Eikev | The Promised Land; A Field of Practice

וְהָיָה עֵקֶב תִּשְׁמְעוּן אֵת הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים הָאֵלֶּה וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֹתָם וְשָׁמַר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְךָ אֶת־הַבְּרִית וְאֶת־הַחֶסֶד אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ׃

And if you will listen/hear these laws and observe them carefully, Eternally Present Creativity will maintain faithfully for you the promise of your ancestors

Deuteronomy 7:12

 

This stirring moment in Torah begins with Moses reminding the people that the consequences of an action are inherent in that action. He shares his realization that Eternally Present was with their ancestors and is with them if they too are present. Moses is teaching across the generations, from the first generation at Sinai, to the descendants who are ready to enter the Promised Land, to us today.

This isn't conditionality. Eternal Presence isn't conditional. This is rather a statement of the law of phenomena. Cause and effect inter-are. Action and effect are not separate. Moses gives instruction for how we, in human form, can enter and inhabit connection and presence fully, by attending to both our intention and the impact of our actions. This isn't a guarantee; it is our promised capacity. The great human tragedy is that we who have named ourselves "sapiens" are continually failing to fulfill our promise.

The effects of our action, eikev, the "heel," are in the action itself. This is a great teaching for our times; our intentions and the impact of our actions are in the actions. There is no separation. To inhabit the Promised Land we must take into account our intentions, our actions, and the impact of our actions.

This is the meaning of eikev and sh'ma, עֵקֶב תִּשְׁמְעוּן, the words that begin this week's Torah moment. They aren't about "obeying" external authority, or punishing "consequences"; it's about how life itself flows through our listening and doing.

If you are findable, your God will find you.

In Buddhist terms, Moses is teaching the basic law of karma. There is no separation between cause and effect. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, cause and effect, like everything, is of the nature of "interbeing." They "inter-are."

I once asked Buddhist teacher Bernie Glassman, or Roshi Bernie as he liked to be called, how do I find a teacher? (It was my attempt to work up enough courage to ask Roshi Bernie if he would be my teacher.)

He stopped and looked at me and replied, I think the teacher finds you.

And then he looked at me again after a pause and said, but you have to be findable. Presence and connection arise when we participate in their energy. It is upon us to listen in deeply and take actions that are the fruit of our deep listening.

Listen!

Torah instructs us to listen rather than "worship images we create with our own minds." Sh'ma, the Hebrew word for "listen" is repeated as an instruction to the people 92 times in Devarim, this last book of the written Torah. In Hebrew, as explained by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

Sh-m-a also means “to understand,” as in the story of the tower of Babel, when God says, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand [yishme’u] each other” (Gen. 11:7) ...

Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation, 5781

Sh'ma does not mean to obey. It means: listen to understand. Use your human capacity to understand that your actions matter, that everything you do affects everything else. Because we are One, we all come from the same Source.

Listening to understand is an antidote to worshiping false beliefs. In deep listening, we don't listen just to see what we agree or disagree with. If we do that, we only learn what we agree or disagree with. We listen to be affected by what we hear. We listen to access the quality of connection that stirs our hearts and that connects us to each other, the quality of connection that reminds us that we come from the same source, that everything we have comes to us because we are in fact made up of the same elements as everything else.

In last week's Torah moment (parasha), Moses highlighted: “When you enter the Promised Land, do not worship false gods, do not create images of Eternally Present.” Creating images is so powerful that it will lead you to worshiping false idols, in the belief that the image is real. It will lead you away from the Truth, to believing your partial, limited idea of what the world is and what is valuable.

Partial and limited: isn't this the trap we fall into, over and over, centering ourselves, then worshiping our limited truths as if we are separate from everything else?

As if our words, actions and narratives only impact us.

All of Torah is a cautionary tale: do not take your own limited ideas and concepts, genetically and culturally born, traumatically induced, for what is true and valuable. Listen deeply to what is, learn to go beyond your limited perception and understanding of things.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh taught this by saying that all perceptions are wrong. The Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of the Jewish mystical Hasidic tradition, taught this by saying, “When I go to the ritual bath, I close my eyes ... and I see all the worlds.” This is a teaching that the true nature of things is beyond the limits of what we see with our eyes.

These teachings point us away from blind worship of things in the world of form, including our perceptions, concepts and beliefs that spring from how we understand the world of form. This includes transforming and deepening our idea of a Promised Land and what it means to occupy or possess it.

If we worship our idea of possession, and ignore its impact on people, places and things, we are out of integrity with sh'ma, understanding.

וְיָדַעְתָּ כִּי לֹא בְצִדְקָתְךָ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַטּוֹבָה הַזֹּאת לְרִשְׁתָּהּ כִּי עַם־קְשֵׁה־עֹרֶף אָתָּה׃

Know, then, that it is not for any virtue of yours that Eternally Present your God is giving you this good land to possess; for you are a stiff-necked people.

