Justice and Love - Parashat Eikev

A short thought on Parashat Eikev.  Justice and love - and how they are so closely dependent upon each other.

Transcript

Shabbat Greeting And Ekev

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Shabbat Shalom. This is Rabbi Stanway from Congregation B'nai Israel. This week's portion begins with a strange word, Ekev. Ekev usually means because, but its more literal meaning is heel. Moses tells the people, Fahya Ekev Tishma'un, and it shall be on the heel of your listening to these laws that God will keep the covenant. It's a strange image, not the head, not the heart, but the heel, the lowest, most trodden upon part of the body, as if to say it isn't the lofty commandments that prove our faithfulness, but rather the small, unglamorous, everyday ones, the ones we walk on, the ones under our feet. And this is exactly where the portion Achiv takes us. Not long ago was the thunder of Sinai and the drama of the golden calf, the giving of the law, of the sacrifices, and

Why The Heel Matters

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the chaos that runs through the book of Numbers. But now, Moses, who knows his life is coming to an end, gets practical and directly to the point. And right at the center of that practicality sits one of the most quietly radical passages in the entire Torah. In Deuteronomy chapter 10, it says, Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart and stiffen

Circumcise Your Heart

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your neck no more, for the Lord your God is a God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but executes justice for the orphan and the widow and loves the stranger, giving them food and clothing. You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I want to point out something that Moses has just done, and it's extraordinary. He has taken the two things that we usually keep in separate boxes, love and justice, and he welded them together into a single

Love And Justice Fused

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sentence, a single divine characteristic trait, as a single human obligation. We tend to think of love as a feeling and justice as a system. Love is warm, justice is impartial and sometimes cold. Love plays favorites. We love our children, we love our friends, we love our people. Justice, by definition, plays no favorites at all. It shows no favor and takes no bribe. How can the same God in the same breath be described both ways? And how can we, mere heel-treading mortals, be commanded to do both at once? Deuteronomy's answer is this, and that it's a false choice. God's love is not sentimental, it moves towards the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the very people with no social power to earn anyone's favor. And God's justice is not cold, it is animated by love aimed at protecting exactly those who justice as mere fairness might otherwise overlook. In Torah's vision, love without justice is just favoritism with better PR, and justice without love is just bureaucracy with a gavel. The two only become holy when they are fused, and then comes the term that should stop us cold. You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Moses doesn't appeal to abstract ethics, he appeals to memory. You know what it feels like to be the outsider, the vulnerable one,

Loving The Stranger Through Memory

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the person justice systems were not built to protect. So you, precisely because of that memory, carry the obligation to build a world where the orphan is fed, the widow is defended, and the stranger is loved, not merely tolerated. This is what circumcising the heart means, not softness for its own sake, and not rigid rule following for its own sake, but cutting away whatever hardness keeps our love from reaching all the way down into how we structure our communities, our courts, our tables, our welcomes. Ekev on the heel, not in the mountaintop, not in Revelation, but in the daily unglamorous heel tread of how we treat the vulnerable person in front of us. This is where covenant lives. This is where love

Covenant In Daily Practice

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becomes justice, and justice becomes loving. May we, like the God we are called upon to imitate, learn to hold both in the same hand, and may our heels, the lowest and most ordinary part of us, carry that love into the world. And I wish you on this Shabbat Ekev, a Shabbat Shalom.