The Love in a Father's Hand (Ki Tavo) | Land of Israel Fellowship

Um, so this past Shabbat in our synagogue on the farm, a boy stood up and read 63 consecutive verses of the Torah out loud with zero preparation with his father guiding him throughout the whole thing. Now, for you to understand the magnitude of the moment, there are a few things I have to explain first. So stay with me because the background of this, it was so complex. I was like, should I even share this? There's so many backgrounds that I need to to set up. But really, the background of it is also part of the beauty of the story. So, let me start with the aliyah. On Shabbat morning, we take this Torah scroll out of the ark and we read from it loud publicly, the way it's been read for thousands of years. The weekly portion is divided into sections. And for each section, the seven sections, a man is called up by name to the reading table. It's called the Beimma. And and that name is not what's printed on your passport. It's the name you were given at your bre ma your circumcision on the eighth day of your life and that is your true name and that's why when people come to the farm they're like my name is Stanley I'm like no what's your Judeian name it's Yakov you know okay so I only call them Yakov that's part of what I do and I see something comes alive within them but we've talked about that before um but that's your true name and it never comes alone it always comes attached to your father's name mine is Ari Yehuda ben Morai Hershel are Yehuda, the son of Morai. That was my father's name. Your connection to your father isn't just a decoration at the end of it. That is your name. That's an aliyah. The word means going up. And it's the same word we use for moving to the land of Israel, which I think is not an accident. You walk up, you take hold of the wooden handles, and you say a blessing before the section and the blessing after the section of the reading. And for those minutes while the reader is reading the Torah, you are standing there with your hands on the Torah while the words are chanted in front of everyone. You're you're not the one reading. Somebody else is reading it for the congregation and for you. And you're supposed to be reading it with him in a whisper through him on some level. Your partner's in the undertaking. He's reading and you're standing there and holding on. Now, as some of you may remember, when I get an aliyah, I listen as though it were written just for me. You know, to me, hearing those particular words at that particular moment of my life is Hashem speaking very loudly to me. At least, it's always been my experience. The words go straight into the exact place I most need them. A place where I didn't even know that I had that I so badly needed to listen to it. This has happened to me so many times where the particular words that are being read when I'm called up is so perfect for me. I just can't deny it, you know. But this Shabbat, the message didn't come through the portion that was read. It came through what was happening around the reading itself. Another word of background, the prayers at the farm are different every week. Whoever shows up is whoever is here. Guests scattered around the Arugot families passing through, soldiers. Sometimes it's Yemenite prayer service, Moroccanic, whatever. As a reminder, this is what our synagogue looks like. I just we have thousands of pictures and videos. I just grabbed whatever I saw. Yes. So, uh so some weeks we are scraping to get 10 men for a minion. Uh you know the quorum that you need to read uh the Torah at all and somebody is standing at the Torah doing the math. Some weeks there are 40. You don't know until it happens. In a normal synagogue, there's a list. Everybody walks in knowing who is reading that week. And that person has had plenty of time to practice. And that matters because reading the Torah is genuinely hard. And here's why. The Torah scroll is written by hand on parchment and ink exactly the way it's been written for millennia. And it contains not only the the consonants, you know, there there's no vowels, no punctuation mark, no verse numbers, no cancellation marks. The the cantellation which we call the trump is the notation that tells you the melody of every single word and it by it does something much bigger than make the reading sound beautiful. It carries the phrasing which words connect and which separate where the sentence breathes where the thought turns. It's the grammar and the meaning carried in a tune. It's sort of hard to explain. You really need to experience it anyways. But none of it is written on the scroll. Not one mark of it. So the reader has to memorize all of it. He has to know the vowels for the words he's seeing without vowels, right? And the the melody for a text that is silent on the page. There are people who spend a month preparing a single portion. But because of the character of our synagogue, because people arrive not knowing who's going to read, nearly every week, the Torah gets read by somebody who has almost no preparation at all. So somebody stands next to him and signs the Trump with his fingers. There's a whole hand language for it, a shape for each mark. And I'm telling you, my friends, there's an astonishing number of people who are good at this. I've seen those who seem fluent in it. And most of them are in the land, by the way. Growing up in