On the festival of Shavuot, we were commanded to take our finest, juiciest fruits and take them them to Jerusalem, a humble offering for the bounty that the Holy One has given us.

The Shavuot offering was a celebration of renewal, a celebration of new life, and an offering of thanks. Each of us was commanded to bring a basket before the priest and to recite our people’s history, to remember that the crop was only one of God’s gifts to us. God has made us a great nation and brought us out of the land of Egypt, and has given us the Land.

Ultimately, the offering was an act of returning, of acknowledging that God had created the fruit. We may have sown it. We may have reaped it. But the land, the rain, the strength to sow and to reap, all of these were gifts from God.

Sefat Emet, one of the greatest Chassidic masters, looked at the words that we said before the priest and noted a deeper meaning, about a deeper kind of return and a deeper kind of creation – the return we call teshuvah. All of us can return to the person that we were meant to be. No matter what we have done, no matter how we have failed, all of us can grow. All of us can change. All of us can re-create ourselves.

Sefat Emet notices that there are two “firsts” in the holiday cycle: the bringing of the first fruits and Rosh Hashanah, the first of the year. And each year there are other “firsts” in our lives – moments of success and achievement when we forget to acknowledge God’s role. He writes:

The mitzvah of the first fruits is the gateway to Rosh Hashanah.  We go through the year, blind to the many “firsts” in our lives. At the end of the year, before Rosh Hashanah, we restore all the “firsts” to the Holy One, and we attach each of them to God.

We recite all the things that God has done for us and we end with the words, “and now I bring.” The sages taught that every use of the phrase “and now” refers to teshuvah. When we return the first fruits to God, we do more than return those fruits to their Creator. We also acknowledge our own need to turn our lives around and to return to our Creator. 

The sages taught that we can no longer go to the Temple in Jerusalem and offer up our first fruits. But through our prayers on Rosh Hashanah, we can offer up the thoughts of our hearts and return them to our Creator. This is the essence of teshuvah.

Shavuot is a celebration of new life. The offering of first fruits, the renewal of Torah, all of them remind us that we, too, can be renewed. Rosh Hashanah is coming. Whatever have done, God will forgive us and help us to grow.

This week. as we count the last days of the Omer, I’ll be thinking about the “firsts” that God has given me and returning them to their Source. I invite you to send comments about your own firsts. We can give thanks for them together.

Chag Sameah.