I believe that every Jewish community is looking for a reason to celebrate. I mean, just look at the B’nai Israel calendar. There are more events celebrating our children, our holidays, our Shabbatot, and so forth. Every committee and every department has some kind of celebration. I am convinced that, if I wanted to, I would never have to take another trip to Publix to food shop again!
These are profoundly meaningful moments worth remembering. Our temple has had these moments in abundance, hasn’t it? But we are greedy for more for in this place is a joy – some of it expressed and some just waiting to pop out!
And this is where our Torah portion gives us a yellow caution flag. You see, after all of these great things, it is natural for something to shift. We ride the success of a program and then we sit back in the afterglow. Nothing wrong with that but what sometimes happens is that we live in that moment for too long.
The energy that built the thing quietly dissolves into the comfort of having it. We stop asking where are we going? and start saying look how far we’ve come. Our celebration can turn into self-congratulation and our energy is dissipated and not focussed on what’s next. And what’s next can change the congregation, the community, and even ourselves.
Moses saw this coming. With extraordinary psychological insight, he warns the Israelites not merely about enemies outside the land, but about the enemy that grows within prosperity and success itself.
In this week’s portion, Moses paints a picture almost too familiar to bear. He tells the people: you will cross the Jordan. You will eat and be satisfied. Your herds will multiply. Your silver and gold will accumulate. Your homes will be beautiful. And then — then — is precisely the moment of greatest danger. “Then your heart will become haughty,” he says, “and you will forget Adonai your God.”
The Sifre on Devarim, one of our ancient midrashic texts, presses deeply into this warning. It reads the phrase “you shall eat to satisfaction” not as a blessing but as a trigger for vigilance. The Sages write: “Be cautious, lest you rebel against the All-Present. For a person only rebels against the All-Present out of satisfaction.”
This is an amazing piece of midrashic text and seemed to anticipate Jewish success in every generation. A person rebels against God but not out of suffering. Not out of poverty or persecution. A person rebels out of satisfaction.
The midrash then assembles a devastating trilogy of evidence. First: the verse from Deuteronomy — eat and be satisfied, build fine homes, let your herds increase, let gold pile up — and what follows? “Your heart will become haughty and you will forget.” Second: the moment the people are brought to the land flowing with milk and honey — and what follows? “He will turn to foreign gods.” And third — perhaps the most searing example of all — Sinai itself. “The people sat to eat and
Three times the Torah makes the same brutal observation. Satisfaction. Forgetting. Betrayal.
Now, I want to be clear: Moses is not preaching asceticism. Jews don’t do well as Nazarites wandering the desert or living in monasteries. He is not saying don’t eat, don’t prosper, don’t build. The Torah loves life. It commands joy. Uvacharta b’chaiim – you shall choose life. What Moses is warning against is not abundance itself — it is the amnesia that abundance makes possible. When we forget where we came from, we forget the vision that brought those before us to this point and that is when we run the risk of losing our own vision.
When we have enough, we stop remembering what it felt like not to have enough. And when we stop remembering that, we stop reaching. We stop striving. We stop asking the question that keeps any living community alive: What are we here to do next?
There is something almost neurological about this. Gratitude requires memory. Vision requires discomfort. When everything is fine, the urgent call to build, to grow, to become — it fades. And communities, like people, do not simply plateau when they stop growing. They begin, quietly, to decline.
I think about congregations I have known — and I suspect you can think of them too — where the conversation in every meeting circles back to the same golden era. “When the sanctuary was full on Friday nights.” “When the religious had x number of children.” “When Rabbi So-and-So was here.” You can, undoubtedly, find more examples. Moses is teaching us that the past becomes not a foundation but a dwelling place. And you cannot move forward if you have taken up permanent residence in yesterday.
The golden calf, in this reading, is not simply idolatry. It is the worship of a fixed moment. The people at Sinai had just experienced the most extraordinary revelation in human history. And when Moses was delayed on the mountain, they panicked — not because they wanted to abandon God, but because they wanted to hold on to what they had felt. They built a calf not to replace God but to capture and freeze a moment of transcendence. The midrash is telling us: even that impulse — the impulse to clutch the past — is a form of faithlessness.
Because God, as our tradition insists, is not in the past. God is in the going forward. The divine name itself — Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I will be what I will be — points not backward but ahead. God is telling us there is a reason why our eyes are in the front of our heads and not in the back.
So what does Moses actually want from us? I think he wants what every good teacher wants: not nostalgia, but memory in the service of motion. Remember the wilderness — not to long for it, but to know what you are capable of surviving. Remember the manna — not to wish for it again, but to trust that provision comes when you step forward in faith. Remember slavery — not to be defined by it, but to never inflict it on another.
The difference between memory that liberates and memory that imprisons is whether it faces forward or backward.
For this congregation, the question Eikev puts before us is not: are we doing well? The question is: are we still asking what we are meant to do? Are we still restless enough to be faithful? Do we still feel the pull of something not yet built, a person not yet reached, a corner of the world not yet touched by what we have to offer?
The blessing of prosperity, of a full sanctuary, of strong programs and devoted members — all of it is real and all of it is gift. But Moses warns us: the moment we mistake the gift for the destination, we have begun the slow turn toward the golden calf.
Let us eat and be satisfied — and let that satisfaction fuel the next step, not replace it.
Let our gratitude for where we have been become the energy for where we are going.
And let us never, never, confuse having arrived with being done.
Shabbat shalom.
