(א) בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:
(1) Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who sanctified us with commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.
Remember the long way that Hashem your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that S/He might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep the commandments or not. He subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that Hashem decrees. The clothes upon you did not wear out, nor did your feet swell these forty years. Bear in mind that Hashem your God disciplines you just as a man disciplines his son. Therefore keep the commandments of Hashem your God: walk in those ways and revere [God]. For Hashem your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to Hashem your God for the good land which S/He has given you. Take care lest you forget Hashem your God and fail to keep the commandments, the rules, and the laws, which I enjoin upon you today. When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget Hashem your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end— and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is Hashem your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfillment of the covenant that S/He made on oath with your fathers, as is still the case.
Keep, therefore, all the Instruction that I enjoin upon you today, so that you may have the strength to enter and take possession of the land that you are about to cross into and possess, and that you may long endure upon the soil that Hashem swore to your fathers to assign to them and to their heirs, a land flowing with milk and honey. For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which Hashem your God looks after, on which Hashem your God always keeps an eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.
Although Rashbam correctly detects an element of warning and threat here, I think the text wants to make an even deeper and more fundamental point. R. Meir Leibush Weiser (Malbim, 1809-1879) asks why God relocates the people to Israel instead of simply giving them the land of Egypt; after all, Egypt too was a good land and the Egyptians had arguably forfeited their rights to it through their enslavement and oppression of the Israelites. The answer, Malbim suggests, is that Egypt is irrigated by the Nile once a year, whereas Israel is in constant need of rain. To live in Israel, he concludes, is to realize that one “needs divine mercy at each and every moment.” Living in Egypt, one can easily forget God; living in Israel, aware of one’s ongoing dependence, one is more likely to remember God at all times (comments to Deuteronomy 11:10). To be dependent on the rain, in other words, is to be dependent on the God who sends the rain. In the wilderness, Israel looked heavenward for bread itself; in the Land of Promise, it will look heavenward—for the rain which will enable it to grow bread.
In many ways, conditions in the land will be the very opposite of conditions in the wilderness: Where before the people faced the peril of having too little, now they will face the challenge of having too much. So Moses reminds them that God “exercises similar providence in both wilderness and land, and the lesson about total dependence learned in the wilderness also applies directly to life in the land.”23 It may be easier to forget God in a land which lacks nothing, so Moses explains that the people will still need to look towards heaven, from where—perhaps less directly than before but just as surely—all blessings ultimately flow.
Real piety requires us to surrender the illusion of self-sufficiency. As human beings, we are fragile and vulnerable—and therefore irreducibly dependent, both on God and on other people. As Israel prepares to enter the Land, Moses looks back and tells them what he hopes they have learned in their wanderings—that they need God and live by God’s word. He also looks forward and reminds them that despite appearances, the revolutionary change in circumstance they are about to undergo does not change the deeper, most basic truth of life and covenant: They need God and cannot live by bread alone.
IT IS POSSIBLE to eat everything in sight and to say 100 blessings a day in perfect Hebrew, and yet remain unsatisfied. The spiritual challenge of Ekev is to break the spell of consumerism whose power rests in our continual dissatisfaction.
As you enter the Land of your life: a land of fountains and depths, valleys and hills, shopping malls and glossy catalogues, a land of wheat and barley, television commercials and billboards and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a place of comforts and the illusion of security… you are in mortal danger of forgetting where all of these gifts come from. It will seem that you made this life for yourself, that you are the Creator.
As I go in to conquer the land and make a life for myself, the force of my ambition begins to rise. Each success feeds that ambition; each failure pushes me into exerting more force. Here is the spiritual challenge of Ekev. How do I protect myself from the corrupting power of my own ambition? How do I discern between self-destructive greed and a true, healthy appetite for pleasure that allows the blessing of satisfaction to manifest?