Ekev is named after its second word which means literally “on the heel of”, i.e. “in consequence of” your obedience. It starts with one of the prominent themes of Devarim, Deuteronomy: whether or not God carries out the covenantal terms depends on the people of Israel. If Israel fulfills their part, they will get the blessings of protection, fertility of body and soil, health and victory. God then draws His people’s attention to their past; the forty years spent in the desert were meant as an educational lesson for them to learn humility, to acknowledge their own relation toward the power of the Almighty and to save them from false pride. Moses reminds his people of their stiff-neckedness, bringing up the example of the Golden Calf episode and stressing his own role as intermediary between God and Israel. A geographic description of the exceptionally good Promised Land, much better than Canaan, follows. The parsha ends with the text in Deuteronomy 11:13-21, which later became the second paragraph of the Shema (“So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today…”).
But today I want us to focus on two verses of our parsha.
- Our texts – Deut. 8:10 and 10:12
| And you shall eat and be satisfied, and bless Adønαi your God for the good land which He has given you. | וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ וְשָׂבָ֑עְתָּ וּבֵֽרַכְתָּ֙ אֶת־ה’ אֱ-לֹהֶ֔יךָ עַל־הָאָ֥רֶץ הַטֹּבָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָֽתַן־לָֽךְ׃ |
| And now, Israel, what does Adønαi your God ask of you, but to fear Adønαi your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve Adønαi your God with all your heart and with all your soul. | וְעַתָּה֙ יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל מָ֚ה ה’ אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ שֹׁאֵ֖ל מֵעִמָּ֑ךְ כִּ֣י אִם־לְ֠יִרְאָה אֶת־יְהוָ֨ה אֱלֹהֶ֜יךָ לָלֶ֤כֶת בְּכָל־דְּרָכָיו֙ וּלְאַהֲבָ֣ה אֹת֔וֹ וְלַֽעֲבֹד֙ אֶת־יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ֖ וּבְכָל־נַפְשֶֽׁךָ׃ |
Most of us recognize the first verse from singing the Blessing after meals, and it is the very verse on which the rabbis affirm you should say a blessing after the meals. The second verse is the one that is treated in the Talmud to give birth to a powerful meditative technique offered by our sources: the blessings for before food and for all sorts of events. It is not a joke when the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof says: wait, there is a blessing for everything.
- Talmud Menachot 43b
| It was taught: R. Meir used to say: “a person is obligated to say one hundred blessings every day, as it is written: And now, Israel, what does Adønαi your God ask of you?” On Shabatot and on Festivals Rav Hiya the son of Rav Avia worked hard to make up this number by the use of spices and delicacies. | תניא היה רבי מאיר אומר חייב אדם לברך מאה ברכות בכל יום שנאמר (דברים י, יב) ועתה ישראל מה ה’ אלהיך שואל מעמך רב חייא בריה דרב אויא בשבתא וביומי טבי טרח וממלי להו באיספרמקי ומגדי |
One hundred brachot every day. That seems quite daunting: to stop and think for one hundred moments in a day. Our current lifestyle does not allow us this luxury – to pause. We run everywhere. We are, for lack of better word, slaves to being busy. But our tradition wants us to remember, every day, that we are actually free. So it gives us the system of saying brachot.
This is a bracha, a blessing: a speed bump in your day. To do it, you have to stop a moment and consider what is in front of you, remember the appropriate blessing, and say it. If you really do embark in this exercise, your entire life will become imbued with a special consciousness – the consciousness of gratefulness. This is particularly true with food, given that we eat a few times a day.
Food writer Michael Pollan is able to summarize all that he learned in his studies about food and humans in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Probably the first two words are most important. “Eat food” means to eat real food – vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat – and to avoid what Pollan calls “edible food-like substances.”
In contrast to this simple idea, however, Western society’s relationship with food is quite dysfunctional.
On one side, we are given the message that we are to take food for granted. Fast food and junk food are examples: eat quickly, and poorly – after all, it is junk, rubbish, garbage. Not real food. For the same price, or a little above, you can have double the portion: and if you can’t eat it all, throw it in the garbage bin. Seeing the amount of food being thrown away in a restaurant is shocking. Having a meal has stopped being a time to sit down, maybe with family, or even alone: it does not deserve its own time in modern society; it is something that happens on the way to work, or sitting in the car. Everything is take-away, portable, and disposable. Not only the packaging, but the content has lost value, too.
Conversely, we also receive the message that food is bad, pernicious and dangerous. Eating disorders abound in both women and men, there are those for whom having a skinny body is the current idol worshipping we do. Counting calories, grams, percentages – food is their main enemy. Also, when overly processed food comes with many additives, reading labels in search for the enemies has become the way many people deal with food.
Michael Pollan, again, sums up our paradox in a very striking way: “The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.”
One of the ways to get away from this mentality is to look at what you are eating, and knowing the blessings before you put something in your mouth will help you to analyze what exactly it is: is it food? What kind of food is it? There are basically six blessings for food and drink. If whenever you eat or drink you stop and say a blessing, you are becoming more and more conscious of yourself and the universe around you. If you see yourself saying too many blessings of one type, you know you need to experience more of what life has to offer.
May we find ways to always express our gratefulness to Life, and may every day we find one hundred reasons to do so.