Eikev: Reward and Punishment

The Shema and the three excerpts from the Torah that follow it are one of the oldest obligatory Jewish prayers. According to the Talmud, priests recited them aloud at the second Jerusalem temple until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.¹ After that, the Shema section became a regular part of all morning and evening prayer services. 

The Shema itself is a single sentence:

Shema, Israel: God is our god; God is one. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:4)

Shema (שְׁמַע) = Listen! Hear! Pay attention! Heed!

Next comes Deuteronomy 6:5-9, a paragraph that urges individuals to remember to love God at all times. (See my post: Va-etchanan: Utmost Love?)

The second paragraph of the Shema section comes from this week’s Torah portion, Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25). In this excerpt, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, God promises rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience.

The third paragraph, Numbers/Bemidbar 14:37-41, calls for tassels (tzitzit) as a reminder to keep our attention on God. (See my post Shelach-Lekha: Glimpses of Blue.)

The second paragraph of the Shema section is the most problematic of the three, because the reasons it gives for obeying God’s rules are three questionable if-then statements.

1. If you love and obey God, then you get rain and crops

And it will be, if you truly heed My commands that I am commanding to you today, to love God, your god, and to serve [God] with your whole mind and your whole being— (Deuteronomy 11:13)

All of the second person pronouns in this verse are plural; God is addressing all the Israelites.

This “if” clause certainly refers to heeding and obeying God’s commands. But which commands? All the laws in the Torah? The laws in Deuteronomy? Or just the command in this verse: to love and serve God with your whole mind and being?

For some classic commentators, it does not matter, because the way to love and serve God is to follow all of God’s commands in the Torah.But for others, loving God is also a feeling or frame of mind.²

According to S.R. Hirsch, studying Torah leads both to loving God, and to serving God by performing God’s commands:

“Hearkening to the commandments and absorbing them in the mind and will shall engender [love], complete devotion to God, which regards this devotion itself and the resulting nearness of God as the supreme goal of all endeavors. Hearkening to the commandments shall also engender [service], active furtherance of God’s purposes on earth.”³

However, N. Leibowitz pointed out that although a lone individual can love God, serving God by obeying God’s commands requires more: a community.

“Love of God is a matter for the individual who strives to attain it through self-perfection, whilst the acceptance of the yoke of mizvot [God’s commands] and their fulfillment is only conceivable in human society. … ‘my commandments’, which, for the most part, relate to the life of man amidst society and his bonds with his family, friends, the state and the human race.”⁴

In the next two verses, God gives the reward for love and service:

—then I will give rain to your land at the right times, autumn-rain and spring-rain, and you will gather your grain and your new wine and your fresh olive oil. And I will put grass in your  field for your livestock, and you will eat and you will be sated. (Deuteronomy 11:14-15)

The second person pronoun in “your land” is plural; it means the land of all the Israelites. But the rest of the second person pronouns are singular, addressing each Israelite individually. Nevertheless, rain covers a whole area; it does not stop at the boundary of one farm, skip the next farm, and resume falling on the land of the next virtuous farmer.

Is the timing of rainfall even up to God? The Torah certainly attributes droughts to God’s deliberate decisions. And Hirsch wrote: “Rainfall is always an act of God’s direct providence and not solely the result of the working of the laws of nature, which God originally established once and for all. The primary cause is God’s providence.”⁵

Yet we all know that loving, serving, and obeying God does not always result in beneficial rain—or a full stomach. One explanation is that God is still addressing the whole community of Israelites, as in the preceding verse, the “if” clause. If too many individuals ignore or reject God, the whole community will suffer.

Ramban wrote: “The explanation of the matter is as follows: God does not always perform miracles—every time giving the rain of the Land … or, on the contrary, shutting up the heaven and drying up the Land—except according to the deeds of the majority of the people.”⁶

Indeed, the God-character in the Torah often wipes out the innocent with the guilty, through epidemics and through wars as well as though droughts.⁷

2. If you disobey God, then you get drought and famine

The if-then promise of good agricultural weather for loving and obeying God is followed by an if-then threat. Here is the “if” clause:

Be on guard against yourselves, because if your minds are tempted, and you turn away and serve other gods and bow down to them— (Deuteronomy 11:16)

The second person pronouns in this verse are all plural, addressing the Israelites collectively. Here is the “then” clause:

—then the heat of God’s anger will be against you, and it will shut up the heavens, and rain will not happen, and the land will not give its produce, and you will quickly perish from the good land that God is giving to you. (Deuteronomy 11:17)

Again, the second person pronouns are all plural. God’s punishments, as well as God’s rewards, are collective. 

Then how can individual Israelites who serve and worship only the God of Israel avoid group punishment? In next week’s Torah portion, God orders people to report, judge, and execute any Israelite who is caught worshiping another god.⁸ If a community polices itself, God will not have to withhold the necessary rain.

All the Israelites know that worshiping other gods is the worst crime against the God of Israel—prohibited in the first of the Ten Commandments that were given at Mount Sinai⁹ as well as in Leviticus.¹⁰ Yet some Israelites are always tempted to be unfaithful to God, and deceive themselves about the consequences.

