(1) When you enter the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, (2) you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where the ETERNAL your God will choose to establish the divine name. (3) You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, “I acknowledge this day before the ETERNAL your God that I have entered the land that GOD swore to our fathers to assign us.” (4) The priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down in front of the altar of the ETERNAL your God. (5) You shall then recite as follows before the ETERNAL your God: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. (6) The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. (7) We cried to the ETERNAL, the God of our ancestors, and the ETERNAL heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. (8) GOD freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, (9) bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (10) And so I now bring the first fruits of the soil that You, O ETERNAL One, have given me.”
You shall leave the basket before the ETERNAL your God and bow low before the ETERNAL your God. (11) And you shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that the ETERNAL your God has bestowed upon you and your household.

A WANDERING ARAMEAN. ... It thus appears to me that the term Aramean refers to Jacob. Scripture, as it were, reads, when my father was in Aram he was “perishing.” That is, he was poor, he had no money. ... Its import is, I did not inherit the land from my father, for my father was poor when he came to Aram. He was also a stranger in Egypt. He was few in number. He then became a large nation. You O Lord took us out of slavery and gave us a good land. ...

ארמי אובד אבי, as if the Torah had written” my father Avraham was an Aramite, lost, and exiled from his birthplace Aram.” G’d had told him in Genesis 12,1 “go forth for yourself from your homeland, etc.” Later on, Avraham himself relates to Avimelech the king of the Philistines, (Genesis 20,13) that G’d had made him wander, away from his father’s house, etc. The meaning of the word אובד here is similar to תועה, the root Avraham used to describe wandering without specific objective, almost like walking because one is lost. The word occurs clearly in that sense in Psalms 119,176 תעיתי כשה אובד בקש עבדך, “I have strayed like a lost sheep; search for Your servant, etc.!” We also find the word in this connotation in Jeremiah 50,6 עמי רועיהם התעום, “My people were lost sheep; their shepherd led them astray.” In other words, the recital by the farmer goes back to the Jewish people’s origin, the farmer saying: ‘our forefathers came to this land from an alien country and now G’d has given it to us.

“My father”: This includes all the patriarchs as one, for they wandered from nation to nation, and the first of them came from Aram. Rashbam’s interpretation is close to this.

(4) ... He begins with the Jewish people’s disgrace and concludes with their glory. And he expounds from the passage: “An Aramean tried to destroy my father” (Deuteronomy 26:5), the declaration one recites when presenting his first fruits at the Temple, until he concludes explaining the entire section.

... In each and every generation a person must view himself as though he personally left Egypt,

צֵא וּלְמַד GO [to the verse]
AND LEARN
what Laban the Aramean
sought to do to our father Jacob:
Pharaoh condemned only the boys to death,
but Laban sought to uproot everything,
as it is written:
“AN ARAMEAN SOUGHT MY FATHER'S DEATH,
AND HE WENT DOWN TO EGYPT
AND RESIDED THERE,
JUST A HANDFUL OF SOULS;
AND THERE HE BECAME A NATION –
LARGE, MIGHTY, AND GREAT.”

And this is the promise that has sustained our ancestors and ourselves, for it was not just once that somebody rose against us to destroy us; for in every generation they rise up to destroy us and the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands.

Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: It is written: “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12). The Gemara asks: What is the relevance of the phrase “It is not in heaven” in this context? Rabbi Yirmeya says: Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah: “After a majority to incline” (Exodus 23:2).

Our God and God of our fathers, let our prayer come before you and do not ignore our supplication. For we are not so brazen-faced and stiff-necked to say to you, Adonoy, our God, and God of our fathers, “We are righteous and have not sinned.” But, indeed, we and our fathers have sinned.