Two Minutes of Torah | Eikev | Deuteronomy 7:12–11:25

Deuteronomy is hard. I’m having a particularly tough time with it this summer of pandemic and social upheaval and discord and violence. Moses has the microphone for the entire book really lets the Israelites have it.  His exhortations are all confusing, and meandering and selectively remembered. It seems to me that the entire book can be summarized by the following thought, “If you do as God commands – all will be well with you; but if you don’t, you will suffer… and you’ve been pretty awful thus far, so… good luck!” 

Slogging my way through this week’s parsha, Ekev, two verses emerged from the verbal onslaught of doom and gloom – I offer them to you this week. The first, comes from Deuteronomy 8:2, “Remember the long way that the Eternal your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, in order to test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.” This rings truer for me now, in 2020, than ever before: trials and tribulations and suffering and pain reveals to us what is in our hearts. I’d wager that God already knows it, the learning, therefore is for us. 

The second redeeming idea comes from chapter 11, verse 1. It is only a word, really, the command to Love, Va’ahvta. The command here is to love God, but it’s striking that the verb is specifically “love,” not “fear,” or “revere,” or even “listen to and obey.” Love, and the matters of the heart, are complicated, and tender, and vulnerable pieces of who we are. Sometimes, they have to be dragged from us, or we have to be dragged through the mud, through the wilderness, through the desert, in order to figure out what it is that we love, what it is that lives within our hearts. 
May we find strength and comfort in the learning of what’s most important to us – of what lives in our hearts, and may it all be in the service of Love, with a capital “L.”