September 12, 2025 | Shabbat Sermon – Ki Tavo 5785
It took years after the Broadway show Hamilton debuted for me to finally get to say, “I was in the place where it happens.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, left us with a profound question at the end of the show: “Who will tell your story?” Aaron Burr notes earlier, “History obliterates in every picture it paints.” He is teaching us that after we die, we have no control over who tells our story, but we realize that the story of our lives is all that is left. Hamilton is Miranda’s attempt to uncover Hamilton’s life, which for nearly two centuries was often hidden in obscurity when compared with the other founding fathers of our country.
The lyrics of this final song begin with Washington reflecting that when he was young, he wished he knew he had no control of “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Jefferson chimes in and says Hamilton’s financial system was a work of genius. Madison adds that he took the country from bankruptcy to prosperity and that he doesn’t get enough credit. Angelica bemoans the fact that every other founder’s story is told. It is Hamilton’s wife Eliza who works to tell his story. She shares in this song that she interviewed every soldier who he fought with, and she tried to make sense of a thousand pages of his writing. Angelica and Eliza sing together, “We tell your story.” Eliza talks about the orphanage she set up in New York City and how in every one of the children’s eyes, she sees Hamilton. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
As Jews, we are a storytelling people. It may be one of the things we do best. And this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, grounds us in our obligation to tell our story. The parshah begins by telling us, “When we enter the land, we are to bring the first fruits as an offering.” The ritual is detailed. You bring the first fruits to the priest and say to him, “I acknowledge this day before your God Adonai, that I have entered the land that Adonai swore to our ancestors.” The priest then takes the basket, and the person is commanded to say the following:
“My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and dwelled there but became a very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried out to God, the God of our ancestors, and God heard our plea, saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. Adonai freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now I bring the first fruits of the soil which You, Adonai, have given me.” (Deuteronomy 26:5–9)
I am so moved by the power of this ritual. Moses’ instruction to us is that once we have settled the land and we have first fruits that have grown from the soil, we have to bring them to the priest. And it is not just the first time—it is every year. If any of us have ever done home gardening, we will remember when that first fruit grows on the plant. We want to eat it because of our excitement. But the Torah comes along and says, “Not so fast. Bring that first fruit as a donation to God.” It is an instruction in gratitude—that it is not you who did it, but there are natural forces at play. And when we bring the first fruit, we don’t just offer it as a donation—we tell a story. It is the story of our people. We tell the story, reminding ourselves of the challenge of being a wanderer and then living in a place that is not our home. Then, we share the pain and suffering we experienced while living in Egypt, reminding ourselves that God brought us up out of the land of Egypt.
There is something profound about living in the land, going about your business, doing the work you need to do, and being required to bring in an offering of gratitude before you even get to enjoy the literal fruits of your labor. And then to have to offer a specific blessing—which is the literal telling of our story—reminds us of the importance of not forgetting our past. It would be far too easy to forget our past after settling in a place and encountering the joys of abundant blessings. This ritual establishes for us the necessity of telling our story. But why?
Perhaps one answer lies in the debate about the nebulous nature of the opening line of the blessing: “Arami oved avi, my father was a wandering Aramean.” The text immediately invites us to think about who it is referring to as our father. Ibn Ezra understands the Arami to be Jacob. If we know our story, that interpretation makes sense. Jacob journeyed to Egypt with his family, and we grew and became populous there. Ibn Ezra adds that when Jacob was there, he was poor—he was oved, perishing.
Rashbam, Rashi’s grandson, disagrees with Ibn Ezra. He suggests that the avi was Abraham because it fit him better, as the prayer should begin with the beginning of Jewish history and continue with the first fruits.
Perhaps their answers do not really matter as far as who the subject of this text is, but rather the overall content and purpose. Benno Jacob explains that Arami is not the name of a resident of any particular country but more so that of an occupation. He adds, just as the merchant was called a Canaanite and the caravan of traders who brought Joseph to Egypt were called Ishmaelites, the shepherd or the wanderer was called an Aramean. And the Mussar text Sefer HaHinukh brings it all together by explaining that we say these words as the blessing because the utterance of our lips deeply impresses our mind and imagination. If we tell the story as part of our blessing, it will shape us both ethically and with a rootedness in our history.
The question we ask ourselves just ten days before Rosh Hashanah is: Who tells our story?
This is a time and a moment when we do the deepest work of discovering and rediscovering our own story. We see ourselves mirrored in our tradition, and in every generation, the sacred story that rises from the text of Torah and the annals of Jewish history emerges and re-emerges again, helping us reflect on our lives and give them new meaning and purpose. Telling our story helps us go another layer deeper, because as we vocalize this sacred story, we remind ourselves that we are not alone. We came forth out of Egypt hand in hand with a family, sharing the journey together. And yet, we still wonder: Who tells our story?
