Mending Soles: Parashat Eqev

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Parashat Eqev
Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25

Moses continues to exhort the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. He hopes that their memories of all that God has done for them will engender gratitude and faithfulness in their hearts. So he reminds them of the very dramatic examples of God’s miracles that they experienced, such as the Exodus, the Giving of the Torah and the manna.

But, almost in the same breath, he also mentions more humble and down to earth favors that they received from God: “Your clothing did not wear out from upon you, nor did your foot swell up for these forty years!” (Deut. 8:4) How prosaic and, even, vulgar! Moses is hoping we will stay loyal to God because God did not let our feet swell from walking in the hot desert? This seems pretty laughable – that is, unless you have ever suffered from swollen feet.
The range of attention to the human experience is so broad here as to be breathtaking. Moses is unabashedly aware that our lives are made up of the most exalted moments along with the most prosaic. We are creatures who can experience the awesome revelations of God’s Presence, during which we transcend our bodies and the limitations of our senses, and we are also creatures whose consciousness is intimately affected by whether our feet are swollen or our clothes are sweaty.

And Moses’ claim is that God knows this about us and cares about all these dimensions of human life, the glorious and the gross. Thus, Rashi quotes a midrash, a rabbinic fantasy, that imagines that the Clouds of Glory that encompassed the Israelite camp in the desert performed another task besides offering us Divine protection and accompaniment. Our clothing did not wear out, explains Rashi, because these Clouds of Glory, like a loving mother, continually washed and ironed our clothes for us. And God’s clouds kept our shoes in good repair so that our feet stayed healthy and unharmed.

Just as Moses sees the range of human experience as amazingly broad, so does he see God’s capacity for caring for us to encompass a range from the sublime to the soiled. It is such a deep and far-ranging love that merits our gratitude and faithfulness.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Greenstein


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image:  “Mexico: Luna Sandals Photo Shoot in Urique” © Eli Duke altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License

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