If I am being 100% honest, I had a hard time writing this d’var torah. Eikev, our Torah portion this week, is a bit of tough. Like many other Torah portions in Deuteronomy, Eikev is presented as part of a long speech that Moses gives to the Israelites at the end of their journey through the wilderness. In his speech, Moses oscillates between telling the Israelites where they have been, and sharing his perspective on where they are going. His words to the people contain reflections that range from inspiring, to mundane, to challenging, to horrifying.
Eikev is no exception. On the one hand, it contains moral injunctions that we see over and over again in the Torah, that we have a responsibility to care for the marginalized in our society – especially the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant – and in fact, that our survival as a collective depends on how we treat these groups. For me, this is one of the most powerful messages our Torah offers: that we are all connected, and all responsible for each other. It’s also an extraordinarily hard message to actually live up to, and seems well-worth studying again and again – as our tradition encourages us to, by repeating it again and again.
On the other hand, Eikev also devotes a lot of space to a theology that is repeated frequently in Deuteronomy: that (according to Moses,) God has given the people the Land they are about to enter, and it is their duty (and a fulfillment of divine will) to violently conquer it. For me, and I think for many of us, this theology is profoundly troubling.
What do we do with troubling teachings in our Torah? This is not only a question for the 21st century: Jewish communities throughout history have grappled with it. The ancient rabbis whose teachings are found in the Mishnah (compiled ca. 220 CE) and the Talmud (compiled ca. 400-600 CE) had a fascinating approach to texts they found morally challenging, or obsolete: they taught that some were only there for us to study (see for example: the rebellious son), and others had to mean something radically different from what they literally said (see for example the ancient rabbinic reinterpretation of “an eye for an eye” into the commandment “pay someone money if you hurt their eye”).
All of us who are Jewish or Jewish-adjacent today are the intellectual descendants of rabbinic Judaism, and part of what this means is that we inherit the tradition not just of study and debate (for which the ancient rabbis are perhaps most famous), but also the tradition of resisting biblical literalism when an embrace of biblical literalism would lead us in an unethical direction.
When faced with a Torah portion like Eikev, with its complicated mix of inspiring and (for many) troubling teachings, the collective force of our tradition encourages us to read deeply, consider carefully, and then speak up for what we believe is right.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alexandra Stein
