“My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there with a small number of people, and there he became a great, mighty and populous nation. And the Egyptians ill-treated us and afflicted us, and they imposed hard labour upon us. So we cried out to the Lord God, God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out from Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, with great awe, and with signs and wonders. And He brought us to this place, and He gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
The Torah tells us that it was this text that we were required to recite at the moment we presented one of the kohanim with the first fruits of our harvest. Why this one? Of all the other obvious possibilities – Sh’ma Yisrael, aseret ha-dibrot – why this text?
In his remarkable book, Zachor, the Jewish historian, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi z”l, calls this text “capsule history.” In effect, it takes the entire story of the Jewish People, and encapsulates it in just five verses. It deals with our origins, our development as a people, our history of persecution, our deliverance from slavery and our connection with God and the land of Israel. In short, it tells us who we are.
It does all this in an intriguing way. This is not history as we typically understand it today – there is no attempt to analyze historical events in order to establish their veracity or reconstruct precisely what happened to the Jewish People. There’s no detail, no evidence, no data. Instead, it is more accurately characterized as “collective memory” – it is our mythic narrative or shared story. And myths don’t need detail or evidence or data – their purpose is less concerned with truth and fact than it is with identity and purpose.
So, at that moment of great relief and gratitude – a moment when, after months of anxiety, we knew for certain that we would be able to put food on the table to feed our families – we were required to take our first fruits to the Temple and make a public declaration of our identity and purpose. At that moment of satiation, we had to acknowledge that they were not a given. It is as if the Torah recognizes that this was a particularly vulnerable moment for us – a time when the potential for us to forget ourselves and succumb to the ideas that we have control over nature and our needs come first. In order to counteract any such possibility, we were required to remember our origins, our story, and what we had been given by the grace of God.
Our lives today are littered with many similar vulnerable moments when we might forget ourselves. We have so much – personally, communally and nationally. Perhaps most significantly, as a People, we have the State of Israel, and located in the context of history, we have only very recently reaped that particular harvest. Yet so many of us forget ourselves – some forget just what a remarkable gift it is; others forget what it felt like to be ill-treated and afflicted, and that we were given it too by the grace of God. In Temple times, we had this text and custom as a device to counteract any such lapses in memory; what we wouldn’t do for a similar tool today.
(Also published in Reflections)
About Me
- Jonathan Boyd
- Dr Jonathan Boyd is Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), a London-based research unit and think tank specialising in contemporary Jewish affairs in Britain and Europe (see: www.jpr.org.uk). He holds a doctorate in educational philosophy and lifelong learning from the University of Nottingham (UK) where he specialised in Jewish community education, and a BA and MA in Modern Jewish History from University College London, where his main areas of interest were Israel-Diaspora relations, the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Prior to joining JPR, he held positions in research and policy at the JDC International Centre for Community Development, the Jewish Agency, UJIA and the Holocaust Educational Trust, and he is a former Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Israel. Author of "The Sovereign and the Situated Self: Jewish Identity and Community in the 21st Century" (Profile Books, 2003), his published research spans contemporary Jewish identity and demography in Britain and across Europe, antisemitism and child poverty. Much of that work is available on the JPR website. He blogs here in a purely personal capacity.