Deuteronomy 9:6

Torah is asking and instructing us to question the belief that "we deserve" anything we have. What does such a belief mean when we look at the billions, literally, of people on the planet who toil from sun up to sundown, carrying water, serving other people, or tilling dry parched soil that "belongs" to someone else, and they return home at the end of the day with barely a few dollars? What does that belief mean when we look at the people who have toiled and preserved the land and resources for millions of years until we settled on it?

The Promised Land is not a physical space

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ וְשָׁמַרְתָּ מִשְׁמַרְתּוֹ וְחֻקֹּתָיו וּמִשְׁפָּטָיו וּמִצְוֺתָיו כׇּל־הַיָּמִים׃

Love, therefore, Eternally Present your God, and pay attention to the laws, rules, and what will bring you closer

Deuteronomy 11:1

Over and over, Moses reminds and instructs the people of how to live and organize society so that the promise can manifest. The Promised Land is not an object of worship or a "free ride." It is a field of practice. It is available through love.

My friend, Rabbi Haviva Ner-David draws on this Torah portion to write with passion and heartbreak about living in Israel and freeing herself from holding the narrative we were taught as a false idol: https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/torah-commands-both-love-and-vengeance-whats-a-zionist-to-do/

וּמַלְתֶּ֕ם אֵ֖ת עׇרְלַ֣ת לְבַבְכֶ֑ם וְעׇ֨רְפְּכֶ֔ם לֹ֥א תַקְשׁ֖וּ עֽוֹד׃

Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more.

Deuteronomy 10:16

How do we access that love? Moses' Torah recognizes that the thickening around the heart is a covering, a protection. The beginning of compassion toward self and others is to recognize that the thickening and frozenness is a protection. 

The protection inside our bodies, the walling off, is trauma. Trauma in our bodies is how we hold onto something too painful to process. There is trauma in our bodies and there is trauma in our societies. There is trauma in the bodies and lands of people we think of as our enemies.

How do we unfreeze the trauma so it transforms back into life?

The Promised Land is the consciousness and circumstances in which we can do that. Kabbalistically, it is the raising of the fallen sparks of life — something constricted, then cracked open. But there was nothing to hold the cracked-openness. The sparks of life fell to earth. We are here to gather and raise them into unity. We begin to do this when we acknowledge that holiness is in everything, everyone, everywhere. The Promised Land is a consciousness and a way of living, not property.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:

There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness.

This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place–a holy mountain or a holy spring–whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.

When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time. When at Sinai the word of God was about to be voiced, a call for holiness in man was proclaimed: “Thou shalt be unto me a holy people.” It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded. The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last. Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses."

Abraham Joshua Heschel, from The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, published by Noonday Press.

Nowhere is the Promised Land identified as kadosh, holy, something even in space, to be worshiped. Doing so imperils our very souls. To the contrary:

וְהָיָה  עֵקֶב תִּשְׁמְעוּן אֵת הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים הָאֵלֶּה וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֹתָם וְשָׁמַר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְךָ אֶת־הַבְּרִית וְאֶת־הַחֶסֶד אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ׃

And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, Eternally Present will maintain faithfully for you the covenant made on oath with your ancestors:

וַאֲהֵבְךָ וּבֵרַכְךָ וְהִרְבֶּךָ וּבֵרַךְ פְּרִי־בִטְנְךָ וּפְרִי־אַדְמָתֶךָ דְּגָנְךָ וְתִירֹשְׁךָ וְיִצְהָרֶךָ שְׁגַר־אֲלָפֶיךָ וְעַשְׁתְּרֹת צֹאנֶךָ עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר־נִשְׁבַּע לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ לָתֶת לָךְ׃

To favor you and bless you and multiply you; to bless the issue of your womb and the produce of your soil, your new grain and wine and oil, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock, in the land promised to your ancestors  to assign to you.

Deuteronomy 7:12-13

If holiness is something that only exists in time, not place, what then is the Promised Land and how do we come to inhabit it?

The Promised Land is a field of practice

In the Promised Land, from this week's Torah moment:

פֶּן־תֹּאכַל וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבָתִּים טֹבִים תִּבְנֶה וְיָשָׁבְתָּ׃

When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in,

וּבְקָרְךָ וְצֹאנְךָ יִרְבְּיֻן וְכֶסֶף וְזָהָב יִרְבֶּה־לָּךְ וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר־לְךָ יִרְבֶּה׃

and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered,

וְרָם לְבָבֶךָ וְשָׁכַחְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ הַמּוֹצִיאֲךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים׃

beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget Eternally Present, your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage;

Deuteronomy 8:12-14

These passages highlight the necessity of daily household practices to enter and inhabit the field of Promise, to bring our lives and consciousness closer to the True Source of everything we have been given or worked for. The Jewish mindfulness practice of pausing and blessing before and after meals is strictly observed in many Jewish circles to raise our eating into the Promised Land.

