Dvar Torah Parsha Eikev 5783

Devarim 7:12 – 11:25

Gratitude and Humility

Parsha Eikev includes three speeches by Moshe. According to Torah, Women’s Commentary, all highlight the central position of the Promised Land in the relationship between G_d and Israel. It begins following a contentious 40 years in the desert a reminder that obedience brings blessings. Obedience, observance, and love are required as they move forward. Following the recitation of the ten commandments and a call to carry them out with care, Hashem will love, bless, and multiply Israel including the people, the fruit of your body, your soil, grain, wine, oil, and animals.

What follows is a reminder of the journey the people have taken when they have sinned. A cautionary note to kill those in the land who worship foreign gods, though later Biblical writing and archaeology suggest this did not happen and this telling was more rhetorical. The strongest warnings are against worshiping foreign gods. As they enter this land against nations larger and stronger than they are, remember Hashem will deliver their people to this new land.

What does G_d require of them? Only to fear G_d, to walk in all G_d’s ways, to love G_d and serve G_d with all your heart and with all your soul. Look with gratitude to all Hashem did for them in the wilderness. Then another warning against turning to other gods.

I want to focus on our parsha’s call for gratitude and humility. Here is what Devarim 8:12-18 says:

“When you have eaten and been satisfied, and have built fine houses and lived in them, when your herds and flocks have grown abundant, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have has multiplied, your heart may become proud, forgetting the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery... You might be tempted to say to yourself, ‘My power, the strength of my own hand, have brought me this great wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the power to do great things, upholding the covenant that He swore to your ancestors...”

History is replete with examples of leaders who become so enamored with their success that they become perfect examples of what the AA Big Book calls “Self-will run riot.” Another saying comes to mind from Ketuvim (Proverbs) 16:18-19, “Pride goes before ruin, Arrogance before failure. Better to be humble and among the lowly Than to share spoils with the proud.” The world around us today seems replete with the arrogance warned against in Proverbs. Greed and self-absorption lead billionaires to ignore the dangers of global climate change in favor of self-enrichment to the point that climate scientists say we may be at or even past the point of no return for humanity. Justice and caring for the least of us has given way to a belligerent greed leaning towards fascism, not just here, but around the world.

This commenter has never known great wealth, but I am grateful for the friends I’ve known along the way and for the love I’ve experienced in this lifetime. For all that is wrong in this world, I nevertheless feel blest. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory relates a story of a medical research in the early 1990’s called the Nun Study. It involved 700 American nuns, all members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. They agreed to allow their medical records to be accessed by a team studying the process of aging and Alzheimer’s. The women were aged 75-102. Now sixty years earlier, they had been asked by their Mother Superior to write a brief biography of their life and reasons for entering the convent. These documents were scored to register among other things, positive and negative emotions. By annually assessing the nuns’ state of health, they were able to test whether their emotional state in 1930 had affected their health some sixty years later. The results? The more positive emotions including contentment, gratitude, happiness, love, and hope expressed in the autobiographical notes, the more likely they were to be alive and well sixty years later. The difference was as much as seven additional years of life expectancy.

At the very heart of our parsha is a call to gratitude. And though for this writer, my sense of gratitude did not come later in a quest for self-truth, the point is well taken. Hashem reminds us to remember where we come from. Gratitude for all those incidents, all those events outside of myself that enabled me to come to this place in life.

I have observed over the years an interesting phenomenon. That is the charity one can find among the poorest of the poor. Let me share one such story. I lost my partner Skip back in August of 1997. He and I used to take walks in our Houston neighborhood and would stop sometimes to chat with our homeless neighbors. One such person lived at the bus stop just outside our apartments. Well Skip became ill and went into a coma. After a couple of weeks virtually living at the hospital, I came home to clean up. A friend came by, and we left on a walk. Our homeless friends came running out to us and asked about Skip. I told him what was going on. A look of sorrow crossed his face. Then he said, “I remember once when I was down on my luck.” Down on his luck? He lives at a bus stop! He goes on, “Anyway, this woman gave me something and I want you to have it. It meant so much to me.” Pulling out his empty pockets, there was a wadded tissue. Unwrapping it, he presented me with a silver cross. Now I’m not Christian, but I fully understood this to be a gift of the heart, his wealth from a place of poverty. I hugged him and went on. Later Skip passed and I offered to return the cross. “No, someday you can hand it on to someone else in need.” His was a gift of generosity, and one of gratitude to be passed on to another.

None of us stand alone. We share a common humanity. Love and humility, gratitude and hope are the key to happiness. Baruch Hashem!