A.
והי' עקב תשמעון את המשפטים האלה ושמרתם ועשיתם אתם ושמר ד' אלקיך לך את הברית ואת החסד אשר נשבע לאבתיך: ואהבך וברכך והרבך וברך פרי בטנך ופרי אדמתך כו' ברוך תהי' מכל העמים וגו' (“And it will be, because [‘éqev] you will hear these judgments and you will keep and do them, Ha-Shem will keep the convenant and the kindness which He swore to your fathers. And He loves you, and will bless you and will increase you, and He will bless the fruit of your belly and the fruit of your land.... Blessed will you be by all the peoples....”). Thus opens our parasha.
The number of occurrences of one or another grammatical permutation of the root בר"ך, “bless,” in the above passage is striking. The usage of the word is interesting: If Israel keep their side of the deal which was struck at Sinai, G-d will “bless” them; the nations will bless them (translating the last verse according to the Talmudic reading [עיי' ירושלמי ברכות פ"ח ה"ח]; it can also be read “more blessed than all the peoples”); and yet, whenever we recite bërachoth they begin with a standard formula ברוך אתה ד' אלקינו מלך העולם (“Blessed are You, Ha-Shem our G-d, King of the universe....”) which appears to suggest that G-d can be blessed.
What exactly is a bëracha, a “blessing?” What does the term really mean? What is Israel here being promised?
B.
In addition to conveying the sense of blessing, the root also underlies the apparently, at first glance, unrelated words berech, knee, and bërécha, a pond or pool. The letters’ gimatriya, 222, is mathematically interesting, since its three letters consist of the number two in escalating orders of magnitude, units, tens, and hundreds. The sëfarim ha-qëdoshim assert that the number “two” (i.e., the letter béyth) signifies increase, since the halachic minimum of any plural term in the Torah is two (note that the second verse in our passage supra follows u-vérachëcha, “and He will bless you” with the parallel vë-hirbecha, “and He will increase you.” Contrast this with the root of the generic term for curse, אר"ר, which begins with an alef whose numerical value, one, is indicative of stasis, of a lack of increase, as we see from that word’s first occurrence in Genesis II, 17: ארורה האדמה בעבורך בעצבון תאכלנה כל ימי חייך (“Cursed is the ground because of you, in travail will you consume it all the days of your life”). Compare this not only with our passage, but also with, e.g., Exodus XXIII, 25: ועבדתם את ד' אלקיכם וברך את לחמכם ואת מימיכם וגו' (“And you will serve Ha-Shem your G-d, and He will bless your bread and your water”), i.e., increase them.
This provides a clue, and a path to understanding the etymology of at least one of the other words. Colloquially, we tend not to use the verb bérach so much as the noun bëracha, and in general we speak of “making bërachoth.” This, in fact, is precisely what the verb itself, in the factitive pi‘él conjugation, signifies: To bring a bëracha into being.
The words bëracha and bërécha are, in fact, spelt identically, only vocalised slightly differently. As a bërécha is a pool or reservoir of water, so is a bëracha a reservoir of metaphysical energy, infused into our world by our action in affirmatively recognising that G-d runs His world and is in fact the Author of everything in it. Thus, the declaration of Baruch Atta Ha-Shem with which we begin each bëracha recited over food, over some pleasure or amazing sight, before performing a mitzva, or on hearing good news, is not our “blessing” G-d, but rather our recognition that the Source of all blessings in the world is the Creator of all.
It is this recognition which leads the Talmud to declare: חייב אדם לברך על הרעה כשם שמברך על הטובה (“A person is obligated to make a bëracha over something bad, just as he is obligated to make a bëracha over something good”; ברכות נ"ד. במשנה), that is, we must accept the judgments and challenges of life in the same spirit as the recognizably, demonstrably good things, and understand that they, too, are for our good.
In this respect, then, we can understand the second odd word, berech. The ability to infuse energy into the cosmos is granted to those who submit, who bend their knees. As we say thrice daily in the ‘Aleinu: ואנחנו כורעים ומשתחוים ומודים לפני מלך מלכי המלכים הקדוש ברוך הוא (“And we bow and prostrate ourselves and acknowledge before the Kings of kings of kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He”).
C.
But the fact is that everything in the universe came into being at the beginning, in the form of an utterance of G-d. The essential structure underlying every object and phenomenon in the universe is “encoded”, as it were, in the letters of the Holy Language which express them, and in the way in which they are configured. לעולם ד' דברך נצב בשמים (“For the world, Ha-Shem, Your word is established in the heavens”; Psalms CXIX, 89), which can also be read to mean, “Forever (i.e., as long as the universe lasts) Your word is established....” This is reflected in the physical world by he by now well-known equivalency between matter and energy (E =mc²), and by the law of conservation of energy, i.e. that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Hence, the total amount of mass-energy in the system is constant; what changes is the ratio of mass to energy.