America, I don't ever remember seeing this happen. Again, just so you get this, the reader is looking down at a column of unvalized consonants. And out of the corner of his eye, he's catching a hand moving beside him with, you know, from those two things, letters with no sound and a hand with no words, he sings the divine truth of the Torah into the world. I've watched it hundreds of times, and I still don't understand how the brain does it. Two people, one voice. And I think that's exactly how it was designed. The scroll was given to us deliberately unfinished. The letters and nothing else because it was never meant to speak by itself. It needs a living person to give it breath. And this is uh two of them giving it breath at once in real time. Now this past Shabbat before I was called up, I noticed the young man who was reading and I was impressed. But I'm always impressed. So it wasn't making that much of an impression on me until my name was called for Shishi, the sixth aliyah. Now, just so you know, our portion this week is key tavo, one of the longer portions of the Torah. 122 verses. I think it's number seven 17 out of all the portions. And um and more than half of them uh of these 122 verses are in shishi, right? The one I was being called up for 63 verses. And many of them were not simple to read at all. They felt like tongue twisters to me, a lot of them. And the boy reading them was 14 years old. I came up, said the blessing, and found myself standing right next to him with a view of everything. His father was next to him signing the truck, and the two of them were locked into something that I can only describe as a dance. The hand moving, the voice following, the hand moving, the voice following. And it was a struggle, like a real one. I mean, 63 consecutive verses of that difficulty would be hard for anybody, even the most experienced reader in the room. And this boy was just 14. And now it really seemed like the whole congregation felt it. We were all in it. He was biting words, making mistakes here and there, fixing them. This person fixed that. Nobody was drifting. Nobody was talking. Our synagogue has seats around the perimeter. Um, and just a few seats in the middle when it's necessary. And so when everyone leans in, you feel it. And everyone was leaning in. At one point, it got so intense that the father stopped signing. He raised his hand and instead of shaping the next note, he brought his hand down to the side of his son's face and just caressed his cheek. The boy was sweating from the effort and appeared to me that his father may have been wiping the sweat off his face while caressing his cheek. He was he was definitely comforting him, telling his son through his hand that he was doing great. And it was clear to me that that this caress was just filled with longing and love and pride, you know, pride at the ferocity of this battle that he and his son were locked in together. Pride at a 14-year-old boy who would not let go, you know, just singing the eternal words of the Torah out loud in these majestic hills of Judea, fighting with all he had. And I even turned and looked at one of the men along the wall with one of those like wow faces like you know just have somebody to share the experience with. And he looked back at me and lifted up two pages of the kumsh of the Bible and said two two more pages left to go. I mean and I'll admit something I was struggling to follow the words themselves because I was so immersed in what was playing out in front of me between him and his father. I I wasn't in the front row. I was on the stage of it in a minor role but a role I was honored to have rolling the Tora scroll for him as he finished each column like I was in it. And when he finished the entire room just exhaled at the same time you could hear it. I I grabbed the kid's shoulders and gave him a congratulatory like tap you know and his father was glowing and gave him a big hug and and then his mother walked around the makita. You know what a makita is? the partition that separates the men and women's sections. She came to the front where her son was standing and put her arms around him and she had tears in her eyes. I mean, she was crying and nobody thought twice about it for a second. Even though the beam of the reading platform is on the men's side, it was just the most natural thing to happen. It's just the most natural thing for a mother to do. Now, here's the part that I didn't sort of go into yet. Shishi in paro is the to the to is the rebuke 50ome consecutive verses right I mean well I guess the the toa is within that so it's 50 I think it was four consecutive verses laying out in unbearable detail everything that will come upon Israel if we abandon the covenant siege exile famine terror the whole family the mother the father the children now there's this custom in most communities ities to read it in a lowered voice almost in an undertone quickly without pausing between the verses. In many synagogues, nobody volunteers for that aliyah. The reader blesses the Torah before and after himself because you don't want to hand that to somebody. I didn't ask for it. I was just it was handed to me. So, this 14-year-old boy was reading the curses. It was in a lower tone fast for that long. And so, that's what was happening. And in the middle of the section, I was standing over with my hands on the wooden handles in this verse. And