I played a game with my kids yesterday. I ask them to tie a ribbon around the first fruit they saw. Alright, maybe the lemons have been hanging on our ancient tree for a while, so they aren’t exactly first fruits. But thank G-d children are blessed with imaginations that enable them to ignore otherwise essential details that would do nothing more at particular moment than mar a beautiful picture.
I told them to imagine picking the fruit, placing it in a special basket and taking it to the Holy Temple. It is fascinating and humbling to think how close our home is to the site of the Temple, whose only standing remains is the Kotel or the Western Wall. Whenever we want to pray there, we take a bus, but I told them we will not take a bus when the Temple is rebuilt, but will join a great procession of thousands who will all have baskets like theirs filled with their own fruits: grapes with draping, bead-like fruit, ruby red pomegranates and wine-sweet plums. We sat and imagined their bringing their fruits to the Holy Temple.
“I watered that tree, and the grapevine,” My oldest piped up. My 3 year old nodded in agreement and insisted that he helped too. They remembered that whenever we picked the fruit, we set some aside as required by the Torah, in commemoration of the portion that went to the priest. We checked the fruit for bugs, made blessings on the fruit, enjoyed it on the Sabbath. Aside from the first fruit, all the fruit was being used in the service of Hashem, to fulfill his Torah.
Since we have no Holy Temple now, we can’t offer the first pomegranates and grapes to G-d the way we did two thousand years ago. But as my children taught me, everything we did involving the fruit of the tree, and the ordinary activities in our daily life are first fruits, offerings of holiness. How can such mundane activities have heavenly significance? Our sages said the whole world was created for the sake of the Torah and for Israel. Every object used to in the service of Torah is a “first fruit” and is fulfilling the potential for which it was created. Even our thoughts and actions can be regarded as first fruits and can be completely devoted to the purpose of life itself.
Inspired by a talk of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, Parshat Ki Tavo, 5751 (1991)