Ki Thavo: recognition

Ki Thavo: recognition

The parsha asks the pilgrim to recognize the arrival.  The wanderers must make a declaration of coming to the goal.  This is it. It was hard to get here, but here we are, and we bear a basket of fruit as a tribute. 

The second half of the parsha are blessings that will devolve from following the law,  followed by pages of details about the curses that will befall us if we veer from the prescription.  Perhaps it is incumbent upon us to recognize what has happened: the Holocaust and the State of Israel, as the fulfillment of this pronouncement. 

As I read through the description of the catastrophe, I could not avoid imagining what my parents and  their generation went through.  The text foresees  the perpetrators of evil  as a a nation with an unintelligible language.  The Romans called the Germanic tribes Barbars because their language sounded like "bar bar bar..", meaningless phonemes.  This was the nation that starved, hunted, and murdered my ancestors, the descendants of the assemblage on the plains of Moab, to whom Moshe described such a cataclysm.  Too many of the details were fulfilled. This was it. 

Now the punishment is meted out, just as it is promised, to  the smallest detail.  What happens now?  What do the survivors and their descendants do with this fulfilled promise?  How do we repair the relationship? Is there a relationship? 

I have lived in a blessed world, with little overt Divine punishment and with fulfillment that the last generation could not fathom. There is no part of my life that is not saturated with contentment. The blessings exceed expectations.  I can have any food, drink, entertainment at any time.  I have a portal to all the knowledge in the world in my pocket. I can travel to Jerusalem on a whim.

So is this what it feels like to arrive?