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Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Ekev
Deut. 7:12-11:25
By Shlomo Riskin
Efrat, Israel – “Not by bread alone does a human being live, but
rather by that which comes forth from the Lord’s mouth does a human being
live” (Deut. 8:3).
How does the Bible view “life,” that span of time
that every individual desperately wishes to preserve and to lengthen, but
which we don’t always take proper advantage of? The sad truth is that no one
is quite certain how best to use whatever time he/she may be given or to
what purpose to dedicate it: How best to “spend” one’s life is the question
of questions, and one who lives without asking and answering that question
runs the risk of leaving this world without ever having lived at all!
Apparently the Almighty came to the conclusion that the newly freed
Israelites were not yet ready to enter the Promised Land; they required an
educational “training” period of forty years – a complete generation – in
the desert no-man’s-land, a kind of “trial by heat and by cold” with lessons
to be learned by a strange mixture of Divine bounty mixed together with
human uncertainty:
“You shall remember the entire journey on which the
Lord your G-d led you these forty years in the desert in order to afflict
you, to test you to know that which is in your heart; will you keep His
commandments or not? He will afflict you and He will make you hungry; He
will provide you with the manna to eat which neither you nor your ancestors
experienced previously in order to teach you that not by bread alone does a
human being live but rather by that which comes forth from the Lord’s mouth
does the human being live” (Deut. 8:2-3).
One way to consider the desert
experience of the manna is to see it as a kind of “time-out,” or respite,
from G-d’s edict that “by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread,” the
critical punishment meted out to Adam and Eve when they were exiled from the
Garden of Eden.
On the one hand, in the desert G-d was the beneficent
Provider of food which the Israelites only had to gather rather than to
manufacture, every individual receiving precisely what he needed each day;
on the other hand, the Israelites had neither the discomfiture nor the
exhilaration that results from the competition, the ingenuity, the sickness
unto death of failure and the dizzying satisfaction of success which
accompany the back-breaking, tension-producing dedication to the
market-place or the agricultural farm. Along these lines, the most ancient
(and I believe, authentic) versions of the rabbinically accepted Aramaic
translation of the Biblical text, Targum Onkelos, takes the last words cited
to read, “Not by bread alone does the human being exist but rather by that
which comes forth from G-d’s mouth does a human being live.” Targum
differentiates between the bread necessary for human existence, and the word
of G-d crucial to human life.
For a clearer explanation of Targum’s
intent, let us study the second Mishnah in the seventh chapter of the
Tractate Shabbat where the Mishnah provides us with the list of the
thirty-nine prohibited physical activities on the Sabbath (melakhot) The
Midrash generally assumes that the source of these prohibited activities are
the very constructive acts involved in the building of the tabernacle to
G-d, the Mishkan (Exodus 31:13). However, one of the prohibited activities
of the Mishnah is “baking,” whereas in the construction of the Mishkan the
dye extracts of the plants had to be “boiled” in order to color the skins
which covered the wood. The Talmud explains the discrepancy by saying that
the Mishnah wished to highlight the procedures in bread manufacture; and
indeed when looking at the prohibited acts from this perspective, the entire
Mishnah prohibits first bread manufacture, then clothing manufacture, then
leather manufacture, and finally acts of building. In effect, the Mishnah is
teaching that the search for food, clothing and shelter – so central to
physical existence and nutritional subsistence – is to be eschewed on the
Sabbath day.
And the truth is that animals, no less than humans, also
require food and need protection, on occasion, from the elements, forcing
migration when weather conditions become intolerable.
What makes the
human being uniquely human is that which goes beyond physical existence, the
spiritual spark of G-d within his/her, the soul, the heart and the mind of
the human being which enables him/her to give, to communicate with the
other, to love, to repair and to create. Animals as well as humans search
for things; only humans enter into relationships with others.
Most
human beings spend their lives in working for their physical existence, in
amassing commodities and the ultimate commodity (money), in collecting
objects and things. In the desert they were freed from this pursuit, with
the exception of the little time it would take to gather the manna – and no
one could take more than his/her needed portion. They could spend their time
receiving – and pondering over – G-d’s words, G-d’s desire that we share
with those less fortunate, G-d’s gift of family and friendship and community
and love. The desert experience was a kind of eternal Sabbath, a taste of a
more perfect world, when we learn to do without material extras but would
hopefully begin to understand that the real purpose of human life would be
to live by G-d’s words.
No wonder, then, that the Hebrew word hayim,
life, is always in the plural – because there can be no meaningful human
life devoid of loving relationship with others. The two “yods” in the center
are the shortened form of expressing G-d’s name, but they also express two
Jews together (yud is Yiddush for Jew or Yehudi). The two surrounding Hebrew
letters, chet at the beginning and mem at the end, spell out the Hebrew word
‘chom,’ which means warmth, alluding to the love, sensitivity and caring
which is central for meaningful human activity on earth. I have never met an
individual on his death-bed who regrets the hours he didn’t spend in the
office – but most individuals on their death-bed do regret the hours they
didn’t spend with family. People are not remembered for the structures they
erected; they are remembered for the lives they have touched and the human
situations they have helped. The weekdays are given over to
involvement with things, objects; Shabbat is reserved for relationships –
human encounters which can leave insights and memories which live beyond the
physical lives of either individual.
Rav Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev once
saw a person running to and fro as if he were ‘chasing his own tail.’ “Where
and why are you running?” the Rabbi asked. “I am running to make a living,”
came the reply. “Just make sure that in the process you don’t lose
your life,” remarked the wise Rabbi.
Shabbat Shalom
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