Sometimes, when the Israelites worship other gods, God does punish them with drought and famine.¹¹ On other occasions, God punishes them with a plague, as in the story of the Golden Calf at Mount Sinai.¹² After they reached the steppe above the Jordan River, where they are still camped, God afflicted them with a plague because many Israelite men worshiped Baal-Peor.¹³ Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, God punishes the Israelites by arranging for an enemy to conquer them.¹⁴

Furthermore, a drought is not always a punishment. Sometimes God causes a drought even though there is no mention of Israelites doing anything wrong.¹⁵

So the crime of worshiping other gods is not always followed by a drought in the bible. Nor has it usually been followed by a drought during the last 2,500 years.

3. If you remember God, then you get an increase in your days

After that, the excerpt from the Torah portion Eikev that is recited as the second paragraph of the Shema section calls for reminders to serve and worship only God:

And you must place these words on your mind and on your being, and you must tie them for a sign on your hand, and they must be for tefillin between your eyes. And you must teach them to your children, by speaking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you must write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 11:18-20)

In this passage, the second person pronoun is plural through “And you must teach them to your children”. It switches to the singular “you” in the verse (Deuteronomy 11:19) about how you teach them to your children—perhaps because it is quoting Deuteronomy 6:7, which is in the first paragraph of the Shema section. “And you must write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates” is an exact quote of Deuteronomy 6:9, in the first paragraph of the Shema section, and both use second person singular pronouns.

The order to set up these reminders is like the “if” in an “if-then” statement. The implied “then”, the reward for doing so, concludes the excerpt:

So that your days will increase, and the days of your children, upon the land that God swore to your fathers, to give to them kimei the heavens over the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:21)

kimei (כִּימֵי) = like days of, as days of. (ki, כִּי  = like, as; because; that + yemei, יְמֵי = days. Kimei is also translated “as long as the days of” and “as long as there is”.)

The second person pronouns in this final verse are all plural.

What reward is God promising here?

The Hebrew bible often uses “days” for indefinite periods of time—the way English uses the word “years”. Therefore many commentators have interpreted the verse as promising that individuals who obey these instructions will live longer. Rashi wrote: “Women are also obligated to put mezuzot [boxes containing God’s words affixed to door jambs] on their homes when no man shares the home they live in. This is logical, seeing that they too wish to enjoy long life.”¹⁶

On the other hand, this verse uses second person plural pronouns, addressing the Israelites collectively. Throughout history, some devout people have died young. And the generally longer lifespans of our time are due to advances in medicine, not to a general increase in devotion of God. Perhaps the reward for setting up reminders of God and teaching your children to remember God is not an increase in the number of days of life, but an increase in the quality of those days. Perhaps then our days increase because they are fuller and richer. According to HaKtav VeHaKabalah, God is promising years that are “like a taste of the World to Come. When you are in the land you will live true life, like the life that is in heaven.”¹⁷

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I believe that God does not monitor our love, service, and worship, and apportion rain and drought accordingly. But if society as a whole does not put the welfare of our planet first, loving and serving the earth God created, then meteorological disasters do follow. Collectively, we humans have deceived ourselves into worshiping short-term financial profit. Because of this modern idolatry, we have changed the climate of the earth, and the results include both flooding in some areas, and drought and wildfires in others.

What words do we need to keep in our minds and teach to our children? The words in the Shema section are good, but I think we should also set up continual reminders saying “You must love your neighbor as yourself”¹⁸ and “You must love [the stranger] as yourself.”¹⁹ If everyone in the world repeated these words, in their own languages, day after day, eventually our behavior would change. Then all people would be able to eat and be sated. And maybe the days of all people would have an increase in happiness—like a taste of heaven on earth.

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1. Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 11b.
2. See my post Va-etchanan: Utmost Love?
3. 19^th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Devarim, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 219.
4. Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Devarim, translated by Aryeh Newman, World Zionist Organization, 1980, pp. 114-115
5. Hirsch, ibid., p. 221.
6. Ramban (acronym of 13^th-century rabbi Moshe ben Nachman), translation in www.sefaria.org.
7. E.g. Exodus 32:35, Numbers 11:18-35, Numbers 17:6-14, Numbers 25:8-9.
8. Deuteronomy 17:2-6.
9. Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 5:7.
10. Leviticus 19:4, 26:1.
11. 2 Samuel 21:1, 1 Kings 18:1-2 and 18-21, Amos 4:6-8, Jeremiah 14:1-10.
12. Exodus 32.
13. Numbers 25:1-9.
14. Judges 2:11-15, 2 Kings 17:6-8, 2 Kings 21:1-15.
15. E.g. Genesis 41:54 and 43:1-2, Ruth 1:1.
16. Rashi, ibid.
17. Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, HaKtav VeHaKabalah, circa 1829-1839, translation in www.sefaria.org.
18. Leviticus 19:18.
19. Leviticus 19:34.