater than death

She thought this meant

that she could transform evil into good 

simply by judging what was for the greater good

And this was her rationalization for

eating of the fruit of the tree growing in the garden

that God had not planted as food for Adam

She imagined that God 

must have actually intended her to do this, 

wanting her to assert herself 

and create a place for his presence 

even in the place of sin,

in the domain of the lowest place of creation possible, 

that he wanted her to sin that grace might abound 

And Adam agreed with her in all of this

The error they made 

was not to realize 

that while God did share his existence with them, 

only God necessarily existed 

and they did not necessarily exist at all, 

nor were they, therefore, greater than death 

Therefore all their thinking was deceived, 

as the place of sin is, in fact,

not the lowest place in creation possible, 

for sin is not in truth a possible place in creation

For any place created by and for sin will be destroyed by God 

and will be as though it never existed 

Rather, the lowest place possible in creation 

is the place where there is temptation, 

but where it has been resisted and thus 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 dwell 

that he might have a home here in this physical world

Is it not for this

that God desired a house and home

of obeidence 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

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

This is the absolute justice and the absolute mercy of God

for one Adam and for all

The Torah of Israel is the permission to Adam

to learn the teshuvah that leads from death to life

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 it is just enough wider