H
oward Gardner, professor of
education and psychology at
Harvard University, is one of the
great minds of our time. He is best known
for his theory of “multiple intelligences,”
the idea that there is not
just one thing that can be
measured and defined as
intelligence but many dif-
ferent facets — which is one
dimension of the dignity of
difference. He has also writ-
ten many books on leader-
ship and creativity, including
one in particular, Leading Minds, that is
important in understanding this week’s
parsha of Ki Tavo.
Gardner’s argument is that what makes
a leader is the ability to tell a particular kind
of story — one that explains ourselves to
ourselves and gives power and resonance
to a collective vision. So Churchill told
the story of Britain’s indomitable courage
in the fight for freedom. Gandhi spoke
about the dignity of India and non-violent
protest. Margaret Thatcher talked about
the importance of the individual against
an ever-encroaching State. Martin Luther
King Jr. told of how a great nation is col-
or-blind. Stories give the group a shared
identity and sense of purpose.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has also
emphasized the importance of narrative to
the moral life. “Man,” he writes, “is in his
actions and practice, as well as in his fic-
tions, essentially a story-telling animal.” It
is through narratives that we begin to learn
who we are and how we are called on to
behave. “Deprive children of stories and
you leave them unscripted, anxious stut-
terers in their actions as in their words.” To
know who we are is, in large part, to
understand the story or stories of which
we are a part.
The great questions — “Who are we?”
“Why are we here?” “What is our task?”
— are best answered by telling a story. As
Barbara Hardy put it: “We dream in nar-
rative, daydream in narrative, remember,
anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt,
plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip,
learn, hate and love by narrative.”
This is fundamental to understanding
why Torah is the kind of book it is: not a
theological treatise or a metaphysical system
but a series of interlinked stories extended
over time, from Abraham and Sarah’s jour-
ney from Mesopotamia to Moses’ and the
Israelites’ wanderings in the desert. Judaism
is less about truth as system than about truth
as story. And we are part of that story. That
is what it is to be a Jew.
A NATION OF STORYTELLERS
A large part of what Moses is doing in the
book of Devarim is retelling that story to
the next generation, reminding them of
what God had done for their parents and
of some of the mistakes their parents had
made. Moses, as well as being the great
liberator, is the supreme storyteller. Yet
what he does in parshat Ki Tavo extends
way beyond this.
He tells the people that when they
enter, conquer and settle the land, they
must bring the first ripened fruits to the
central Sanctuary, the Temple, as a way
of giving thanks to God. A Mishnah in
Bikkurim describes the joyous scene as
people converged on Jerusalem from
across the country, bringing their first-
fruits to the accompaniment of music and
celebration. Merely bringing the fruits,
though, was not enough. Each person had
to make a declaration. That declaration
become one of the best-known passages
in the Torah because, though it was origi-
nally said on Shavuot, the festival of first-
fruits, in post-biblical times, it became
a central element of the Haggadah on
seder night: “My father was a wandering
Aramean, and he went down into Egypt
and lived there, few in number, there
becoming a great nation, powerful and
A Nation of Storytellers
62 | AUGUST 31 • 2023
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks