A highlight of this discourse is Moses’s stirring depiction of the Land of Israel and its abundance in a sort of poem (beginning in ) in which each line begins with the word [a] land: a land of rivers and fountains; a land of wheat and barley; a land of oil and honey; a land in which you will lack nothing; a land whose stones are iron and whose mountains yield copper (paraphrased to highlight the anaphoric repetition of the word land).

Moses’s skills as an orator are apparent also in complementary pairs that shape the parashah’s first large section��(, the complete Torah reading in the ancient triennial cycle). He frames this section with the uncommon word eikev��(“if”), which gives the parashah its name, to enunciate a promise and threat: “If you observe the laws, God will preserve His covenant with you”; and “If you do not obey the Lord, you will perish like the Canaanites.” This symmetry recurs throughout the parashah, for example: “It will come to pass that if you forget the Lord your God” (8:19) vs. “It will come to pass that if you obey My commandment” (11:13, incorporated by tradition into the Shema’). Again: “When you eat and are satisfied, you will bless the Lord” (8:10) vs. “Beware lest you eat and are satisfied . . . and become arrogant and forget the Lord” (8:12–14).

The discourse is also replete with striking imagery, such as the hornet that Moses assures the people that God will send ahead of them to destroy the Canaanites (7:20) and the depiction of God as a consuming fire (9:3). It contains the famous symmetrical proverb, “Man does not live on bread alone; rather on whatever comes from God’s mouth does man live.” Not what we put into our mouths sustains us but what comes out of God’s mouth: His words, His teaching, His decree of death and life, of famine and plenty.

Motifs of eating are prominent in the parashah. Moses speaks of the Israelites “eating” the Canaanites (7:16). (The spies whom Moses sent from Qadesh Barnea thirty-eight years earlier had already spoken of the Canaanites as Israel’s “bread,” ) He reminds the Israelites of the manna they ate in the desert (8:3); promises that in the Land, they will not eat scantily but in abundance (8:9); warns them against eating ungratefully (8:13); and, in a passage that would be repeated by Jews several times daily for centuries, he announces (8:10): “When you have eaten and been satisfied, you will bless the Lord your God for the good Land that He has given you.”

Ancient rabbis cited this verse as authority for the obligation of reciting a grace after meals. However, the verse does not seem to speak about a ritual blessing, but rather a spontaneous expression of gratitude; not “When you eat and are satisfied, you��must��bless the Lord” (implying a commandment) but “When you eat and are satisfied, you��will��(spontaneously) bless the Lord.” Regardless, Moses was not speaking primarily of gratitude for the food. Gratitude for the��food, he declares,��will lead to gratitude for the��Land, and it is for the Land that he envisions the Israelites as giving thanks once they experience its bounty.

Despite this link between grace and the Land of Israel, the rabbis insisted we give thanks for our food wherever in the world we live and enjoy it, wherever in the world it comes from. Thus, “Blessed are Thou, Lord, for the land and the food” refers not, as originally intended, to the Land of Israel but to this whole bountiful world. There is, indeed, a certain analogy between the Israelites entering Canaan, waging war, occupying it, and eating its produce, and mankind’s conquest of the world’s soil and of the technology of food production, then producing and eating the produce. Like the Land of Israel to the spies, and to Moses in our parashah, the world is our bread to eat, ours for the taking.

Because bread comes to us so easily, we slip easily into the arrogance against which Moses warned (8:11): “Beware of forgetting the Lord your God. . . . When you eat and are satisfied, build great houses and dwell in them, when your cattle and sheep multiply and you acquire much silver and gold, when everything you have is abundant-beware of turning arrogant and forgetting the Lord your God.” Master rhetorician that he is, Moses uses here some of the same language that he used when he spoke of blessing the Lord, turning it into another poem warning against that arrogance. He is less concerned here that the Israelites will forget to bless the Lord than he is that they will credit their success to themselves and say (8:17): “My power and my own hand’s strength have gotten me this prosperity.” In our time, the practical consequence is that we fail to consider the harm we are doing in the act of conquering the land and its inhabitants and extracting its bounty, heedless of the consequences for the land itself, its inhabitants, and future generations. Thinking that we can subject them to our unrestrained appetites, we give no thought to any larger principle that should teach us humility in our attitude toward ourselves and modesty in our demands for material things.

The Bible is not much given to abstract language. In place of modern words like arrogance, it uses imagery like “your heart will become lofty.” It couches its message in concrete situations such as the conquest of the Land of Israel and embellishes it with rhetorical techniques of the kind we have been exploring. In the opening passage of our parashah, it targets behavior that is the besetting sin of our age, the attitude that we are our own masters and masters of the earth. We moderns may not be able to see God as clearly as Moses did, but there is no difficulty in seeing this behavior as sin. Happily singing��birkat hamazon��over the remains of a plentiful meal, we vaguely feel we have done our duty. But the goal, as Moses’s rhetoric makes clear, is not only to praise God but to use His world humbly and modestly, a discipline that is considerably harder to achieve.

This piece was originally published in 2010.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (��”l) Hassenfeld.

If, then, you obey the commandments that I have enjoined upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. . .Take care not to be lured way and serve other gods and bow to them. For the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain. . . (-17, NJPS translation)

Many of us are uncomfortable reciting these verses. We live in a scientific age. We look to science, in this case meteorology, to explain the weather. Moreover, our experience of the world belies Deuteronomy’s claim. It rains or it doesn’t. People fulfill the commandments or they don’t; they commit atrocities or great acts of kindness. There is no observable link between the two. And even if one were to grant the premise of Deuteronomy, the tone of these words sound like a threat—“the Lord’s anger will flare up against you”—which some of us find demeaning. We are fine with being told that it is important to fulfill God’s commands, but we don’t want to be bullied into it.

When I recite these verses I do not experience them as a threat. I see them as a vital reminder that the effects of the good and evil we do are not limited to the moment in which we act. Our actions have consequences far beyond that moment, and most of them are beyond our control. If I spread gossip about you, I hurt you not only in the moment that I tarnish your reputation in the mind of the hearer. He will undoubtedly tell others who will in turn tell others. I cannot control the ripple effects of my act of denigration, nor of anything else I do, for better or for worse.

Of course this is true not only of sin, but of good deeds as well. Shakespeare got it wrong when he had Anthony say, in his funeral oration for Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” (Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2). Good has an afterlife just as vigorous as that of evil.

I share with you a small but moving example of this truth. In our family we tell the story of my cousin Shira who, every Shabbat after services, puts away any prayer books that have not been returned to their proper place. She does so because she observed our grandfather, a man who was dedicated to prayer and synagogue life, carefully restore order to the sanctuary after the congregants had left. One Shabbat a few years back, she noticed that a young man who had recently moved into town was engaging in the same task. She approached him and complained, tongue-in-cheek, that he was taking away her job. He explained that many years ago he had studied for his bar mitzvah with a man by the name of Mr. Weiss. He had seen him return the prayer books to their shelves week after week and was inspired to follow his example. Mr. Weiss, of course, was Shira’s and my grandfather.

I also regard the very implausibility of rainfall depending on human behavior as calling me to reflect that the results of our actions are not only often unknowable but often unforeseeable. Consider the story of David and Ahimelekh. In , we read how David, fleeing Saul’s wrath, maneuvers the priest Ahimelekh into unwittingly aiding him in his escape by providing him with food and a sword. One of Saul’s generals, Doeg the Edomite, overhears their conversation and reports it to Saul. In a paranoid rage, Saul orders the death not only of Ahimelekh, but also of 85 of his fellow priests. When Saul gives the order for the priests to be killed, none of his men steps forward. Finally, it is Doeg who does the deed. I wonder what went through Doeg’s mind. Did he regret having informed on Ahimelekh now that it had resulted in his killing of innocent men? In any case, he was ensnared by the unforeseeable consequences of his words.

We need not let our theological differences with Deuteronomy blind us to the deep truth underlying its words: Until we act, we are the master of our actions. Once we do act, they master us.

This Commentary was originally published in 2015.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Deutero-Isaiah anticipated the victory of the Persian emperor, Cyrus, over the Babylonian empire and predicted that the Persians would allow the Judean exiles to return to their homeland and to rebuild their Temple there. Addressed to a despondent people who have experienced a catastrophe,  this prophet’s poetic orations attempt to convince the Judeans that the God of Israel is still powerful and still loyal to the people Israel.

Unusually among biblical texts, Deutero-Isaiah refers to God using not only masculine metaphors but feminine ones as well (e.g., Isa. 42:13–14, 45:10, 49:14–15, 66:13). The reasons behind this innovation cannot be known with certainty. Perhaps the prophet’s intense monotheism requires the prophet to show explicitly that Hashem has characteristics that polytheists associate with goddesses as well those associated with gods. At the same time, the feminine imagery, and especially maternal language, Deutero-Isaiah uses for God suit this prophet’s focus on solace and hope, and the opening lines of today’s haftarah are a banner example. They also display this prophet’s frequent practice of borrowing language and images from earlier biblical texts and recasting them to comfort the exiled Judeans. Let’s take a closer look.

In the opening lines of the haftarah, the prophet portrays Jerusalem as a woman who thinks that her husband has left her and that her children are gone forever. Zion (i.e., Jerusalem) serves as a stand-in for the Jewish people, who believe either that the God of Israel no longer loves them (i.e., has ended the covenant) or that Israel’s deity is one of many gods, and has been defeated—or even killed—by the god of Babylon. Further, because the nation is in exile, the prophet portrays Zion not only as a rejected or widowed wife but also as a bereaved mother: her children have been taken away forever, destined to live in Babylon and probably to assimilate into the population there, thus ending the Jewish people’s existence. Zion laments in the first verse:

Hashem has abandoned me,
            And my Lord has forgotten me. ()

But the prophet quotes God as forcefully denying this:

Would a woman forget her infant,
            Forget to love the child of her womb?
Even if they would forget,
            I never forget you . . . 
Your children come quickly . . .
Lift up your eyes and see—
            All of them have gathered, they’re coming towards you!
I am making a vow (an utterance of Hashem):
Truly, you will wear all of them like jewelry,
            You will adorn yourself with them as a bride. 

()

Zion’s question in verse 14 uses a marital metaphor to describe the covenant: God is the husband and Zion or Israel is the wife. The same metaphor was used by the prophet Jeremiah shortly before the exile began, quoting God:

Why do My people say,
            “We’re leaving You! We’re not coming home anymore!”
Would a young woman forget her jewelry,
            A bride her ornaments?
But My people has forgotten Me
            Days beyond number. 

()

In our haftarah, Deutero-Isaiah takes up language from Jeremiah’s prophecy of rebuke but uses it in radically new ways. In Jeremiah, God asked, “Would a young woman forget her jewelry, a bride her adornment (הֲתִשְׁכַּח בְּתוּלָה עֶדְיָהּ כַּלָּה קִשֻּׁרֶיהָ)?” But in Deutero-Isaiah, God asks, “Would a woman forget her infant, forget to love the child of her womb? (הֲתִשְׁכַּח אִשָּׁה עוּלָהּ מֵרַחֵם בֶּן־בִּטְנָהּ). Words found immediately thereafter in Jeremiah’s question reappear several verses later in Deutero-Isaiah: כעדי (“like jewelry”) in  recalls עדיה (“her jewelry”) in Jeremiah. Deutero-Isaiah’s phrase “You will adorn yourself with them as a bride” echoes Jeremiah’s question: the later prophet’s verb ותקשׁרים recalls the earlier prophet’s noun קשוריה (“her adornments/ornaments”), and the word “bride” (כלה)  appears next to the word for adornment in both texts.

By repeating vocabulary from Jeremiah’s complaint, Deutero-Isaiah encourages us to read these passages alongside each other, making clear that in the later text, God denies abandoning the people, even though they forgot God in Jeremiah’s day. Both texts include the metaphor of a woman, but in Deutero-Isaiah the figure is a more tender image: in place of a woman who covets jewelry, we read of mother and child. The jewelry does reappear, but is no longer used critically. Instead, God promises Zion that she will have children with which to adorn herself—that is, that Jerusalem will again be inhabited by multitudes of Jews. The later prophet repeatedly uses words and images to comfort that the earlier one had used to castigate. Deutero-Isaiah reverses the message of the passage from Jeremiah—but never denies its accuracy (for simply by reminding the audience of Jeremiah’s prophecy of doom, Deutero-Isaiah implicitly confirms that the exile Jeremiah long predicted has indeed come to pass.) For the later prophet, God reprimands but does not renounce Israel.

The most interesting change Deutero-Isaiah works on Jeremiah’s language involves the metaphor each uses for God. In Jeremiah, the woman who is fickle and ungrateful is Israel, and God is her husband. But in today’s haftarah, the woman is not a bride but a mother—and that mother is God. In fact, the persuasive force of the passage depends on the fact that God is portrayed here as Israel’s mother rather than Israel’s husband: a husband can divorce a wife, but a mother remains a mother forever.

In rare cases mothers do abandon their children, but Deutero-Isaiah anticipates this objection and responds to it in a daring way: the prophet likens Hashem not merely to a mother, but to a mother who breast-feeds (עול, which I translated above as “infant,” refers specifically to an infant who is nursing; the noun is derived from a verb that means “to suckle”). A mother who is breast-feeding is physically unable to forget her child: if she does not express milk every few hours, her breasts become engorged and painful. God is physically connected to the Jewish people, the prophet insists, as a breast-feeding mother is connected to her infant. The people did forsake God. But God will never renounce Her child. Deutero-Isaiah provides reasons for God’s loyalty unrelated to Israel’s behavior—which are therefore more believable to a guilt-ridden exilic audience.

Deutero-Isaiah is a constantly allusive poet, borrowing language from older biblical texts and reworking it to provide a message of comfort and encouragement in place of the often negative predictions of prophets who came earlier. The allusion to  we have examined is but one of roughly a dozen in today’s haftarah that rework language from Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, First Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and Psalms. In fact, all of this prophet’s compositions () display a very clever artistry of allusion and revision even as they constantly echo and reinforce older biblical traditions.

And this prophet is the one biblical author who repeatedly uses female metaphors to describe God (as well as masculine figures of speech). This prophet’s work seems surprisingly contemporary in suggesting that God is as much a mother as a husband—which is to say that God is neither man nor woman, and that whatever language we apply to God is always figurative, never literal. In both these respects today’s haftarah is a reminder of the literary sensitivity and theological depth we are privileged to experience on Shabbat morning.

This commentary was originally published in 2018

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

The children of Israel are at the precipice of entering the Land of Israel, having depended upon God for all of their needs while wandering in the wilderness. Moses, who knows he will not enter the Land, attempts to warn the people about the danger of bounty and the weakness of their own natures. They will enter “a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey” (Deut. 8:7–8). Like God’s warning in Hosea, Moses admonishes: “When you have eaten your fill . . . . beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget your God” (Deut. 8:12–14). ln the midst of plenty, this warning from Moses hits on one of the greatest human flaws and ongoing biblical sins: human beings are quick to forget the Source of their blessings, proclaiming, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me” (Deut. 8:17).  Moses’s challenge to the Israelites reverberates today: How do we refrain from spoiling ourselves or our children in the midst of plenty? 

In Deuteronomy 8, we can identify four main terms or leitworts that provide keys to unlocking responses to our problem:

1. זכור/שכח  Zakhor/Shakhah (remember/forget)
2. ברכה  Berakhah (blessing)
3. מצוה  Mitzvah (commandment)
4. ענוי  Inui (test or hardship)

For each of these terms, we can consider the contextual meaning (peshat) and an applied or contemporary meaning (derash) to answer how to raise children in the midst of plenty. 

The terms zakhor, to remember, and its opposite, shakhah, to forget, appear in the following verses: “remember (zakhor) that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth” (Deut. 8:18) and “beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget (veshakhahta) the Lord your God who freed you from Egypt” (Deut. 8:14). In these two contexts, the peshat of zakhor, or its opposite, refers to God being the source of success. Shabbat reminds us to cease from creation and to remember that we are not the Creator. 

In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, ceasing is a practice which requires us to “stop worshiping the idols of technical civilization,” and Shabbat is “a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and forces of nature.” (Heschel, The Sabbath, p.3)

Next we move to berakha, or blessing, with the well-known verse from the Grace After Meals, “You will eat and be satisfied and bless” (Deut. 8:10). Here we express our gratitude to the Source of our bounty. Two lines later, Moses warns that the people will “eat and be satisfied” without blessing (Deut. 8:12). Eating without a blessing carries the danger of forgetting the Source. Traditionally, blessing is an immediate acknowledgement of a gift received. What would this look like today? Some modern applications would be writing thank you notes, acknowledging a host, or expressing gratitude at the end of a class.

The third key term, mitzvah or commandment, is expressed in the first verse of chapter 8: “All the commandments (mitzvot) which I give to you this day, keep and do, that you may live and increase and possess the Land” (Deut. 8:1). Each time the term mitzvah is used in this chapter, it is accompanied by the word shamor, to keep or guard. First and foremost, following the commandments keeps you in relationship with God. When the Israelites fulfill their obligation, they receive life, offspring, and the Land. If the sin of this chapter is forgetting the source of your blessing and succumbing to hubris, we see that one of the functions of the mitzvot is to pull you out of your hubris and stretch you into a relationship with God or with others. Regularly practicing mitzvot like tzedakah, talmud torah, or honoring one’s parents enables you to counteract the arrogance and selfishness of seeing yourself as the source of blessing and highest being.

In this chapter the term inui, test or hardship, is connected to testing by hardship, whether by hunger or wandering in the wilderness (Deut. 8:2,3,16). Thinking about our essential question around the case of a child, inui asks what kind of discipline enables a child not to be spoiled. How do you create a home that is joyous, playful, generous, and welcoming, while also including discipline as a means for remembering, blessing, and mitzvah? Throughout the Israelites’ wandering through the desert, God has modeled discipline by creating a situation of total dependency, such as living on the daily manna, and then God brings the Israelites into a land of milk and honey. God quickly becomes infuriated when the people do not meet God’s expectations, highlighting the challenging nature of the divine plan.

God attempted to bring the people from total dependency to a land of overwhelming riches. In his speech to the children of Israel, Moses warns that such an abrupt transition is unlikely to be successful. Perhaps God could have disciplined the people not only in a place of deprivation, but also in a place of temptation. Or, brought them from the wilderness into a land of moderation and simplicity on the way to a land of plenty. With our own children, our challenge is to create homes and communities which are steeped in discipline, the practice of mitzvot, blessing, and memory; children who are disciplined, committed, responsible, and grateful, and who live in relationship to a larger Source.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Their continued presence is not only strange in light of the merit-based leadership of our sages in later times. The focus on a religious nobility determined by blood flies in the face of the Torah’s more democratic vision. From the time of Abraham through the Exodus, it was the heads of families who offered up sacrifices. And  seems to imply that the first-born of every Jewish family was to be responsible for the slaughter and preparation of the sacrifice.

Prior to the creation of this special holy clan of religious leaders descended from Aaron, the Torah’s standard seems to have been that the bekhor, the first-born son, was to serve as religious leader of each family. As God says in ,

For all the first-born are Mine; on the day that I struck down all the first-born in the land of Egypt, I sanctified to Myself all the firstborn in Israel.

So why was the role of religious leadership taken from the first-born of every family and given to the descendants of Aaron?

One possible answer may lie in the trauma of the Golden Calf. As the children of Israel betrayed the divine trust at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the Torah hints that the tribe of Levi refused to participate in the idolatry to which the rest of Israel succumbed. When Moses returns from the Mountain to discover the betrayal, he asks “Who is for the Lord? Join me!” And the Torah tells us, “The whole tribe of Levi joined him” ().  It may be at this point that the Aaronite families of the tribe of Levi take up their role as the kohanim. The change of religious leadership is made explicit in the census of , where we actually see the first-born Israelites exchanged for the Levites:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: I hereby accept the Levites from among the Israelites as substitutes for all the firstborn that open the womb among the Israelites. The Levites shall be mine.

Thus, the kohanim are a special holy caste created after the trauma of the Golden Calf. The first-born of Israel can no longer serve in the role of religious leadership because of their participation in this sin. The kohanim are substituted so that the religious life of Israel can survive.

The weakness of this argument is that Aaron the High Priest himself participated in the sin of the Golden Calf! In Parashat Eikev, Moses tells his memory of that day of sin and violence. He recalls:

The Lord was so angry with Aaron that he was ready to destroy him, but I interceded also on behalf of Aaron at the same time. ()

 In  Aaron himself tells us who cast the gold into the fire, bringing forth the calf:

“So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

Though several commentators try to exculpate Aaron from this deed, justifying his actions as either a delaying tactic (Rashi), or as an esoteric misunderstanding on his part (Ramban), the basic meaning is clear: Aaron sinned, Moses prayed for him, and he was forgiven. Why should his line become the priests of Israel, while the other Levites—who did not sin with the calf—become secondary to his line!? 

The answer may be found in what Moses leaves out of his account of the Golden Calf. In our parashah, Moses fails to mention his cry, ““Who is for the Lord? Join me!” In , after the Levites heed Moses’ call, he instructs them:

He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’”

And we see their faithful response:

The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day.

Ramban argues that this act of vengeance elevates the Levites and makes them worthy to be the holiest tribe of Israel. But I would like to suggest a different interpretation: Moses omits the vengeance of the Levites in his account in Deuteronomy because he is ashamed to have called for it. The Levites’ act of violence disqualified them from the priesthood. And Aaron’s peaceful and conciliatory nature thus made him and his line the ideal candidates for the high priesthood.

Responding to Moses’ statement in  (“Thus says the Lord . . .”), Rashi asks: “Where did He say it?” Rashi is perplexed, as all sensitive readers would be, by Moses’ claim that God said something we never hear. Quoting the Mechilta (a third century collection of Midrash), Rashi posits that the specific command to kill the worshipers of the calf is Moses’ own decision, based on his interpretation of an earlier verse from Exodus.  Perhaps Moses, at the end of his life, came to regret this call to violence and omitted it from his own account in Deuteronomy.

The Talmud says, “Aaron was a lover of peace and a pursuer of peace and would make peace between one person and the other” (). This is the quality that God seems to have wanted from the High Priest of Israel. Indeed, it was Aaron’s desire for peace that may have led him to capitulate to the demands of B’nei Yisrael, avoid conflict and violence, and begin work on the calf. The very quality that led him to sin is the same quality that led him to the high priesthood.

In the post-temple world, our sages regarded the honor given to the kohanim as an opportunity to promote peace: “A priest is called up first to read the Torah, and then a Levite, and then an Israelite, because of the ways of peace” (). The Talmud explains that the kohen receives the first honor so that those in the synagogue will not come to quarrel about who is the most deserving among them. In the rabbinic mind, Aaron is still making peace between people, resolving conflicts, and making the world a more blessed place. This is why we continue to need kohanim: they are to be a vision of peace among us. They will fail at times, as we all do, but as the Priestly Blessing reminds us, it is their calling to bless us with peace.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

וְשָׁמַרְתָּ אֶת־הַמִּצְוָה וְאֶת־הַחֻקִּים וְאֶת־הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם לַעֲשׂוֹתָם:

You should carefully carry out the commandment,
the laws, and the statutes, that I command you today.

(Parashat Va’et-hannan: Deut. 7:11)

 רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה:

Look: today I set before you a blessing and a curse.

(Parashat Re’eh: Deut. 11:26)

In between those bookends the word hayyom, meaning “today,” appears no fewer than twelve times. In this respect, Parashat Eikev is typical of the book in which it appears, because the word hayyom is a leitmotiv in Deuteronomy, occurring seventy-four times. It serves as what the great Jewish theologians and biblical commentators Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig call a “guiding word”: its variations in Deuteronomy provide a key that unlocks a central theme of the book.

Hayyom simply means “today,” but it is not always clear which “today” Deuteronomy intends. The book of Deuteronomy consists largely of several speeches Moses delivered shortly before his death. Since Moses is the speaker, “today” must mean the day Moses delivered the speech, at the end of the Israelites’ forty-year journey to the Promised Land. In some verses, this is explicitly the case. In our parashah (9:1 and 9:3), when Moses refers to the fact that the Israelites are soon to cross over the River Jordan to enter the land of Canaan “today” means the day on which Moses is speaking. But in other verses, Moses, who after all is speaking as a prophet, appears to speak on behalf of God. This is the case in the many verses where we find the phrase אשר אנכי מצוך היום, “that which that I command you today.” God is the one who issues the commands, and so we might infer that hayyom refers to the day God revealed the law on top of Mount Horeb, at the very beginning of the Israelites’ forty years in the desert. This is clearly the case when the word appears in last week’s parashah at Deuteronomy 5:24.

But in this week’s parashah, it’s clear that the speaker of this phrase is in fact Moses, because the surrounding verses refer to God in the third person; see 8:1, 11, and 19. In those verses “today” must refer to a day at the end of the forty years. However, it’s possible that in some cases both meanings make sense: God commanded the Israelites at Horeb soon after they left Egypt, and Moses conveys those commands to the Israelites a little while before they enter Canaan. The word hayyom in the oft-repeated phrase “which I command you today” becomes charged with a double meaning referring to more than one moment in time.

We see this phenomenon toward the end of this week’s parashah. The phrase “which I command you today” occurs in 11:13, and in the two verses that follow God speaks in the first person: “I shall provide timely rain for you . . . I shall provide grass for your cattle.” This suggests that the speaker who commands the people “today” is God. Does that mean that God commands Israel on the day Moses delivers this speech? Or should we understand God’s commanding Israel “today” as referring to the event at Mount Horeb forty years earlier? Elsewhere in the same passage, it is clearly Moses who uses the word “today,” which must refer to the day he delivered his speech (11:8, 27, and 28). In a single passage, the shift between these two “todays” breaks down the specificity of the word’s reference. This repetition disconnects our guiding word from any particular day in the past, allowing Deuteronomy’s audiences through time to understand the word as referring not only to these two events in the past but, most importantly, to their own present, the day on which they read our parashah. 

