In our Parshah Ekev, the Israelites stand at the entrance to the Land of Israel, after forty years of wandering in the desert. Moshe is teaching them the love secret to God and to our beloved one who lives around us. Love and appreciation! He is reminding them that theese things may seem small to us, but they make up life and give it flavor and meaning. They are the main thing. Because if we don’t fulfill them, if we don’t pay attention to the laws in our case, we are bound to find ourselves on a dangerous path, a dead-end path – the path of arrogancy, to social and spiritual emptiness.
He tells them that man should remember that he is not self-sufficient but depends on the “word of God.” There is more here than that. God is trying to teach us something. To show us that bread is not taken for granted. It is not for nothing that Moses reminds the people of the manna that God sent down from the sky, manna that satisfied them when they had nothing to eat during their wanderings in the desert.
Not only the bread is not self-evident. Egypt has an abundance of water, coming from the Nile. In the Land of Israel, water is given sparingly: “For the rain of heaven you shall drink water.” Water isn’t taken for granted.
And another warning is given to the people. God tells the people that they are about to enter a good land, and they going to experience huge economic success.
“And might you say in your heart for yourself, my intelligence and the strength of my hand made me this success – My capacity and the hard work made me all this success.”
It seems to us, sometimes, that it is only thanks to us that what happens, happens. Sometimes we find ourselves drunk from our own power and we easily forget to appreciate the bread and water of our lives.
A person who doesn’t remember that he didn’t reach what he reached by himself, a person drunk on his own power, a person who is sure that everything was given to him on a silver platter and forgets the hands that offer him the platter, his end is destruction. He, or she, will lose the spirit, the soul, the joy from the little things of life. The missing of the sense of miracle and of the initial wonder at what is happening around us.
The miracle only becomes a miracle if it is noticed. Only if we bother to stop for a moment and talk about what is unusual, wonderful, happy. They are small things that we tend not to pay attention to, not to appreciate them. Like a pleasant breeze on a hot day; like a smile we didn’t expect; Like something that was bothering us and here it is suddenly solved easily.
Love is not taken for granted either, love is also a miracle. It is also something precious that we must cherish and appreciate – love between spouses, love of parents, love of our sons and daughters, love of siblings. Love is also a miracle, or maybe a chain of small, everyday but wonderful miracles. Love has a wonderful quality: the more we cherish it and the more we rejoice in it, the brighter, more beautiful and more abundant it is. This is how we get back more love. And when we return love, we make happy not only the soul of the loved one, but also our soul.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Refael Cohen