This week's Torah portion, Ki Tavo, offers a series of blessings and curses in language both poetic and resonant. The lines have been running through my head this week as I've been working in the kitchen.

Maybe that's why and how this week's d'var for Radical Torah wound up a meditation both on the blessings and curses in the Torah portion, and on the strictures of preserving the harvest:

If I do all of these things as I have been taught, then we will have five, maybe six gleaming jelly jars of sun-dried tomatoes, the fruit of local soil, to rest on our baker's rack through the Jewish holiday season, through autumn, through the falling of the leaves and the first snows, and into the chill damp days of next spring and the season when the sun returns to our skies. I will feel blessed when I venture into city spaces, and blessed here in my chosen country life. My kitchen will yield sustenance and abundance.

Read the whole thing here: Harvest blessings.

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