First of / Best of
Our parshah begins with the commandment to give the first fruits that the Israelites see in the Promised Land to the priests — that is, to God.
“You shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where your God will choose to establish the divine name.” (Deut. 26:2)
Rashi points out that these refer to the seven species special to the Land: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. The moment they become ripe is one that as a farmer, you would not fail to notice, especially with these fruits.
The Hebrew that the Torah uses for this verse suggests that where it says “first,” it also means “best”: reyshit. Reyshit can mean either — and technically it means “first/best of,” and perhaps the first fruits truly are the best as well.
You may recall that we see this word as part of the first word of Torah, Be’reyshit, “in the beginning of.” In the Midrash of Bereishit Rabbah, we learn that Be’reyshit is an allusion to the idea that the world was created for the sake of the gifts we would one day give God.
“Rav Huna said in the name of Rav Matana: The world was created for the sake of three things: For the sake of Challah (the tithing of dough), for the sake of tithes, and for the sake of first fruits. What is the source? “In the beginning, [bereshit] God created,”... and reyshit is nothing other than first fruits, as it is stated: “The choicest of [reyshit] the first fruits of your land…” (Exodus 23:19).”
In an (mostly, but not completely) unrelated note, in this same Midrash, we also read that the world was created through wisdom: “Rabbi Banai said: The world and its contents were created only due to the merit of the Torah, as it is stated: ‘The Lord founded the earth with wisdom [bekhochma].’”
This idea, though not mentioning “reyshit” explicitly, is an allusion to a verse in Psalms 111: “The Beginning of (reyshit) Wisdom is Yirat Hashem (Fear of God.)”
In this way of looking at things, we see that not only is it with Wisdom that God created the Universe, but that Wisdom for all people is preceded by God. Not only that, because of the ambiguity of the word “reyshit,” you can also read it so that the best kind of wisdom is the Fear of God.
What is the Fear of God? How would this be Wisdom?
Many in the modern world translate Yirat Hashem as “reverence” to God, or “awe” of God. In my opinion, these are helpful translations, but not the most accurate ones. For one, Yirah is generally presented as the opposite of “Ahavah,” love, which we are commanded to in relationship to God.
Fearing and Loving our Creator seem like natural opposites. But what becomes confusing is that Fearing seems to be “Fearing a punishment” from God. I think it stands to reason that fearing God can mean fearing God’s punishments, but can also simply mean trembling in fear before the immensity of God for how great it is compared to you.
Where Fearing God ascends to the greatest of Wisdom is in what it replaces: Fear of People. Solomon Schechter in his book Rabbinic Theology describes how being God’s servants/slaves is a replacement for being exactly that for other people.
Consider how much we are likely to fear people in our day to day lives. We fear our boss, we fear our loved ones. We fear the people on the street. We fear the government. We fear ourselves sometimes too. This fear is a fixation on what people, or ourselves, can do to hurt us, or perhaps vice versa. We become very small.
How do we walk through life so that we can replace fear of people, of nature, with that of God? What reality do we have to live in?
There is one path to this. We must consider where we are from and where we are going.
When we give the first/best fruits to God, we are commanded to recount how “my father was a fugitive Aramean” who “went down to Egypt” and “God freed us.” We see how the “reyshit” of the first fruits is not just in the quality of the produce, but in the wisdom inherent in their ritual handover.
When we account for where we have been and where we are going, we liberate ourselves from people. We realize in these recollections that we are always accountable to ourselves, no matter what. From there, we realize that we cannot live in cognitive dissonance and moral imbalance, and seek to correct it.
Do we pay the tax of impressing human beings, or do we pay it with the hard labor of accounting ourselves and our lives?
The real and most powerful benefit of a consciousness of the self is to be able to bring to light who you are, what you have done, why you have done it. The power of prayer, the Holy Days, and God’s Presence is to learn to move from fear to love of God, which envelopes us with compassion and mercy when we have done this accounting to ourselves. This is the beginning of Wisdom, and the greatest of it.