It is that sharing that is critical to storytelling. Psychologist Ira Hyman looked closely at the lyrics of the final song in Hamilton and notes that throughout the entire show, it is Aaron Burr who is the narrator. But in the final song, it is Hamilton’s wife Eliza. Hyman explains that the change in narrator determines who tells our story and who shapes the perspective and how we remember. He writes, “A narrator determines the story, choosing events and perspectives to include—and just as importantly, choosing what to leave out. History is supposedly written by the winners. But history is really written by those who write. They decide how to tell the story. The narrator is important for our personal memories as well. Who tells the stories in your family, or in your circle of friends? That narrator plays a critical role in how we reconstruct our memories and our shared past.”
When we sit down to tell the Jewish story, we find a story that has been curated over the centuries by rabbis and leaders who have captured the complexity of the past, reminding us of what is sacred. Those stories are often combined with commandments that are discussed and debated on the pages of books. It is the study of those debates that brings the stories to life. We tell the story in every generation because we are the newest narrators of the story.
Hyman adds an interesting insight—he reminds us that “Remembering is a collaborative process in groups. [Families or friends work to tell a story together.] Once a group collaboratively remembers something, that recollection will influence each person’s own memories.” As Jews, we do not sit alone to tell our story—we share it in groups. We are narrators of a collective past that we are actively living.
When I tell the story of my life, I see it as a journey that was rooted in my own family’s journey. When my grandfather died months before I was born, my mother wanted to mourn. As a Jewish adult who could not read Hebrew, she knew the way she could mourn was through the recitation of Kaddish. She endeavored to learn Hebrew, and it became an important part of her life. Along with my father, they committed to making Judaism central to our lives throughout our upbringing. They took us to Israel as teens and impressed a deep connection to Jews and the Jewish people upon our hearts.
Rabbi Donniel Hartman likes to teach that the Jewish people are the sum of the stories we tell about ourselves. While every Jewish person cannot hear the story of every other Jewish person in the world—or every other person who has ever lived—I like to imagine that God is the collector of every Jewish story. As we share our story and the prayers in our hearts, God is collecting it all. And perhaps through coincidence, brings us to moments where we encounter someone with a similar story.
One of the names for Rosh Hashanah is Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance. The second set of calls of the shofar is called Zikhronot—reminding us that God remembers the covenant with us. Yosef Yerushalmi, who wrote a book entitled Zakhor – Remember, explains that the nature of Jewish memory has never been dispassionate recollection but rather evocation, identification, and re-actualization. In explaining what this means, Ellen Umansky teaches: we read the stories of our past because in them we see confusion, fear, and a sense of hope, and taste the bitterness of slavery and the sweetness of freedom—in short, we experience all that our ancestors experienced as if we were there. We also recognize that we live these experiences as well, and the stories of our past can help us navigate our own unique pathways forward as we tell our stories.
“My ancestor was a wandering Aramean…” How do I see myself in that story?
That is the question we need to ask ourselves. When we sit down to study Torah, when we sit down and open up our prayer book, when we sit down at the Passover Seder—we open the pages of our collective past and we have to ask ourselves: How do we see ourselves in it?
Rabbi Donniel Hartman shares a story about a time he was on faculty at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, which was offering a program for college students. A student came up to him and asked if he was one of the teachers. He said he was, and the student asked, “Why should I be Jewish?” Hartman thought about his response and realized that if he said, “You should be Jewish because Judaism teaches you to be a moral human being or connects you to God,” the student might respond, “What, only Jews are ethical? Only Jews have a relationship with God?”
Instead, Hartman gave one of the most profound answers he could have given. He said, “There is no reason why you have to be Jewish. You can live a perfectly meaningful, ethical, and valued life as a secular American, or a Christian, or a Muslim for that matter. Why then be Jewish? The only reason to be Jewish and to belong to the Jewish people is if doing so adds meaning and value to your life. I will be sharing what I love about Judaism and how it has added meaning to mine. Whether it does so for you is for you to determine.”
Hartman’s words are an invitation to each of us to open a book, engage with, and live our story. “Who lives, who dies, who will tell your story?” For us, right now, we tell our own stories. This season of the High Holy Days gives us the opportunity to write them as well. By seeing ourselves mirrored through our people’s story, we gain wisdom and insight from the challenges and journeys told in our sacred texts that help us shape our stories. As we remind ourselves of our wandering past, we share our own journey that is also filled with challenges and blessings.
In these days and weeks ahead, let us find the opportunity to sit down and tell our story to a friend or neighbor. May we have the wisdom to look deep into our past, and may we have the courage to use the memories to shape our lives and Jewish identities in the future.
Kein yehi ratzon.