There’s a Talmudic teaching that, as a condition of being born, every creature has to consent to God to accept the form it is being given, and the life that will ensue from that. Following on from that, here is my reading of the first two verses of Ki Tavo (Deut. 26:1-2).
“Now it shall be: when you enter the land [aretz] that YHVH your God is giving you as an inheritance [for you to possess], and you take possession of it and settle in it, you are to take from the first part [mei–reishit] of all [kol] the fruit [p’ri – your fruitfulness] of the ground [adamah] that you produce from your land [aretz] that YHVH your God is giving you; you are to put it in a basket [tene] and are to go to the place [hamakom] that YHVH your God chooses to have his name dwell.”
When God says ‘you’ I imagine God speaking to our soul, and teaching us how to live when our soul enters the physical world through coming to live in a body, both at birth, and when we wake each morning. On waking, and at birth, we enter the land, ie. this physical realm that we see now. God gives us this as something that we are allowed to possess while we’re here. And, by being born, our soul consents to receive the gift of physicality, and so take possession and settle in the body. We become adam, ‘earthlings’ on adamah, the ground.
As our starting point, i.e. as a foundational principle for living (mei-reishit), and from the moment we awaken, our soul must take all our fruitfulness that our adamah, our earthly body produces while inhabiting ha-aretz, this physical plane. We are to use contain our fruitfulness, and take what we make and do, to ‘The Place‘ / hamakom, which is one of the names of God. I understand this as a directive to offer up our actions to God.
The end of this short passage tells us that where we take ourselves and our fruitfulness is of God’s choosing. Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi (z”l) said that, when we make our morning blessings, we place ourselves in the service of God, willing, as he calls it to be ‘deployed by God.’ So, when God gives our soul the opportunity to enter this physical container (our body, in the physical world), this passage suggests to me that we reciprocate by dedicating ourselves to serving God, in whichever way God calls us to do so from moment to moment. And we can think of our immediate Jewish community—our kehillah—as a container for what Reb Zalman might call a ‘soul-cluster’, brought together in order to serve, not ourselves, but God. What highest purpose are we, as individuals, and as a community, called to fulfil at this moment?
“May we listen deeply, as individuals and as a community, moment by moment, to what highest purposes and values we are being called to serve. Amen.”