Activating Dormant Powers

Activating Dormant Powers

D’var Torah on Parashat Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12--11:25)

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

The harsh climate of summer in Israel often obscures the fruitfulness with which the land is blessed. By mid-morning the extreme heat and blaring, blazing sunlight make your head spin and your bones feel like dried, brittle twigs. Fields are parched and the hillsides are covered with thistles and thorns. Yet deep within the earth, the potential of renewed life is merely asleep. All it will take is the first few drops of autumnal rain for nature to wake up again.

Yet summer is also the season of ripening fruit. Open air markets teem with any number of varieties of grapes, apples, peaches, mangoes, plums and dates. Beautiful just-off-the-vine tomatoes and cucumbers vie for attention with barrels of green and black olives cured in brine and spices.

It is an unusually fertile land, yet it does not yield its fruit freely. It requires hard work and dedication, much love—and definitely the sweat of your brow.

This week’s Torah portion, Eikev (“whereupon,” or “since”), makes it clear that there is yet one more condition that needs to be fulfilled if the land is to give its blessed yield: Keeping faith with God.

One of the purposes of religion and ritual is--hopefully--to wield some influence on the unseen powers that seem to control our lives. The local deities of the ancient world were finicky and wily. They often found humanity distracting if not a downright bother to deal with. But the gods were as given to bribery and flattery as any of us human beings. A nice slab of meat went a long way, and a few gold coins often secured safe passage through some difficult life ordeal, especially if deposited in some powerful priest’s or king’s safe.

The Torah, however, sets forth a different equation. Desired consequences are not a question of random, blind luck, and certainly not the result of bribery. The genius of the Torah is in the brilliant understanding that righteousness—moral, ethical behavior—is the fertile ground in which success flourishes.

It would be observing the commandments given and accepted at Sinai that would guarantee the Israelites safe passage into the Promised Land, a “good land, a land with brooks of water, fountains and depths that emerge in valleys and mountains, a land of wheat and barley, vines and figs and pomegranates, a land of oil producing olives and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, you will lack nothing in it, a land whose stones are iron and out of whose mountains you will hew copper” (Deuteronomy 7:7-9).

And what are those commandments? Simply, “to walk in all His ways” (Deut. 10:12). Just as God “defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing” (Deut. 10:18), so must we. The persecution we felt on our own skin as strangers in Egypt and the many deprivations we suffered while wandering in the wilderness were teaching opportunities meant to sensitize us to the needs of the weakest members of our own society.

What this week’s parashah accomplishes surpasses the simple law that every action has an equal reaction. Its lesson is even greater than the easy recognition that morality bears good consequences, that a smile generates a smile, that one good deed deserves another. The teaching of Eikev has much broader consequences. Ethical behavior achieves more than merely internal security. Thousands of years ago the Torah already recognized that acting locally has global implications, that acts of righteousness impact not only society but also history and ecology. It is through the observance of God’s commandments of justice and compassion that the Israelites will become so strong as to overcome “nations larger and stronger than you” (Deut. 11:23). It was for that purpose that God had redeemed us from Egypt and devastated “the Egyptian army… its horses and chariots… [and] overwhelmed them with the waters of the Red Sea” (Deut. 11:4).

Eikev teaches that observing God’s commandments will have the consequences not only of strengthening the People of Israel and ensuring its survival through historical events, but also of activating the powers embedded within the very Land of Israel. The land is described as getting its rain from heaven, a land that God Himself cares for. Thus, as a consequence of our moral behavior God “will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil” (Deut. 11:14).

It’s not hard to realize that actions and deeds have consequences. However, it’s a much farther reach to conceive of a broader outcome that reaches as far as heaven itself. Mystics claim that it is through subtle and mysterious incantations that our thoughts can reach the stars above. But it took the Torah to help us understand that simple acts of kindness and compassion can result in strength, peace and security; that respect shown to life all around us will lead to nature respecting us in return; that refraining from moral and physical pollution will result in the earth yielding its fruit and grain seemingly without effort. Moral strength equals physical strength.

The very simplicity of this concept makes it difficult to comprehend and even harder to believe. Yet evidence is all around us. The People of Israel is still here, a marvel of history some three and a half thousand years after our emergence from Egyptian tyranny and genocide. That and the renewed fruitfulness of the Land of Israel offer irrefutable proof of the accuracy of the axiom proposed by the Deuteronomist. It’s a promise the whole world might want to try. In this age of cultural upheaval and ecological disasters, what have we got to lose?

©2010 by Boaz D. Heilman