At the beginning of a meal, before we take in the food, we pause to connect with both earthly and divine source of the food. We look deeply to understand how the food was grown and brought to our table. Before eating bread, we bless or bow to the process of drawing it from the field. Before wine, we bless the sourced fruit of the vine. Before fruit, we bless the tree. Before vegetables, we bless adamah, the earth, remembering we too are of the earth. Before eating foods that didn't grow from the ground, such as animal products and water, we bless their formation.

Here is how we Bless the formation of foods that didn't grow from the ground:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְ‑יָ אֱ‑לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם שֶׁהַכֹּל נִהְיָה בִּדְבָרוֹ

Baruch atah A-donay, Elo-heinu Melech Ha’Olam shehakol nihiyah bed'varo.

I remember you, Blessed are You, Eternally Present, Sovereign of all the worlds, by Whose word all things came to be.

With this mindfulness practice we become part of the manifesting of the Promised Land. We are blessing by remembering the source of our nourishment, in form and in non-form.

וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ עַל־הָאָרֶץ הַטֹּבָה אֲשֶׁר נָתַן־לָךְ׃

When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to Eternally Present your God for the good land given you.

Deuteronomy 8:10

After the meal, we pause to experience how the duality of subject and object has dissolved. We bless the One Source of the food, the oneness that we and the food have become.

We have always been the same as the food, made up of earth, water, air and minerals. But our forms were different. Our eating transforms form so that after eating there is no longer separate form between us and the food. Subject and object are merged.

We take note of the flow and processes of life, of things becoming and disintegrating, changing and transforming. This is an opportunity to experience the wonders and impermanence of life without attaching to form.

Judaism, like all religions, is a way of living developed to maintain connection to the One Source. It is a field of practice, not a place to occupy.

In the Jewish calendar, the next new moon begins the month of Elul, a special field of practice. Elul, the month before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, invites us into a field filled with the presence of the unified source of all being. In that field, Elul invites us to step into the Promised Land in time through the practice of forgiveness.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

Avodah [the work of serving Eternally Present] is not reserved for a Temple or an altar or a place. It is the building of the Temple in time. Daily practices such as Deep Listening and heightening our awareness of how our limited perceptions affect how we connect and disconnect, and how our actions and words impact others,  bring about and bring us into the Promised Land.

Eikev Nonviolent Communication Practice

Listening Deeply

• Read out loud an email or text that generated irritation in you.
• Notice the tone you used when you read it.
• What feelings have arisen in you that are carried in your tone?
• What needs or thoughts in you generated the irritation?
• Go back and ask yourself, what exact observation- which words in their text or email-  triggered that irritation?
• Meditate on the words...what is it about those words that generated your feelings of irritation?

Useful approach:

• Draw a line down the center of a blank sheet of paper
• Write the words in the text or email on one side
• Write out all the thoughts that generated your feelings of irritation?

Don't censor yourself!!!

Now go back to the original text

Read it with different tones.

See how the meaning and your response change.

Try reading it with curiosity in you to understand, what is their meaning? What meaning is this person trying to convey to me?

 

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Because: Parsha Eikev

I asked for extra grace from the Holy One at that time
Devarim. 3:23

Remember the long way that the Eternal has made you travel in the wilderness these
forty years, that the One might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts
Parshat Eikev. Devarim. 8: 2

See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands
Isaiah 49:16

I remember
what it was like
when I first heard God calling
and I did not know how to listen or speak. I remember,
before I was a teacher, a leader, an elder, how my voice felt heavy,
covered by layers of unknowing; every act of standing up with love,
forgiveness and compassion was an unpeeling, sometimes a stumble. How
often I was lost and could not find my heart or Yours, was angry and hit the rock,
said: no not me, why me, this is too much. I remember when I first noticed that I was a wanderer in the palm of Your hand, first hearing the Shma as if from everywhere, echoing through my body, understanding that for forty years I had been walking towards
this clarity of form that frees, that is shade in the midbar, an opening of the forest
canopy that lets the light in. I stood on the plains by the River Jordan calling
Nachamu nachamu ami, and asked for extra grace from the Holy One,
for the sorrow of leaving my beloved ami and the grief of my own
disappointments: it was a comfort to recall the story of how
Abraham dug many wells and when it was time Isaac
dug them again. Eickev ami I prayed, remember
the long way, re-dig the wells wherever
you dwell, in every generation,
welcome the stranger,
draw deeply from the living
waters to sustain all peoples and creatures.
And when it was time and I was told no you will not
cross the river, you will not enter the land, I felt released
from my life of leadership, the challenges of witnessing and caretaking.
I remember when I finished the teachings - all that I hoped my descendants might recall and returned to my solitary mind and body feeling the vibrations in my bones,
muscles and sinews, knowing I had indeed become fully your harp,
the extra grace given to me, to ascend the mountain alone,
to live the last moments of this life in the rhythms
of my own heart harmonizing
with the beating of Yours.

Elana Klugman
draft 7-28-21