Written by Tal Segal
In this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo, just before the Jewish people enter the land of Israel, Moshe tells us a long list of blessings that will come to us in the land of Israel if we follow the ways of His Torah, and G-d forbid, of curses that will come to us if we stray from them.
At first glance, these blessings and curses look like rewards and punishments, but they really aren’t. At the very end of the list, the Torah says
“These are the words of the Covenant that Hashem commanded Moshe to make with Bnei Yisrael in the land of Moav, aside from the Covenant that was made with them at Horev (Mt Sinai).” (Devarim 28:69)
So we see that these words are not reward and punishments – they are actually tools to forging a covenant between Hashem and the Jewish people. Let us try and understand the nature of our covenant with Hashem.
If you look carefully at the verse above, the word it uses for creating this covenant is to ‘cut’ a covenant. It’s a strange choice of word. Here we are joining two parties, and you use the word “cut”? Rather use the word “Forge”, or “Build”!? “Cut” seems a strange choice.
Covenant
The Ramban explains that the word for a covenant in Ivrit is “brit”, and that it comes from the same word as “briah” which means create. Whenever you see a covenant being formed, it is the creation of a new entity that didn’t exist before. When we talk about a ‘brit’, we are referring to a covenant that is so close and intrinsic that each member of the covenant becomes a part of the other member.
An analogy: Two friends are traveling together, and have been for a long time. They really love each other, but eventually they arrive at a fork in the road and they have to part and each go their separate ways. They can’t bear to part! So they decide that each of them should give something to the other that is so special to them that it is basically a part of who they are. Something they can barely bear to give away. But now, whenever one of the travelers is on his way, he has a piece of his friend with him, and so too for the other traveler. They have each become a new person – a person that now contains a piece of the friend with whom they have created an intrinsic bond.
Marriage
We see this whenever the Torah describes a covenant. The classic example is marriage. Before a wedding, you have two separate people walking down the