Ultimately, the “today” of which Deuteronomy speaks includes the “today” of the book’s audience—that is, the many “todays” of each person the text addresses. This is especially evident in 11:2–9 where Moses maintains that the members of the generation listening to his speech witnessed God’s miracles at the time of the exodus from Egypt—though in fact his audience is one generation removed from those events. Many of the Israelites in his audience were born during the forty years of wandering through the desert. Even the oldest among them were but children at the time of the exodus itself, since all the adults who left Egypt (other than Moses, Joshua, and Caleb) died during the forty years of wandering. But Deuteronomy implicitly claims that in each and every generation, people must see themselves as if they had gone forth from Egypt, and so Deuteronomy can refer to the children’s generation as having been present at their parents’ liberation from slavery. Similarly, in every generation people must regard the lawgiving at Mount Horeb as something they themselves witnessed (as last week’s parashah intimated at 5:3).

Deuteronomy wants the audience’s acceptance of God’s commands to occur “today,” not in the past. Religious meaning seems reserved for a moment that knows neither past generations nor future ones, but only an eternal now. This is the reason our parashah, like the book of which it is part, uses the word “today” to refer to several different days: the “today” that matters is whatever day we happen to be reading Deuteronomy. As Jews, we leave Egypt—that is, we accept our freedom—every day, or at least we should. And as Jews, we receive God’s command—that is, we accept the responsibility that comes with freedom—every day, or at least we should. Only when we realize that Parashat Eikev addresses each of us directly this Shabbat do we understand Deuteronomy’s message: that we need to embrace the law as our own right now.

Deuteronomy is the first Jewish text that emphasizes “today,” but hardly the last. The need for divine command to be understood as coming to us in the present is a central theme for what is widely regarded as the greatest work of Jewish philosophy of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. There Rosenzweig writes,

The imperative of commandment makes no provision for the future; it can only conceive the immediacy of obedience . . . Thus the commandment is purely the present . . . All of revelation is subsumed under the great today. God commands “today,” and “today” it is incumbent to obey his voice. It is in the today that the love of the lover lives, in this imperative today of the commandment. (The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo [Boston: Beacon Press, 1972], 177)

Similarly, in his influential essay “The Builders,” Rosenzweig proclaims that in order for Jews to observe Jewish law authentically, God’s command “must regain that today-ness in which all great Jewish periods have sensed the guarantee for its eternity.” (Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold und Annemarie Mayer [Dordrech: Nijhoff, 1984], 707. Adapted from trans. by Nahum Glatzer)

Abraham Joshua Heschel, too, speaks of the need for commitment to happen in a moment that is always present; this is true of commitments humans have to other humans, and no less so for one’s acceptance of commitments to God:

Revelation lasts a moment, acceptance continues . . . Sinai is both an event that happened once and for all, and an event that happens all the time. What God does, happens both in time and in eternity. Seen from our vantage point, it happened once; seen from His vantage point, it happens all the time. About the arrival of the people at Sinai we read . . . “In the third month after the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, on this day they came into the wilderness of Sinai” (Exodus 19:1). Here was an expression that puzzled the ancient rabbis: on this day? It should have said, on that day. This can only mean that the day of giving the Torah can never become past; that day is this day, every day.* (God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism [New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1955], 213–15)

The command, or mitzvah, that is the heart of Judaism cannot function if we regard it as something from our people’s past. A command can only be a command if God’s commanding, and our accepting, take place today. This week’s parashah, like Deuteronomy as a whole and Rosenzweig and Heschel, comes to remind us, from one bookend to the next, that Judaism is alive only if we understand the Torah commanding us today, every day.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

^{* Heschel cites Midrash Tanhuma (Buber) Yitro 7, BT Berakhot 63b, and Rashi to Exod. 19:1, as well as Deut. 6:6, 11:13 and 26:16. Elsewhere Heschel notes that this teaching appears in the work of his great-great-great-grandfather and namesake, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, the Hasidic sage known as the Apter Rebbe. See the elder Heschel’s classic, Oheiv Yisroel (Zhitomir, 5623), to Parashat Ki Teiẓei, 172a. (Torah min Hashamayim B’aspaqlarya shel Hadorot, vol. 3 [New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1990], 37, translated by Gordon Tucker in Heavenly Torah as Refracted Through the Generations [New York: Continuum, 2005], 672)}

My son, however, wasn’t having it. He made clear that he wasn’t coming home, even if we promised we would bring him back to camp right after the appointment. And he was right. The camp brought him for x-rays, and the bone wasn’t broken. Within a couple of days, we saw pictures of him playing hockey without even a splint. I was a little hurt at first that he didn’t need me, but then my hurt turned to pride: he didn’t need me.

This week’s Torah portion, Eikev, is part of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites before they will pass into the Land of Israel. In it, God (via Moses) expresses God’s desire to provide an idyllic existence for God’s children, the “Children of Israel,” in the Land of Israel. Like most parents, God not only feels an obligation to feed and protect God’s children, but God wants to facilitate their happiness as well.

Thus, God promises to bring them into a land of unparalleled vigor: “For God is bringing you to a good land, a land of streams and springs and fountains coming forth from valley and hill. A land of wheat, barley, vine, fig, and pomegranate, a land of olive oil and honey. A land where you shall eat bread without poverty, where you will lack nothing, whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you will mine copper” (Deut. 8:7-9). A rabbinic midrash suggests that every other land in the world is lacking in some way, except for Israel (Sifrei Devarim 37:6). The Israelites won’t need to worry about irrigation, which is hard work and might cause them to lose sleep (Rashi on Deut 11:10). Instead, God will provide because “[The Land of Israel] is a land that God looks after; God’s eyes are upon it from the beginning to the end of the year” (Deut 11:12).

