HUNGER AND SATISFACTION

Jews traditionally read one chapter (parasha) of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) per week and discuss the meanings, lessons and ideas of the chapter up to and during the corresponding Sabbath. This week, the reading is the chapter of Eikev (parashat Eikev), which corresponds to Deuteronomy 7:12 - 11:25, and it relates that divine blessings for abundance and sustenance will follow if the Jews follow God's rules. I was forwarded an e-mail discussing this chapter and was very impressed by the author's analysis of how we spiritually relate to hunger and satisfaction. So, with Emma Kippley-Ogman's permission, I am reproducing her beautiful reading of Eikev here (I added one link and a few brackets for those less versed in religious Jewish vocabulary).

Parashat Eikev by Emma Kippley-Ogman

Parashat Eikev addresses a most basic human action: feeling hunger, eating food, and experiencing satisfaction. But according to midrash, every time it says in Torah that we eat and are satisfied, there is also a warning. To eat until we are satisfied, a nourishing and necessary act that allows us to live, is somehow also dangerous. 

The warning from this parasha goes like this: “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery… and you say in your heart, ‘my own power and the might of my own hand have wrought me all this success.’”

The danger of being satisfied is the danger of forgetting. While we wandered through the wilderness, with manna falling from the sky daily, it was totally clear to us that our nourishment was not solely the work of our hands. When we have just enough to live on for today, we can feel the edge of hunger just beyond, and we might remember that Divine grace gives us what we have. But when we feel like we have enough – enough to eat this meal that there are leftovers for later, a place to live that can withstand the weather, resources that produce income, wealth that we can save for future investments or even the next generation – when our enough grows so that its edge is well beyond our reach, then we are in danger of believing that what we have comes from our own success. As we are about to enter the land of Israel, Moshe sees that our lives will shift radically towards stability, power and wealth. He warns us against the danger of perceiving only our own power in our satisfaction. 

We live at a moment in history and in a society where we are again liable to forget. Most of us eat and are satisfied several times a day. Most of us live in houses or apartments where our needs are met and we even have a lot of what we want, well beyond what we need. And yet we live in a time of tremendous economic uncertainty. Some of us have lost our jobs and have struggled for a long time to find work in a terrible economy. Some of our mortgages are underwater. Some of our debts have far outpaced our assets and it is hard to imagine how we might ever be solvent again. Many of us watch the stock market swinging and wonder what will happen to the money we’re trying to invest in our futures. 

And as a nation we struggle to dig out simultaneously from precipitous economic times and from years of amassed debt that we fear might overwhelm us. But the short- and long-term solutions posed from all parties to these great struggles seem to tear apart the fabric of the society we have built. The proposed federal budget cuts will, among other things, undo progress in education, eliminate significant funding for scientific research, likely require raising the eligibility age for social security and paring back on public sector workers – the teachers, public safety officers, DMV workers, nurses and so many others who allow our society to function will be out of work and we will be missing their labor.

All this will be lost to preserve lower tax rates and with them higher profits for corporations and individuals. To preserve the notion that what we earn is really our own, that the work of our hands really brings us our wealth and our success. This is the fallacy of the fundamental attribution error, the pattern in human thinking that gives undue weight to personality over environment. As we cut our human and physical infrastructure, we forget that the profits of individuals and corporations rest on that very infrastructure. Economic success has a context – the infrastructure of our society. A well-educated work force, well-maintained roads, railways, ports and airfields, communication networks for internet, phone and post – without these infrastructures in place, no business could turn a profit. 

As Jews, we have an obligation to approach our economic situation with the kind of thinking inspired by this week’s parasha, with a sense of humility and gratitude knowing that each of us is here because of others’ concern for us, because others provided for us. Just like Honi and the carob tree that he planted knowing he would not see it to maturity, we know that we have streets and bridges because previous generations laid them for us, a good education because previous generations wrote policies that affirmed its importance, support in retirement because previous generations made that a priority. Let us ask if we are ensuring that we are leaving a similar inheritance for our future.

With the women’s rosh hodesh [new moon, head of the month] group from my shul [synagogue], I recently spent an afternoon preparing and serving a meal at Rosie’s Place, a Boston shelter and soup kitchen for homeless and vulnerable women. An L-shaped counter separates the kitchen and food preparation area from the dining room. Standing on the kitchen side of the counter, I was blown away by just how close those of us on the kitchen side are to being guests eating in that dining room. One health emergency and addiction to painkillers, a lost job, a change in mental status, a change in social security policy, savings lost to the fluctuating stock market. I wondered, if I were to become a guest, how I might learn to carry myself with the dignity of so many of those homeless women.

To seek policies that protect the vulnerable and thereby shift the dynamics of our entire society towards greater stability requires us to reflect on our own vulnerability. The danger in eating and being satisfied is indeed that we might forget. Rabbeinu Bahya invites us to reflect on the verse from our parasha like this: “While you still experience the bounty of goodness, look back at a terrible day that you had sometime in the past. Then you will notice the advantage you have today over that past time and will thank the Holy Blessed One for it.” Through internal empathy, cultivating a stronger sense of our own moments of weakness and of strength, of vulnerability and of power, we might gain a greater sense of empathy for our neighbors.

If eating and being satisfied puts us in danger of arrogance, our parasha also offers a tool for shifting our consciousness: “When you eat and are satisfied, give blessing to Adonai your God for the good land that God has given you.” To transform eating and being satisfied from a moment of forgetting to one of most powerfully acknowledging the source of all, we simply bring a sense of gratitude and blessing to our meal. All of us, those who are struggling and those whose ventures are taking off, are tremendously blessed, as we benefit from circumstances beyond our control. To the extent that we are successful, it is not just our own doing, but a gift we receive from generations past, our fellow human beings, and ultimately the Divine. May we continue to find nourishment and satisfaction in our food, in our work, and in our communities. And may our satisfaction lead us to be a source of blessing for all.