“It will be, as a result of your hearkening to these ordinances, and your guarding and doing them – HaShem your G-d will guard the Covenant and the loving-kindness for you, as He swore to your fathers: He will love you and bless you and multiply you” (Deuteronomy 7:12-13).
Parashat Eikev starts and finishes with the blessings that G-d promises to inundate us with in the Land of Israel is we but keep His Commandments. The word “eikev” means “following on from”, hence our translation “a result of” (“eikev” is a cognate of “akav”, “follow”; “akev”, “heel” the part of the foot that follows the rest of the foot; hence the name “Ya’akov”, Jacob – both because he was born clutching his twin brother’s heel, and because he would “supplant” his elder twin).
These blessings depict the wonderful life that awaits us in Israel: grain, wine, and oil in abundance; no infertile men or women; no sickness; peace in the Land; rain in its proper season to water the fields.
And perhaps the most striking feature of all these blessings is that they are all seemingly natural. G-d nowhere promises open, revealed miracles, of the kind we witnessed throughout the forty years of wandering through the Sinai Desert. Manna descending from Heaven every night and staying fresh for only one day, except for Friday when it stayed fresh for Shabbat, was openly miraculous; in Israel, we would instead be blessed with good weather so that food would grow naturally out of the ground. Instead of the Ten Plagues which devastated Egypt, we would defeat our enemies in Israel through natural means.
Even Divine help would be disguised as natural: “HaShem your G-d will also send forth the hornets among them, until those who remain and those who hide will perish before you” (7:20).
This theme continues: “HaShem your G-d will exile these nations before you little by little. You will not be able to eliminate them quickly, lest the wild animals of the field increase against you” (v.22). Our victory over the inhabitants of Israel was to appear entirely natural.
There was, indeed, a miraculous period in Jewish history, which began with the Ten Plagues in Egypt and continued for the next approximately forty-one years until we entered the Land of Israel. The Ten Plagues, the Splitting of the Red Sea, the Giving of the Torah, the daily manna, the daily Clouds of Glory shielding us from the fierce desert sun and the nightly Pillar of Fire warming us against the bitterly cold desert nights – all these open miracles would only last for that relatively brief forty-one year period.
The rest of history would follow natural paths; the miracles would be hidden, to be appreciated only by those who would know how and where to look.
Following the Ramban (see for example his commentary to Genesis 17:1, 46:15, Exodus 6:2, Leviticus 26:11), miracles are divided into two categories: open, revealed miracles – events which any unbiased observer would be forced to recognise as miraculous; and hidden miracles – events which are controlled by G-d for specific purposes, but which follow seemingly natural laws.
Towards the end of our Parashah, the Torah gives the promise, so famous because it is part of the Shema which we recite twice every day: “It will be, if you diligently hearken to My commandments that I command you today, to love HaShem your G-d and to serve Him with all your heart and all your soul, then I will give the rain of your Land in its appropriate season – the first rain and the last rain…” (Deuteronomy 11:13).
The Ramban summarises here the character of miracles: “Know that miracles, whether for good or for bad, are performed only for those who are completely righteous or completely evil; but for all those who are somewhere in between, He does good or bad for them according to the natural way of the world ‘in their way and in their actions’ (Ezekiel 36:17)”.
Thus throughout most of the Tanakh (and, indeed, for the rest of Jewish history), our fortunes and misfortunes have followed seemingly natural courses. A particularly striking example occurred in the period of the conquest of the Land of Israel, shortly after Joshua died: “HaShem was with [the Tribe of] Judah; he drove [the Canaanites] out of the mountain region, though he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots” (Judges 1:19). That is to say, not that iron chariots are more powerful than G-d, but that the war between Israel and the Canaanites ran according to seemingly natural means, hence the more powerful Canaanite armies would take more effort to vanquish. Indeed, it would take some three and a half centuries before the Canaanites would finally be defeated.
And among all this, the Torah admonishes us: “Should you say in your heart, These nations are greater than me! How will I be able to drive them out?! – Do not fear them! Remember – just remember – what HaShem your G-d did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, the great tests which your eyes saw, the signs and the wonders and the mighty hand and the outstretched arm with which HaShem your G-d took you out” (Deuteronomy 7:17-19).
These open, revealed miracles which the entire nation witnessed and experienced and lived through constitute the credentials, so to speak, by which we know that G-d indeed controls the world for our benefit. These are not events which anyone could have invented: no other religion has ever dared make a parallel claim, that every single member of the nation was personally witness to even a single miracle. No other religion ever dared make such a claim, because when such a claim is false, then it will never be accepted by its target audience. The claim that the entire nation witnessed a generation-long sequence of events can be made solely when those events really happened and when they were seared into the national consciousness of the target audience.
So the miraculous period of our history – those forty-one years from the Plague of Blood until the conquest of Israel – are our evidence that just as G-d led us to freedom and victory all those millennia ago, so will He do again.
As the Ramban puts it: “The signs and great wonders are faithful witnesses to belief in the Creator and in the entire Torah. And because G-d does not perform such signs and wonders in every generation in the sight of every evil person or heretic, He commanded us to make a constant memorial to signify that which our eyes had seen, and that we replicate this to our children, and their children to their children, and their children on to the last generation… Through these tremendous open miracles, one acknowledges the hidden miracles which are the foundation of the entire Torah. A person can have no portion in the Torah of Moshe our Master unless he believes that everything that exists and everything that happens are all miracles” (commentary to Exodus 13:16).
It is particularly important for us, at this time in history, to internalise and understand this. As we stand just a week and a half after the ninth of Av, commemorating so many disasters which have struck us, we must understand that those disasters were not random. As we approach the season of judgement, Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom ha-Kippurim, we must be aware that all that will happen in the coming year, whether for bad or for good, is not random happenstance but G-d’s punishment or reward for our actions.
And as we fight terrorist attacks and stand before a potentially momentous conflict in another month, we must recall at all times that though conflicts transpire according to seemingly natural processes, though armies usually win or lose depending on their apparent physical power, it is G-d Who decides who wins and who loses.
This week’s Parashah warns us against the arrogant belief that “my strength and the power of my hand have wrought this might for me” (Deuteronomy 8:17).
And the Torah continues: “It will be that if you totally forget HaShem your G-d and go after other gods, worshipping them and bowing to them, then I testify against you today that you will utterly perish. Just as the nations which HaShem destroys before you, so too will you perish ‘eikev’ – as a result of your not hearkening to the voice of HaShem your G-d” (vs. 19-20).
And yet we must also remember at all times that even punishments (may G-d spare us!) are not random, but are still directed by G-d for His purposes. And His oft-repeated promise that He will never destroy us entirely is eternal.
And, as our Parashah concludes, “If you diligently hearken to this entire commandment which I command you to perform, to love HaShem your G-d, walking in His paths and cleaving to Him – then HaShem will drive out all these nations from before you, and you will drive out nations greater and mightier than yourselves… No man will stand up against you; HaShem your G-d will set fear of you and terror of you on the entire face of the Land upon which you will tread, as He has spoken to you”.