EKEV
Ekev (Because) (7:12-11:25) is a clear statement of the blessings the people will receive if they follow the laws laid out for them and the bad things that will happen to them if they do not. This is reinforced by a recounting of the history of the people wandering in the desert. This history focuses on the sins of the people and the great deeds of YHVH.
The blessings of the people basically consist of the fertility of the land, the animals and the humans on the one hand, and the conquering of the indigenous population who are more numerous and powerful than the Israelites. The historical recollection includes YHVH making great signs and wonders in Egypt and drowning Pharoah’s army (11:2-4), the opening up of the earth to swallow Dathan and Abiram (11:5). We have references to both of Moses’ vision quests on Mt. Sinai,(9:9-11, 9:17, 10:10-11) through the building and destruction of the Golden Calf, (9:12-16), Aaron’s death (10:6) and the many, many times that the people made YHVH angry and Moses intervened for them (9:7-8, 9:13-14, 9:18-19, 9:25-9:29)
I want to discuss four themes:
Orthopraxy vs orthodoxy
The zero sum game ideology
The blessing of good land.
The second paragraph of the Sh’ma
Orthopraxy is the concept that what counts is fidelity to core practices compared to orthodoxy, or fidelity to core beliefs. “And it will be because you’ll listen to these judgments and observe and do them that YHVH, your God, will keep the covenant and kindness for you that he swore to your fathers. (7:12). This opening verse of the parsha is an exemplary statement of orthopraxy. Compare this quotation from St. Paul “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9). This is orthodoxy—good things happening because of belief and belief only.
There’s no question that Deuteronomy demands belief in YHVH. “And you shall remember all the ways that YHVH, your God, had you go these forty years in the wilderness in order to degrade you, to test you, to know what was in your heart: would you observe his commandments or not.” (8:2). The argument here is that you can know what is in a person’s heart by their actions. Only it is obviously easy to outwardly behave while inwardly, in your heart, not believing. To give a simple example, every morning I chant Elohai Neshama sh’natata bi, T’horah hi. My God, the soul you have given me, she is pure. Only I don’t believe at all that there is some kind of divine being outside of me that placed a soul in me. I pray this prayer because that’s part of what it means to me to be a Jew—a typical orthopraxic response. The reasons for conformity without belief are infinite.
Orthopraxy also has the obvious problem that people can get stuck in the minutiae of behavior. An orthodox Rabbi once said to me that in a well functioning community, 60% of a Rabbi’s actions should be about the details of Kashrut. I was amazed, given that I think there are more important things than the standards by which one certifies a blade for kosher slaughter (this was one of the dividing issues between early Hasidim and their opponents).
Orthodoxy, on the other hand, has the obvious problem that it downplays the importance of righteous behavior. Too many white Christian fundamentalists in our country, whose actions literally result in people suffering and dying, think they are going to heaven because they (loudly) confess their belief in Jesus. To be fair, there are plenty of evangelical leaders who recognize that their followers should actually love their fellow human beings and manifest that in their action.
It's not that Judaism or any other orthopraxy such as Islam does not believe in the importance of belief. It’s not as if Christianity or any other orthodoxy does not believe in righteous action. It’s a question rather of what gets attention, where the emphasis is placed.
There’s another tension here contained in the prefix “ortho” which comes from the Greek and means “straight” or “erect.” We want our teeth to be straight, that’s why we pay big bucks to orthodontists, but do we want our beliefs or actions to fit comfortably in a box? It’s more comfortable for sure but conformity is too often presented as if it is the only possibility and thus forced rather than chosen.
If you are like me, my actions have been pretty conformist in the course of my life, even as my beliefs have been pretty radical and I haven’t navigated that balance particularly well. I would have wished that my beliefs influenced my actions more and that my beliefs and actions were more congruent with each other, rowing the boat of my life together.
Are you personally more inclined towards orthopraxy or orthodoxy? What’s the level of congruence between belief and action in your life?
We may approach the world through the perspective that our spiritual task is to ensure the best for everyone, or we may believe that there are winners and losers and you want to be on the side that’s winning. Stephen Covey popularized this idea as win-win thinking vs win-lose thinking.
We see both perspectives in this parsha. On the one hand, if we follow the divine, “He’ll love you and bless you and multiply you and bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your land: your grain and your wine and your oil, your cattle’s offspring and your flock’s young.” (7:13). You’ll recall that there was a win-lose orientation when Cain and Abel made their offerings to the divine, reflecting an ancient conflict between those who raise animals and those who raise crops. But here there is no conflict.
On the other hand, the Israelites will only occupy the land if they displace by force the indigenous inhabitants. “And you shall eat up all the peoples that YHVH, your God, is giving you. Your eye shall not pity them.” (7:16) Why? Because even though they are more numerous than you (7:17), remember what happened in Egypt and “YHVH, your God, will put them in front of you and put them into a big tumult until they are destroyed.” (7:23)
Win-lose thinking is based on the idea/felt sense of scarcity. There’s only so much land and so anything my people hold has to come at the expense of someone else. There’s only so many leaders in the company, so in order to climb the corporate ladder, I need to put down my competitors. There’s only so much money in a given deal, so the more you get, the less I get—therefore I must get as much as possible. Only one guy/girl can get the sexually desirable person so I should do everything in my means to be the winner.