If so, what does it mean to infuse additional metaphysical energy into this world from outside the system? The fact is, that whilst the metaphysical letters themselves are immutable once established, their configurations, or tzirufim, can be changed, and our parasha provides an excellent example of how this process works.
A bit later on, we read: ולא תביא תועבה אל ביתך והיית חרם כמהו שקץ תשקצנו ותעב תתעבנו כי חרם הוא (“And you will not bring an abomination into your house, and you will be banned [hérem] like it; reviling you will revile it and abominating you will abominate it, for it is hérem’; VII, 26).
The Ba‘al ha-Turim notes the double occurrence of the word hérem in our verse, and points out that סמיך לי' "כל המצוה" לאמר שהעובר על החרם כעובר על כל המצות (“next to it [in the verse immediately following] is ‘every mitzva’, to say that one who violates the hérem is as if he violates all the mitzvoth”), a point which he backs up by noting that the gimatriya of hérem is 248, the same as the number of évarim (loosely translated “limbs”) counted by Hazal in the human body.
The consequence, in short, of having anything to do with idolatry is a negative effect on every part of one’s body. However, he goes on, sincere tëshuva, repentance for having anything to do with it, can effect a change, and erase the sin. The change is effected by changing the configuration of the letters, so that חרם, hérem, becomes רחם, rahém, “mercy,” a point which he buttresses by reference to the prophet, ברוגז רחם תזכר, “in anger, You remember mercy” (Habakkuk III, 2). Spelt the same, though vocalised differently, is rehem, a womb, the portal through which the sacred animating soul enters this world. The energy which we can bring into the world, allows us to affect the fundamental configurations underpinning our world.
D.
And this brings us to the relevance of our parasha to Israel in every time and place.
Later on still, the Holy Land is called an ארץ אשר ד' אלקיך דרש אתה תמיד עיני ד' אלקיך בה מרשית השנה ועד אחרית השנה (“Land which Ha-Shem your G-d seeks out; always are the eyes of Ha-Shem your G-d upon it, from the year’s beginning until year’s end”; XI, 12).
The word mé-réshith, roughly, “from [the] beginning,” in our verse is spelt anomalously, lacking an alef between the réysh and the shin. Hazal take note of the anomaly, and explain it to mean: כל שנה שרשה בתחלתה מתעשרת בסופה (“Any year which is poor [rasha] at its beginning becomes rich at its end”; ראש השנה ט"ז:). Rashi explains this concept of a year being “poor” at its beginning, שישראל עושין עצמן רשין בר"ה לדבר תחנונים ותפלה כענין שנאמר "תחנונים ידבר רש" (“that Israel make themselves poor [rashin] on Rosh ha-Shana for the sake of supplications and prayer, as the matter is said, ‘a poor man [rash] speaks supplications’ [Proverbs XVIII, 23]”).
I have heard in the name of Rabbi Hayyim Friedländer זצ"ל, late mashgiah of Yëshivath Ponevesh, an elaboration of this idea. He explains it as meaning that one must come honestly to, and internalize, the realisation that in fact one’s entire fate over the next year, one’s safety, health, family and financial situations, one’s life itself, is entirely determined Rosh ha-Shana. One must truly understand that, as of the first of the year, he has nothing to his name, and must earn it all from scratch, as it were, through his bërachoth, tëfilloth, vë-thahanunim.
This brings us to a consideration of the primal root, רו"ך, from which בר"ך is derived by prefixation.
The meaning of this primal root can be discerned from, e.g., II Kings XXIII, 19-20, in which the young King Yoshiyahu is told by G-d through a prophet: יען רך לבבך ותכנע מפני ד' בשמעך אשר דברתי על המקום הזה ועל ישביו להיות לשמה ולקללה ותקרע את בגדיך ויבכה לפני וגם אנכי שמעתי נאם ד': לכן הנני אספך על אבתיך וגו' (“Since your heart is contrite [rach] and you have submitted before Ha-Shem when you heard what I said about this place and its inhabitants [that they would] be for desolation and a curse, and you tore your garments and wept before Me, I, too, have heard. Therefore, behold I shall increase you over your fathers....”).
The heart of the ability to make efficacious bërachoth, it seems, is contrition and submission, רו"ך, to which the letter béyth, signifying “increase” is prefixed. If we can follow Rabbi Friedländer’s advice, and recognize and accept that we have nothing and are wholly dependent on the Master of the Universe, our bërachoth should be efficacious, and all good things increased, this coming Rosh ha-Shana.
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