Sefer Devarim Parshat Eikev:
On Remembering the Big Picture
By Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz
Parshat Eikev, which roughly means “as a result of,” 1 spells out the blessings the Israelites will receive if they follow God’s teachings. These rewards include having children, produce, animals, land, and health.
These gifts, however, come in tandem with a danger. In Deuteronomy Chapter 8, Moses has the foresight to warn us that, once we become financially stable, we run the risk of becoming self-satisfied and abandoning God. We are told:
Take care lest you forget the Lord your God and fail to keep the divine commandments, rules, and laws which I enjoin upon you today.
When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God Who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. 2
When we become sated with food and settled in our homes and enriched with wealth, we may potentially forget not only where we’ve come from, but where we’re going. This is a deep truth in human psychology still today. Once we’re accustomed to a certain amount of status, we believe we’re entitled to it.
The traditional interpreters primarily take this passage to mean that we should work extra hard to stay humble. Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah, holds up Moshe Rabbeinu as the best example of a meek individual, one who does not forget God in the midst of honor and success, as it says in the Book of Numbers, 3 “Now Moses himself was very humble, more so than any other human being on earth.” 4
And the medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra taught that, when we become full of ourselves, we will forget the feeling of slavery in ancient Egypt and homelessness in the wilderness. 5
This is a main distinction between the desert generation, which was soon to die off, and those that would be born in the Promised Land. The journeyers lived in a time of upheaval and transition. Their children, though, would not remember the travels of the desert, or the receiving of the Torah at Sinai, or the miracles of the sea, or the slavery in Mitzrayim.
Consequently, they must go out of their way to remember God who brought them there. So too, we in our generation are called upon to remember where we’ve come from and keep in mind where we are going, so as to not lose our values in the distractions of everyday life.
The Jewish tradition asks us to constantly take stock of our priorities, remembering that there are bigger things than the current situation. It is taught in Pirkei Avot:
Know from where you come, and where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning. From where do you come? From a putrid drop. Where are you going? To a place of dust, of worm, and of maggot. Before whom are you destined to give an account and reckoning? Before the King of kings, the Holy One be Blessed .6
This outlook can put us into a profoundly contradictory mindset. On one hand, much of one’s life’s work is futile, as it inevitably comes to an end. On the other hand, we are reminded that we are all created in the image of God and are obligated to work toward redemption. This is one of the reasons why we need to engage in prayer and learning, to never forget where we’ve come from and where we’re going, to never accept the status quo as good enough.
In times of vulnerability and insecurity, we may feel like we have nothing to lose, and thus we can more easily be humble servants and bold seekers. But in times of comfort and stability, we can forget our purpose. This is the greatest threat to American Jews today. We are not lured away by appealing statues of gods, but rather by bigger and bigger real-estate deals and other materialism.
To be clear, the problem is not comfort and stability per se, which are things we ought to pursue. The problem is that, if we’re not careful, the otherwise-wonderful blessings of prosperity and safety can mislead us into moral complacency. We can become ultra-conservative and non-evolving out of fear of losing what we have.
This is also true in Israel today. The early pioneers had bold moral visions for equality. Yet, as the country became more stable and began to grow, it started down a path of assimilating into a Western model of unbalanced capitalism.
So too, many of the Jewish immigrants who came to America had a more direct connection to the Jewish tradition. But once we became established on the social ladder and in the world of American consumerism, we in many ways lost that rootedness.
We should be asking ourselves: Have we let money, success, and security take the place of connection to the Divine and the community? Or, as a result of many of us getting the resources we needed in America, have we stopped feeling the need to be concerned about higher things?
What is the necessary amount of communal life and spirituality that must be infused in our lives?
By engaging in Torah study and observance, and putting ourselves week after week in the position of our ancestors who hadn’t yet made it to the Promised Land, we can reconnect to that visceral groundedness in the physical and emotional realities of the trials of the past: of slavery, of accepting the mitzvot at Mount Sinai, and of being a homeless and hungry people in the desert. By creating a practice of mentally removing ourselves from our current comforts, we can remember to be the people that the tradition calls upon us to be.
Sources
- The full term is “V’hayah eikev tishme’un” (“And it shall be as a result of your obeying”).
- Deuteronomy 8:11-14
- Numbers 12:3
- Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Dei’ot 2:3
- Ibn Ezra on Deuteronomy 8:14:1
- Pirkei Avot 3:1