Anniversary D’var Torah—Parashat Eikev
By Diane Herman, August 16, 2025
Three years ago, Larry and I were celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary and we were meant to give a joint drash on our celebratory weekend. Unfortunately, COVID hit our family and our celebration was postponed. I have been waiting to give this drash since then because Parshat Eikev has one of my favorite pieces of liturgy from the Siddur. That is the second paragraph of the Shema-the whole of which is the prayer most fundamental to our religion and one which we read twice a day in the daily prayer services.
I have to admit that I came to davening only as an adult and I have a hard to relating to many of the prayers in the siddur. But I find the second paragraph of the Sh’ma so compelling that I read it in English to make sure I understand what I’m reading. In the second paragraph are two themes very dear to me: caring for the Earth, and love- an obvious connection as Larry and getting ready to celebrate our fifty-third wedding anniversary this coming week. In case it is your practice to read this text in Hebrew, I am going to read it to you in English:
If you indeed heed My commandments with which I charge you today, to love the Lord your God and worship Him with all your heart and with all your soul, I will give rain in your land in its season, the early rain (YOREH) and late rain (MALKOSH).
I love that Hebrew has names for the first and last rains of the season and that the weather service in Israel even reports on the rain that way! The prayer continues:
…and you shall gather in your grain, wine and oil. I will give grass in your field for your cattle, and you shall eat and be satisfied. Be careful lest your heart be tempted and you go astray and worship other gods, bowing down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will flare against you and He will close the heavens so that there will be no rain. The land will not yield its crops and you will perish swiftly from the good land that the Lord is giving you.
God asks three things of B’nai Yisrael in this paragraph: First is Shmo-ah tish-m’oo—really listen to– or heed, as it is usually translated, God’s commandments; next, to love God; and third, to worship God. In exchange God guarantees that the rain will fall, that we’ll have a good harvest, and that we and our animals will have enough to eat.
You might wonder why I find this paragraph so compelling since it seems to express as its theology that God controls nature and uses natural processes to reward or punish human beings for their behavior. Surely most modern Jews don’t accept that the presence or absence of rain or the success or failure of our agricultural harvest is a function of Divine favor. So troubling do many modern Jews find this theology, that the Reform Movement actually removed this paragraph from its siddur in the 1950s or 60s and only in 2005 put it back in. The Reconstructionist siddur, offers alternatives to read, while a note beside the traditional text calls it “supernatural theology that many contemporary Jews find difficult.”
In fact, there are many prayers in the siddur that many modern Jews find difficult. What are we to do with them?
I want to give credit to Rabbi Avi Havivi who addressed this topic in his Tuesday morning siddur class several years ago. (By the way, he spent 4 full class periods on this second paragraph of the Sh’ma. I highly recommend going back and listening to those on the TBA podcast site.)
When faced with liturgy we don’t believe we have several choices: We can say the words anyway and don’t think too hard about their meaning for the sake of continuity with our ancestral practice. We can skip over the words and not read them in our private prayers. We can rewrite the siddur and leave out some of these parts when they conflict with our modern sensibilities. Or we can reinterpret the words in ways that make sense. Thanks to Rabbi Havivi, I realized this latter choice is exactly what I do with the second paragraph of the Shema and that this reinterpretation is what makes it so meaningful for me.
Here is how I understand the meaning:
This paragraph is addressed to the collective “you”, not the individual “you.” No matter how good you are as an individual, these words are about how we should behave collectively and how we will fare as a society:
If we organize our societies around principles of justice and mercy [that is, heeding commandments], love one another and our planet, and value life then we will flourish. And if not –if we go astray and worship other gods—the idols of modern society– If our society allows itself to be seduced, veers off the path, we will suffer the consequences and our society will wither.
Indeed, in our present day, it is impossible not to recognize that our failure to treat the Earth with love and respect has resulted in high temperatures, extreme weather, forests on fire, floods. The relationship between human behavior and the fate of Earth and its inhabitants is clear.
And not only natural events. According to Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt who blogs as the Velveteen Rabbi the reward and punishment expressed in this paragraph can be read metaphorically beyond Nature:. She says “…[it] reminds us how fragile and precious our sense of sustenance is, and how much it depends on our willingness to revere the infinite, walk in paths of holiness, and commit our hearts and souls to loving and serving the Source from which we come.”
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, author and activist who is associated with the Jewish Renewal Movement, wrote a metaphoric/midrashic interpretation of the Sh’ma. Here is one section:
| If you listen, yes listen to the teachings of Adonai, the One Breath of Life, that the world is One, all its parts intertwined, then the rains will fall Time by time, Time by time; The rivers will run, the heavens will smile, the good earth will fruitfully feed you. |
| But — chop the world into parts and choose parts to worship — gods of race or of nation, gods of wealth and of power, gods of greed and addiction; |
| If you Do and you Make, and Pro-duce without pausing; If you Do without Being — |
| Then the rain will not fall — or will turn to sharp acid — The rivers won’t run — or flood homes and cities; The heavens themselves will take arms against you: the ozone will fail you, the oil that you burn will scorch your whole planet and from the good earth that the Breath of Life gives you, you will vanish; yes, perish. |
Finally, I offer you another creative source that relates to the final part of this paragraph which enjoins us to v’limadetem otam et b’naichem– teach these words to your children…so that they and we “may live long in the land…for as long as the heavens are over the earth.” Whenever I come to these words, I hear the Crosby, Stills and Nash song Teach Your Children (actually written by Graham Nash), ringing in my head. When I looked up the words of the song, I discovered that they were even more appropriate to parshat Eikev then I realized. Here Moshe is speaking to the generation of B’nai Yisrael who lived through the “hell” of 40 years of wandering in the desert and to the next generation who must learn the tradition of their parents and yet forge their own way as they prepare to enter The Land promised by God.
The words of this song from those masters of commentary; Crosby, Stills, and Nash seem particularly fitting:
You, who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye
Teach your children well
Their father’s hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by
Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you
Shabbat Shalom.