(Delivered August 29, 2026)

Shabbat shalom!

Sometimes I feel like Sefer Dvarim—the book of Deuteronomy—has a split personality. On the one hand, it never tires of teaching, sometimes in a pretty threatening tone, about all the obligations that fall to us as soon as we enter the Promised Land, and about all the suffering we’ll experience if we don’t fulfill those obligations. On the other hand, the word שִׂמְחָה (joy) shows up a good deal more than you might anticipate in a book that is so focused on duty.

To our 21st-century eyes and ears, so inclined to think of joy as being synonymous with lazing around in the golden sunshine on the beach with a good book and a fruity drink, Dvarim’s definition of שִׂמְחָה seems incongruous and hard to fathom.

Ten times the root letters שׂמח—sin, mem chet—show up in Dvarim, typically exhorting us to rejoice before God with our families and our entire households as we bring our offerings to the Temple or as we contemplate fulfilling the mitzvot which God has commanded us. In this valence of rejoicing, it’s not worldly pleasure or self-satisfaction that is at the center, but service and community. Leaving our individual desires aside and doing for others. Doing for God.

Our Torah is teaching us a lesson that is downright counter-cultural for the current moment. Over the course of several parshiot, the lesson has been hammered over and over again: that what we have doesn’t belong to us but rather to God, and that the pathway to שִׂמְחָה passes through sacrifice. To that end, there is no such thing as the self-made person. Torah teaches repeatedly in Dvarim that when you come into the land, when your cherished hopes are finally realized, when the 40 years of wandering, and the 400-year history of enslavement that preceded it are finally redeemed, the obligation is to give. And not just to give dutifully or grudgingly, but with שִׂמְחָה.

It’s a lesson for us all.

Way back in Vaetchanan, Moses predicts that when the Israelites come into the land, there will be houses we didn’t build and vineyards we didn’t plant, and then Moses warns about the danger of forgetting about God when things are going well. In Eikev, there’s a similar warning that as we begin to prosper, we should not imagine ourselves to deserve full credit. Nobody is anybody without God’s help, and the Torah is at pains to teach this emphatically. 

This week’s reading, Ki Tavo, opens with the tradition of Bikkurim (first fruits), in which once we come into the land, we are called to bring the first of the crops—before we even eat of them—as an offering to God. And when we do, we say, in so many words, My ancestors suffered and struggled, and I am now here in this extraordinary land. I am here because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, and because of what God has given me. Now it is my turn to give, בְּשִׂמְחָה—with joy.

This week, we lost a true exemplar of joyful giving. When country music icon Dolly Parton died this past Tuesday, dayeinu, the loss would have been significant enough on the strength of her voluminous music catalogue covering the full range of human experience. But in the days following her death, we have come to know not just the entertainer but the person who knew in her bones how to give back with joy.

Dolly Parton grew up impoverished financially but filthy rich with talent. Professional success brought wealth, and with wealth came not self-aggrandizement or ostentatious luxury but rather extraordinary generosity. When she arrived at her promised land of the Grand Ole Opry, she proceeded to redeem those years of struggle and sacrifice by joyfully supporting others in need. 

She supported the education of people who couldn’t afford college; she supported fellow Tennesseans who lost their homes and their property to wildfire in 2016; she supported scientists in developing the technology that made the Covid vaccines effective; and she founded the Imagination Library in memory of her father, who himself had never learned to read. The Imagination Library sent free books to children. Anybody who registered would receive a book in the mail every month, courtesy of Dolly Parton.

In 2005, this last initiative caught the attention of philanthropist Harold Grinspoon, who, inspired by Parton’s idea, founded the PJ Library Foundation, which sends Jewish children’s books every month to households with Jewish children under age five. Again, all a person has to do is register.

It might be tempting to look at all the good she has done and make an idol of Dolly Parton. I understand the temptation, but our parsha teaches us about that, too. Chapter 27, verse 2 contains this puzzling instruction:

וְהָיָה בַּיּוֹם אֲשֶׁר תַּעַבְרוּ אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּן אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־ה’ אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ
וַהֲקֵמֹתָ לְךָ אֲבָנִים גְּדֹלוֹת וְשַׂדְתָּ אֹתָם בַּשִּׂיד׃
And on the day when you cross the Jordan to the land which Adonai your God gives you,
you shall put up great stones and cover them with whitewash.

The careful reader might bump on this teaching: elsewhere we were told explicitly not to set up monuments, for fear they could become idols. The question came up in this weeks’ Torah Study, and Doug Parsons illuminated the contradiction by likening the stones to people. It’s one thing to set them up to admire them, to take inspiration from them or see them as role models. But when that admiration crosses over to imagining them to be godlike, this is where it becomes problematic. Before idols we become passive and powerless.

If we allow ourselves to worship at the altar of Dolly Parton or any other admirable person, we abdicate the responsibility that should rightly remain ours. To put it simply, one person’s work and deep commitment to joyful service should inspire us to do the same. But if we allow ourselves to rest on mere talk about how great someone was, letting the responsibility remain with them, we miss the mark and fall into idolatry.

Regardless of our means, we all have the capacity to give what we can of our time or money, or both, in order to fulfill the vision that Parshat Ki Tavo and Deuteronomy as a whole lay out for us: to remember our past with humility, to credit the role of forces well beyond our control, and to share what we have, בְּשִׂמְחָה!

Shabbat shalom!