I suspect that anyone reading or hearing this is going to say, of course I believe in win-win thinking and reject win-lose thinking. But I’d bet that if you really looked closely, you’ll discover places where you think you need to get yours because there’s not enough. I think you will also discover places where you can’t figure out how to get out of a win/lose mentality.
Let me give you two examples from our political lives. I absolutely think we need to crush the Republicans and all they represent. That’s win-lose thinking. I’ve got absolutely no idea what win-win thinking would look like in this context. Intellectually I could say we need to find a way to address their grievances and their toxic patriarchal orientation, but that’s just intellectually. The other example is Israel. I’ve watched any number of people become substantially less liberal thinking, less win-win and more let’s beat the crap out of them since the Hamas pogrom on October 7. I both completely understand and know that there will be no peace in the middle east until we can be reconciled with the Palestinians—not that I have any idea how to actually make that happen.
I think back to my Goddess worshipping ancestors. When patriarchal tribes started to sniff around their land and threatened them militarily what were they supposed to do? Flee? Fight? Assimilate? Beats me. All win-lose.
Scarcity also exists in our personal lives. How many of us think we don’t have enough money, sex, the property we want etc. How many of us are truly content with what we have?
Where are the not so nice places where you live in scarcity and think win/lose? Where do you feel stuck in a win/lose dynamic?
“And you will eat and be full and bless YHVH your God for the good land that He has given you.” (8:10). I have two areas of comments on this apparently simple verse. First, how do we know what is good land? For our ancestors whose livelihoods depended upon the land, good land was land that consistently produced enough food and the other necessities of life, while being safe. As good as the land of Israel was, it became a kind of crossroads in the ancient Middle East and therefore not secure as Egyptians, Greeks and Persians all swept through to conquer on their way to somewhere else.
For us, how much of what constitutes good land is what the human community is like? How much is what the weather is like, the topography such as mountains or the oceans? How many of us have a strong felt sense of what counts as good land that includes the agricultural capability of the land? If we are ever going to be at home in the more than human world, this felt sense of good land is something we have to develop.
The second area is this question of how we bless the divine for the gift of good land. In our parsha, the answer is crystal clear that we do this by observing the commandments. Personally, I find this a wholly inadequate answer. Does this mean that if we follow the rules of the Rabbis we are allowed to use Round up ready monoculture that rapes the land, bovine concentration camps (feedlots), strip mining and all the other ways that our society ravages the more than human world? Wendell Berry, who collected some essays in a book entitled The Gift of Good Land has long argued that we bless the gift of good land through loving it and working it with affection and care. Berry believes that we must have an economic relationship with the land on which we dwell, or else we won’t really be present to the land. This works well for me; it’s part of why Berry is such a role model for me.
I do wonder if maybe something else is needed if the land in question is not agricultural land. How do we bless the divine for the gift of a good desert? Good mountains? The Jewish inclination would be to offer prayers of gratitude. I think we should incorporate this practice for both land we work and land we don’t—since cultivating gratitude is always a good thing.
How do you know if something is good land? What do you believe is/experience as good land? What is the role of the human community in defining good land? How do we bless the divine for the gift of good land?
The second paragraph of the Sh’ma comes from this parsha (11:13-21). “If you will listen to my commandments…then I will give you land’s showers at their time, the early rain and the late rain….Watch yourself in case your heart is deceived…and YHVH’s anger will flare at you and He’ll hold back the skies, and there won’t be showers, and the earth won’t give its crop and you’ll perish quickly from the good land”
We might read this, legitimately, as a kind of tit for tat theology. Do as I tell you to do and good things will happen to you, don’t do them and I’ll zap you. To me, that’s an unappealing reading, if highly defensible. Let me offer a different perspective.
Actions have consequences, something we like to ignore in our society. If we strip mine, if we plant Round up ready monocultures, if we don’t take care of the good land we’ve been given, there will be consequences that we don’t like. If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, we’ll have frequent record breaking floods, forest fires like we’ve never seen before, hurricanes to destroy coastal settlements, forests killed by bugs who used to be killed off my cold winters—take your pick of horrible consequences of global climate disruption. Have we not failed to listen to the commandments of the divine when it comes to the earth, and are we not reaping the consequences?
How do you respond to global climate change? To what extent are you burying your head in the sand? To what extent taking action to limit your footprint? What kind of action are you taking?
QUESTIONS
Are you personally more inclined towards orthopraxy or orthodoxy? What’s the level of congruence between belief and action in your life?
Where are the not so nice places where you live in scarcity and think win/lose? Where do you feel stuck in a win/lose dynamic?
How do you know if something is good land? What do you believe is/experience as good land? What is the role of the human community in defining good land? How do we bless the divine for the gift of good land?
How do you respond to global climate change? To what extent are you burying your head in the sand? To what extent taking action to limit your footprint? What kind of action are you taking?
