Counting Our Blessings
The TOCHACHA (Divine Reproach) comes at us in a depressingly heavy dose in Parshat Ki Tavo. The TOCHACHA is contained within the largest Aliya in the Torah - the 63-pasuk SHISHI of this week’s sedra. That’s more than half the sedra!

But there is much more reproach of an even stronger kind. Look at the beginning of the sedra. Actually, first look at the whole Torah from Lech Lecha until now. All that the Avot and Imahot went through. All that Yosef and his brothers went through. All that Bnei Yisrael went through, in Egypt and during the forty years of wandering in the Midbar.

Throughout, the goal has been: Take the Torah and the Way of Life it teaches us to lead, and go into Eretz Yisrael, G-d’s intended venue for the Jewish People and His Torah. And here, in the beginning of Parshat Ki Tavo, we are poised on the threshold of Eretz Yisrael and will be entering there in a few short weeks. Here is the mitzva of Bikurim, which when it was first mentioned in Mishpatim and Ki Tisa, it was an abstract idea. But now, we find a beautiful description of the mitzva to bring First Fruits and its partner mitzva, the recitation of the Bikurim portion, presenting the Kohen with the beloved first samples of our bounty. For Jewish People at this moment in their lives, they must have seem Bikurim as a preview of the “and they lived happily ever after” life they were anticipating in Eretz Yisrael.

And then the Torah lists all kinds of great promises for a bright future.
But then come the list of curses for non-compliance and violation of G-d’s word. And the elaboration in gory detail of the terrible things in store for the nation that will turn away from G-d.

How can You even suggest that?! Much less imply that it will come to pass.
This is the most devastating part of the Tochacha. Not its content, but its mere existence.

Can it be that the people who crossed the Sea escorted by such magnificent miracles, the people who stood at Sinai and witnessed the greatest manifesta- tion of Divine Revelation, the people who followed G-d through the Wilder- ness and witnessed - no, lived - miracle after miracle, that these people should be offered such great things in their future, and that they should need even one word of reproach and warning!

Sadly, they needed it; we need it. And that becomes our goal. When G-d offers Life and Good and Blessing, we should deserve it... and receive it.