Parashat Ekev

Torah: Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25; Triennial 9:4-10:11

Haftarah: Judges 49:14-51:3

In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Bread in Our Baskets", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "Rain – For Better or for Worse?" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about "On Change" in the Haftarah.

In this week’s parashah, Moshe continues to review the experiences of the Israelites in the desert. He makes repeated mention of the manna which God provided the Israelites for the duration of their desert wanderings, each time referring to it as a form of affliction that the Israelites had to endure. As Moshe tells the people, God “fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to afflict you and in order to test you, to benefit you in the end” (Deut. 8:16). In what way was the manna a source of affliction for the Israelites, and how did it serve to test them? The Talmud and midrash, in commenting on this verse, offer insight into the connection between uncertainty and faith, such that even we who have never tasted manna can nonetheless internalize its lessons. 

Perhaps the most extended discussion of the manna in the Talmud appears in the context of the laws of Yom Kippur. In the eighth and final chapter in tractate Yoma, the rabbis discuss the prohibition on eating, drinking, anointing, wearing leather shoes, and engaging in sexual relations, all of which are based on the biblical injunction to “afflict your souls” on this day (Leviticus 16:29). In trying to understand what afflicting our souls might signify, the rabbis cite other instances in the Torah in which this verb is used. They quote Moshe’s words in our parashah about the manna, which God gave the Israelites in order to “afflict” them. To explain the connection between the manna and affliction, the rabbis quote a proverb that appears at various points throughout the Talmud: “There is no comparison between one who has bread in his basket and one who does not have bread in his basket” (Yoma 74b). Although the Israelites had enough to eat every day, they could not store it in their baskets, because, as the Torah teaches, they could only gather enough manna for one day at a time; anyone who tried to store extra manna for the next day would find that it became infested with maggots (see Exodus 16). The Israelites were like those who did not have bread in their baskets because, as Rashi explains, they were constantly eating what they needed that day and worrying about the next. According to the Talmud in Yoma, it was this uncertainty that constituted the affliction of the manna. 

The connection between the manna and uncertainty is further explored in a midrash (Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael, Beshalah, Vayasa 2) in which Rabbi Elazar HaModai explains that the injunction to gather “each day that day’s portion” meant that “a person may not gather on one day the portion for the next day,” except on Friday, when everyone was to gather a second portion for Shabbat. Based on this injunction, Rabbi Elazar HaModai declares that, “He who has enough to eat for today yet says: ‘What will I eat tomorrow?’—Behold he is of little faith, for it is said, ‘In order to afflict you, in order to test you.’” This sage quotes our parashah to argue that the experience of eating manna was not just about affliction, but also about faith. Since the manna could not be stored, the people had to have faith that God would rain down new manna every day. They were paradoxically both living from hand to mouth and living with their entire sustenance contingent on God’s providence. In a sense, then, the manna was less about nourishing the people and more about teaching them how to have faith – which is exactly what Moshe tells them in our parashah: “He subjected you to the affliction 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 the Lord decrees” (8:3). The purpose of the desert experience was to teach the Israelites that they don’t need bread in order to survive; they need only to trust in God.

As a stage in the Israelites’ development, the desert experience—which follows immediately on the heels of the Exodus, when the nation was born—may be compared to infancy. Just as an infant is totally dependent on its caretakers for sustenance, the Israelites in the desert were completely dependent on God. Indeed, the same Talmudic passage in Yoma goes on to compare the manna to breastmilk. In the Torah, the taste of the manna is described as shad hashamen, a sort of rich cream. The Hebrew word shad is also the word for “breast,” which leads Rabbi Abbahu to comment that “just as a baby tastes different flavors from the breast, so too with the manna, every time that the Jewish people ate it, they found in it many flavors” (Yoma 75a). Just as an infant nursing at the breast develops a very close bond with its mother, the Israelites in the desert learned to feel close to God on account of the manna. And just as every breastfeeding infant is ultimately weaned, the Israelites will not subsist on manna forever – as Moses tells them in our parashah, “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land…a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack for nothing” (8:7-9). 