According to Midrash, the current inhabitants of the Land of Israel have been working to prepare it for the Israelites’ arrival: “Thus you find that the whole 40 years that the Israelites were in the wilderness, the (current) inhabitants of the Land of Israel were building houses and digging holes, pits, and caves, planting fields, vineyards and all types of fruit trees in order that when our fathers arrived in the Land of Israel they would find it full of blessing” (Sifrei Devarim 38:10). The Israelites have no need to fear the current inhabitants, who are more numerous than they are; God will “clear them away” to make way for the Israelites (Deut 7:19-24).

As I read this passage, I was struck by the unusual Hebrew verb, nashal (נ.ש.ל.), “to clear away,” which occurs several times in our portion and last week’s portion to describe God’s destruction of the current inhabitants in the Land of Israel. The word is rare enough that Rashi feels the need to define it using synonyms that mean to remove forcefully. Perhaps, if God were a modern parent, it would be fair to accuse God of acting like a “snowplow parent” in this moment. A snowplow parent seeks to clear away any obstacle in his child’s path in a misguided attempt to assure her future success.

Was it really necessary that God bring the Israelites to not only a good land, but the very best land? Wouldn’t a less than perfect home have sufficed? Why does God promise to “clear away” the other peoples whom the Israelites fear instead of urging the Israelites to confront their own challenges? Even putting aside the injustice of using another people to unwittingly build their land, aren’t the Israelites perfectly capable of building houses and planting fields, as well as devising a solution for irrigation? (Indeed, the Israelites do irrigate their fields by the time of the Mishnah.)

In the introduction to her book, How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims explains the modern snowplow parenting phenomenon and why it is problematic: “We treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens and provide a deliberate, measured amount of care and feeding while running interference on all that might toughen and weather them. But humans need some degree of weathering in order to survive the larger challenges life will throw our way. Without experiencing the rougher spots of life, our kids become exquisite, like orchids, yet are incapable, sometimes terribly incapable, of thriving in the real world on their own” (7).

Those parents caught paying off universities in the recent sting “Operation Varsity Blues” were an extreme example of this larger trend. Modern articles abound cautioning against such parenting. Children whose parents overly intervene in their childhood often become less resilient adults. Sometimes they refuse to become adults at all. Small setbacks can seem catastrophic because they aren’t accustomed to navigating frustration or criticism on their own. They have trouble trusting their own judgment. Lythcott-Haims sums up the concern: “Maybe [they] did so much for their kids that their kids have been robbed of a chance to develop a belief in their own selves” (ibid.).

Like many parents, God’s desire to give the Israelites the easiest, most wonderful life is in tension with God’s concern that such a life might yield undesirable results. God warns that the Israelites could become haughty and falsely believe that they are solely responsible for their success, forgetting to be grateful to God. The text specifies that God tried to prevent this haughtiness by subjecting the Israelites to earlier hardships, including slavery and wandering in the desert: “You should know in your heart that God disciplines you like a parent disciplines a child” (Deut. 8:5).

Inflicting hundreds of years of slavery and 40 years of intense deprivation for disciplinary purposes probably disqualifies God from being a snowplow parent. And the sheer nature of God’s divinity makes human comparisons fraught. But rather than snowplow parents, most parents I know, even God apparently, have their snowplow moments. Usually, we are mindful that for our children (and others who rely on us) to thrive as adults they need space to make mistakes, they need to feel the thrill of independence, they need to know that they can endure scrapes and bruises and other challenges without their parents. But sometimes we forget and attempt to shield them from all struggle. At those times- like when the camp doctor calls—if we are lucky, our children will remind us.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Deutero-Isaiah anticipated the victory of the Persian emperor, Cyrus, over the Babylonian empire and predicted that the Persians would allow the Judean exiles to return to their homeland and to rebuild their Temple there. Addressed to a despondent people who have experienced a catastrophe,  this prophet’s poetic orations attempt to convince the Judeans that the God of Israel is still powerful and still loyal to the people Israel.

Unusually among biblical texts, Deutero-Isaiah refers to God using not only masculine metaphors but feminine ones as well (e.g., Isa. 42:13–14, 45:10, 49:14–15, 66:13). The reasons behind this innovation cannot be known with certainty. Perhaps the prophet’s intense monotheism requires the prophet to show explicitly that Hashem has characteristics that polytheists associate with goddesses as well those associated with gods. At the same time, the feminine imagery, and especially maternal language, Deutero-Isaiah uses for God suit this prophet’s focus on solace and hope, and the opening lines of today’s haftarah are a banner example. They also display this prophet’s frequent practice of borrowing language and images from earlier biblical texts and recasting them to comfort the exiled Judeans. Let’s take a closer look.

