Every success we’ve ever had, we tell ourselves we earned outright. Ourselves alone. Our sweat, our sleepless nights, our nerve. It is almost never true, and Parshat Eikev names the lie for what it is.
“Beware,” Moses warns, “lest you eat and are satisfied, and build good houses and dwell in them, and your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies — and your heart grows haughty, and you forget the Lord your God… and you say in your heart, kochi v’otzem yadi asah li et ha’chayil ha’zeh — my own power and the strength of my own hand have made me this wealth.” (Deut. 8:12–14, 17)
I have sat at enough hospital bedsides to know how quickly that sentence collapses. I was with someone who had amassed substantial wealth by building a successful business, a “self-made” man. Now, breath labored, strength gone, in a bed he could no longer leave, his truth lay before him; the wealth was real. So was the hard work. But beneath it all was a foundation he never laid himself — the health, the years, the people who taught him his trade, those who lovingly supported him, and the improbable fact of even being alive to do any of it.
That’s the forgetting Moses worries about. Not the wealth itself; the Torah has no quarrel with houses, flocks, and gold. The danger is amnesia. A heart so full it forgets what filled it.
Even the parsha’s name makes the point. Eikev is usually translated as “because,” but its plain meaning is “heel.” The part of the body we don’t look at, the part that drags behind, trampled by everything else on its way to something more important. Rashi reads it as a warning about the commandments we treat as too small to matter. I also hear something else: the heel is what follows in the wake of a life, the consequence that trails behind and eventually catches up.
Shel Silverstein tells this story more plainly in The Giving Tree. A boy loves a tree, and for a lifetime she gives him everything: apples to sell, branches for a house, her trunk for a boat. Every time he needs something, she says quietly, “Take it; it will make me happy.” He never once says thank you. He only says I need until there is nothing left of her but a stump. Only then, an old man with nowhere else to go, does he sit on what remains and find it, at last, enough. The boy learned to be satisfied with almost nothing, but only after he had already taken almost everything.
Except that the warning in Eikev is supposed to land before that, before the wealth, before the haughty heart, while the tree is still standing and nothing has yet been taken. It didn’t fully take, anyway. Centuries later, Hosea accuses Israel of forgetting the God who fed them in the wilderness, nearly making Deuteronomy’s own warning come true. The timing was right. The lesson didn’t stick, regardless.
Here is what I can’t resolve, and I don’t think I’m supposed to: the same God who watches all this forgetting happen anyway is the God who fed them manna for forty years, who let them go hungry on purpose “to make you know that man does not live on bread alone,” and fed them regardless of whether the lesson landed. The love doesn’t wait for us to get it right. It carries us toward the promised land even as we’re still telling ourselves we’re carrying ourselves.
So here’s the question Eikev leaves me with, unfinished: not whether I’m grateful in the abstract (I usually am, in the way that costs nothing), but whether my life is built to show it while there’s still a tree standing. Whether the small commandments I keep, the heel-commandments, easy to trample, say out loud what my heart already knows. What would it look like to learn this lesson now, on time, grateful while the tree is still giving, not only afterward, thankful for what’s already gone?
Rabbi David Levin is president of the Board of Rabbis and founder of Jewish Relationships Initiative and EthicalLegacy.com