Like the Israelites, we all experience periods of uncertainty in our lives. But just as the close bond between mother and child is ideally lifelong—lasting far beyond the moment of weaning—we aspire to trust and have faith in God even after we have arrived in the promised land and have ample bread in our proverbial baskets. 

Rain – For Better or for Worse?Vered Hollander-Goldfarb

10For the land which you go to possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and watered it by foot, as a vegetable garden. 11But the land which you cross over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water from the rain of heaven. 12A land for which the Lord your God cares; the eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

Is not as the land of Egypt: rather - it is better than it! …The land of Egypt was such that you had to bring water from the Nile …to irrigate it — you had to rise from your sleep and toil, and then, the low-lying parts drank but not the higher land, and you had to take up water from the lower to the higher parts. but this land “drinks water of the rain of heaven” — You may sleep on your bed, and the Holy One, blessed be He, waters both low and high districts, both what is exposed and what is not exposed alike.

For the land which you go to possess is not like the land of Egypt: …You have to observe the commandments of the LORD your God, because this land is better than Egypt for those who observe the commandments, and it is worse than any other land for those who do not observe, For the land which you go to possess is not like the land of Egypt, where they are not dependent on rain; all of them, good people and sinners, have bread to eat as a result of their own efforts of irrigation. However, in the land of Israel, if you observe the commandments, then the eyes of the Lord your God are always on it to irrigate the land with rain from the heavens, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, providing rain at the appropriate times.

Is it possible to change another person? Perhaps. You can, sometimes, change someone’s behavior. But can you change a person’s fundamental nature? And if so, how do you know that they won’t revert back to who they used to be? 

Our haftarah, Isaiah 49-51, happens in the wake of tremendous change. In many ways, our fundamental nature had changed. We had lost ourselves - our land, our Temple, our system of government, and perhaps our God. Sitting in exile after the destruction of everything we held dear, everything we considered as constituting our identity, we hear the words of Isaiah, offering comfort and consolation. Our haftarah is the second of the seven haftarot of consolation. But it is not easy to console a people who don’t know who they are. Is comfort a return to whom we used to be? The return of our land, our Temple, our system of government, and most of all our God? And if we were to get all of this back, how could we know that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes as last time, causing us to lose it all again? Perhaps a complete, forward-looking transformation of our character would be better comfort - something that would ensure that we would never lose God again. 

The haftarah portion considers real change in an exploration of the idea of motherhood. One of the prevailing images of destruction had been the destruction of children and the bereavement of Zion and Jerusalem. This haftarah portion promises not only a reversal of that fortune but a change of what it means to be a mother. Upon returning, Zion, confronted by a multitude of her children, asks in confusion, “Who gave birth for me to these, when I was bereaved and barren, exiled and cast aside, and these, why, who has raised? Why, I was left alone, these, from where have they come?” God answers, “Look, I will raise My hand to the nations… and they shall bring your sons in their laps, and your daughters shall be borne on their shoulders. And kings shall be your attendants and princesses your wet nurses.” [Translation by Robert Alter] Zion was originally exiled for consorting with other nations. And yet now she takes the other nations into her employ, using the humiliated rulers of other kingdoms to act as surrogate mothers to her children. While it is an empowering image, implying that Zion will utterly defeat those who once defeated her, it also suggests that it is precisely by being reared by other nations that Zion’s children have managed to become such a multitude. While Zion was absent as a mother, her children were raised by those better equipped for the job and they came back better for it. 

However, even if there has been real change, even if the character of our people will forever reflect what we learned in exile, the haftarah urges us to use the change in order to return to an idealized version of whom we used to be. The final line of the haftarah, as translated by Robert Alter, reads: “For the LORD has comforted Zion, brought comfort to all her ruins and made her desert like Eden, her wasteland like the garden of the LORD.” We find comfort by returning to our very roots. Perhaps there wasn’t anything wrong with our fundamental nature in the first place; we had just lost sight of what it was and who we could be. 

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