In the opening lines of the haftarah, the prophet portrays Jerusalem as a woman who thinks that her husband has left her and that her children are gone forever. Zion (i.e., Jerusalem) serves as a stand-in for the Jewish people, who believe either that the God of Israel no longer loves them (i.e., has ended the covenant) or that the Israel’s deity is one of many gods, and has been defeated—or even killed—by the god of Babylon. Further, because the nation is in exile, the prophet portrays Zion not only as a rejected or widowed wife but also as a bereaved mother: her children have been taken away forever, destined to live in Babylon and probably to assimilate into the population there, thus ending the Jewish people’s existence. Zion laments in the first verse:

Hashem has abandoned me,
            And my Lord has forgotten me. (Isa. 49:14)

But the prophet quotes God as forcefully denying this:

Would a woman forget her infant,
            Forget to love the child of her womb?
Even if they would forget,
            I never forget you . . . 
Your children come quickly . . .
Lift up your eyes and see—
            All of them have gathered, they’re coming towards you!
I am making a vow (an utterance of Hashem):
Truly, you will wear all of them like jewelry,
            You will adorn yourself with them as a bride. (Isa. 49.15–18)

Zion’s question in verse 14 uses a marital metaphor to describe the covenant: God is the husband and Zion or Israel is the wife. The same metaphor was used by the prophet Jeremiah shortly before the exile began, quoting God:

Why do My people say,
            “We’re leaving You! We’re not coming home anymore!”
Would a young woman forget her jewelry,
            A bride her ornaments?
But My people has forgotten Me
            Days beyond number. (Jer. 2:31–32)

In our haftarah, Deutero-Isaiah takes up language from Jeremiah’s prophecy of rebuke but uses it in radically new ways. In Jeremiah, God asked, “Would a young woman forget her jewelry, a bride her adornment (הֲתִשְׁכַּח בְּתוּלָה עֶדְיָהּ כַּלָּה קִשֻּׁרֶיהָ)?” But in Deutero-Isaiah, God asks, “Would a woman forget her infant, forget to love the child of her womb? (הֲתִשְׁכַּח אִשָּׁה עוּלָהּ מֵרַחֵם בֶּן־בִּטְנָהּ). Words found immediately thereafter in Jeremiah’s question reappear several verses later in Deutero-Isaiah: כעדי (“like jewelry”) in Isaiah 49:18 recalls עדיה (“her jewelry”) in Jeremiah. Deutero-Isaiah’s phrase “You will adorn yourself with them as a bride” echoes Jeremiah’s question: the later prophet’s verb ותקשׁרים recalls the earlier prophet’s noun קשוריה (“her adornments/ornaments”), and the word “bride” (כלה)  appears next to the word for adornment in both texts.

By repeating vocabulary from Jeremiah’s complaint, Deutero-Isaiah encourages us to read these passages alongside each other, making clear that in the later text, God denies abandoning the people, even though they forgot God in Jeremiah’s day. Both texts include the metaphor of a woman, but in Deutero-Isaiah the figure is a more tender image: in place of a woman who covets jewelry, we read of mother and child. The jewelry does reappear, but is no longer used critically. Instead, God promises Zion that she will have children with which to adorn herself—that is, that Jerusalem will again be inhabited by multitudes of Jews. The later prophet repeatedly uses words and images to comfort that the earlier one had used to castigate. Deutero-Isaiah reverses the message of the passage from Jeremiah—but never denies its accuracy (for simply by reminding the audience of Jeremiah’s prophecy of doom, Deutero-Isaiah implicitly confirms that the exile Jeremiah long predicted has indeed come to pass.) For the later prophet, God reprimands but does not renounce Israel.

The most interesting change Deutero-Isaiah works on Jeremiah’s language involves the metaphor each uses for God. In Jeremiah, the woman who is fickle and ungrateful is Israel, and God is her husband. But in today’s haftarah, the woman is not a bride but a mother—and that mother is God. In fact, the persuasive force of the passage depends on the fact that God is portrayed here as Israel’s mother rather than Israel’s husband: a husband can divorce a wife, but a mother remains a mother forever.

In rare cases mothers do abandon their children, but Deutero-Isaiah anticipates this objection and responds to it in a daring way: the prophet likens Hashem not merely to a mother, but to a mother who breast-feeds (עול, which I translated above as “infant,” refers specifically to an infant who is nursing; the noun is derived from a verb that means “to suckle”). A mother who is breast-feeding is physically unable to forget her child: if she does not express milk every few hours, her breasts become engorged and painful. God is physically connected to the Jewish people, the prophet insists, as a breast-feeding mother is connected to her infant. The people did forsake God. But God will never renounce Her child. Deutero-Isaiah provides reasons for God’s loyalty unrelated to Israel’s behavior—which are therefore more believable to a guilt-ridden exilic audience.

Deutero-Isaiah is a constantly allusive poet, borrowing language from older biblical texts and reworking it to provide a message of comfort and encouragement in place of the often negative predictions of prophets who came earlier. The allusion to Jeremiah 2:31—32 we have examined is but one of roughly a dozen in today’s haftarah that rework language from Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, First Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and Psalms. In fact, all of this prophet’s compositions (Isaiah 35, 40—66) display a very clever artistry of allusion and revision even as they constantly echo and reinforce older biblical traditions.

And this prophet is the one biblical author who repeatedly uses female metaphors to describe God (as well as masculine figures of speech). This prophet’s work seems surprisingly contemporary in suggesting that God is as much a mother as a husband—which is to say that God is neither man nor woman, and that whatever language we apply to God is always figurative, never literal. In both these respects today’s haftarah is a reminder of the literary sensitivity and theological depth we are privileged to experience on Shabbat morning.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).