this is one of the most powerful verses for me. All of these things, right? These because you did not serve Hashem your God with joy and with gladness of heart out of the abundance of everything. We've done entire fellowships on this verse. There's so much to say and I'm fighting the impulse to say it because I want to give it back to Jeremy. This is his fellowship. But that verse is the hinge of the entire toa. Everything around it describes what will happen. This is the why. And it doesn't say the curses come because you didn't serve him. It says they come because you served him without joy. You had everything meovk out of the abundance of everything and you did it joylessly. And my friends, it took me until just later to digest all of this to see what actually happened there. Because while those words were being whispered in that room, the room was full of the exact thing the verse says was missing. A father's hand on his son's cheek in the middle of one of the hardest passages in the Torah. A mother crossing the makita because her son had carried something enormous and she was just not going to let him set it down alone. You know the the reading of the curses was without anybody planning it an act of avodima service with joy performed by a boy his father and really we were all a part of it the entire congregation and it wasn't the western idea of joy nobody was like smiling right nobody was having a nice time it was hard and at times it was slow and it was even times it was painful right and there was a kid sweating and breaking his teeth in the front of the room right but simka the word that verse uses for joy is not the feeling you get when things go pleasantly and you have a you're going to a good comedy show with yummy food, right? It's what happens when a person is doing the exact thing he was created to do, put here to do and every part of him is inside of it and he knows that it matters and he knows this is he's doing what he's here for. Right? That room was not comfortable. It was alive. Right? Right. And there's and there's one more thing. The same portion opens with bikurim, the first fruits. A farmer carries the first thing that grew in his field up to Jerusalem in a basket and says out loud what Hashem has done for him. We spoke about this in depth in the Judeian diet support session, right? But um the it's described by our sages as uh you know officials of Jerusalem coming out to meet the procession. Now I'm a farmer. I'm an aspiring farmer. I know exactly what that basket is. You didn't make it. You worked for it and you waited for it. And then one morning it was there. And the only sane response is to carry it up and give it to the one who gave it to you. Right? And that father brought his first fruits on Shabbat morning, not in a basket, but in a talit in front of the Torah. And when it was over, everybody came to meet him. Right? We read Kavo at the end of Elul in the last weeks before Roshashana. And the reason I think is clear. The curses are read at the close of the year so that the year should end and the curses end with it and the new year begins with its blessings. Let the year end and its curses end with it. So we sat in that majestic so stone synagogue on a hill in Judea and let some of the hardest verses in the Torah be sung over us by with a 14-year-old with his father's hand on his face and we ended the year. And what actually ended the curses in that room, as far as I could tell, was a hand on a cheek and a mother who just couldn't hold back her love for her child. And uh and this boy whose zealous love for Hashem just wouldn't let him quit. And I keep coming back to the name, somebody's son. That morning, a boy stood in front of the scroll and read it for all of us. And his father stood behind him and handed him the melody with his fingers. They did it together for 63 verses. And there was no gap at all between the the name and the thing. Now, I told you when I get an aliyah, I always feel like Hashem is speaking to me through the verses I'm standing over. And it's true, he was. But this time, he wasn't only speaking of me from the Torah scroll. He was speaking through the father standing beside a son, through the mother who couldn't hold back her love, right? Through a a room full of Jews leaning in as the curses of the year were whispered away. And most of all, and this is what I so badly want to share with all of you, I think he was speaking through the hand on that cheek. Because as we are approaching Roshashana now, we are and every one of us is is carrying something. Every one of us has verses ahead of us that we don't know how we're going to get through. There are words we can't pronounce yet, melodies we haven't learned, pages that feel like they will never end, things we don't understand. And our father doesn't always take them away. Sometimes he stands beside us and sometimes he shows us the next note. And sometimes right in the middle of the hardest passage, he reaches over and reminds us that we are his child and he loves us and he's with us and he caresses our cheek. And maybe that's the message Hashem wanted me to hear in the in my aliyah this year. Not that the curses aren't real or the struggles aren't real, but that I'm not standing at the Torah alone and none of us are. Right? May this year end and may its curses end with it. And may a new year begin and its blessings begin with it. [music]