Food That Isn’t Even Yours -- Eikev 5786

I’ve been thinking all week about a line from Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. I won’t worry too much about spoilers — the story has been around for nearly three thousand years.

Near the end of the film, Odysseus finally makes it home to Ithaca after twenty years away. To say that the journey has not gone according to plan would be an understatement. The Trojan War took ten years, the trip home took another ten, and by the time Odysseus reaches Ithaca, he has lost every ship and every man who set out with him.

But Odysseus does not stride into the palace and announce the triumphant return of the king. Instead, he enters his own home disguised as a beggar. There, he finds Penelope’s suitors eating his food, drinking his wine, slaughtering his livestock, and consuming the wealth of his household.

Odysseus goes around the room asking them for scraps. Some reluctantly give him a morsel. Others mock and abuse him. Antinous, the worst of the suitors — played in the movie by a perfectly cast, sneering Robert Pattinson — responds with particular cruelty.

And Odysseus asks him a devastating question: How can you be so stingy with food that is not even yours?

It is not simply that the suitors are greedy or inhospitable. They have eaten at another person’s table for so long that they have begun to imagine themselves as its owners. They believe they possess the right to determine who deserves a portion and who does not, even as they gorge themselves on another person’s goods.

The suitors have forgotten that they are just guests. That is precisely what Moses fears will happen to the Children of Israel when they enter the Promised Land.

In today’s parashah, Moses tells the people that the land they are about to enter is “a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing.”

After forty years of wandering through the wilderness, dependent each day on manna from heaven, this is the promise the Israelites have been waiting for. They will finally enjoy stability and security. They will cultivate fields, build homes, accumulate wealth, and eat their fill.

But Moses is worried about what will happen when they do. “When you have eaten your fill,” he warns, “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 the Infinite your God who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”

Just a few chapters earlier, Moses reminds the Israelites that they will enter great cities they did not build, houses filled with goods they did not acquire, cisterns they did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves they did not plant. They will eat their fill, and eventually the food will feel like theirs. The houses will feel like theirs. The land will feel like theirs. Guests, in other words, will begin to imagine themselves as owners.

Moses knows, of course, that scarcity can be dangerous. When people feel they don’t have enough, they can become anxious, competitive, suspicious, and cruel. But here, Moses is preoccupied with a different danger. Yes, scarcity can make us fearful. But abundance can make us forgetful: “Beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Infinite your God who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”

Why would eating our fill make our hearts haughty? Why would living in fine houses and enjoying material security cause us to forget God? What, exactly, does it mean to forget God, anyway?

Moses offers one answer a few verses later. Once the Israelites have prospered, they may begin to say, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”

The danger is not simply that prosperous people will fail to feel grateful. It is that prosperity will distort their understanding of what they possess.

Most of us, of course, work hard for what we have. We make sacrifices, develop our gifts, exercise discipline, and seize opportunities. The Torah does not deny human effort or agency. But none of us is entirely self-made.

Our health and abilities, our families and communities, our education and opportunities, the stability and infrastructure of the society in which we live, the people who opened doors for us, the sacrifices made by previous generations, and countless turns of fortune all help determine how far our efforts can take us.

Put differently, if life were a race, some of us get to begin much closer to the finish line. Yet those of us who have benefited most from life’s lottery tend to minimize the role of luck in our success. We prefer to understand our prosperity as entirely the product of our own agency — which also implies that those who are worse off must somehow deserve their misfortune.

Over time, our blessings begin to feel normal. What feels normal begins to feel deserved: “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” But the problem doesn’t stop there: we eventually become possessive over that which we feel we’ve earned. And once we believe that everything in our hands belongs to us alone, we naturally assume that no one else has a legitimate claim upon it.

Moses does not stop there. Later in the parashah, he returns to this danger in a passage so familiar that we may fail to notice how closely it is connected to what came before. We know it as the second paragraph or portion of the Shema, but it is originally found in this week’s parashah.

In that passage, Moses imagines Israel settled in the land, the rains falling, the fields producing grain, wine, and oil, and the people eating their fill. Then he warns, “Take care lest your heart be seduced and you turn away.” Most of us were taught to understand this passage as a straightforward theology of reward and punishment: If Israel obeys God’s commandments, rain will fall, crops will flourish, and the people will eat their fill. If Israel disobeys, the heavens will close, the crops will fail, and the people will perish.

Read that way, the passage seems to reinforce the very illusion Moses has been warning against. If prosperity is the reward for righteousness, then my success becomes evidence of my virtue. I have what I have because I earned it, because I deserve it, perhaps even because God has judged me worthy. And if another person has less, then perhaps their deprivation is not my responsibility. Perhaps it is their fault. Prosperity becomes moral vindication.

But Professor Rabbi Reuven Kimelman offers a different way to understand the passage. He points out that it does not follow the Torah’s normal formulation of reward and punishment. The text does not say, “If you obey, rain will fall; but if you do not obey, rain will not fall.” Instead, it says: If you obey the commandments, and if rain falls, and if the land produces grain, wine, and oil, and if you eat your fill — then take care lest your heart be seduced and you turn away.

In other words, the passage is not primarily promising prosperity as the reward for faithfulness. It is a warning – that prosperity may undermine faithfulness. The rain and the abundant harvest are not only blessings. They are also tests.

The second portion of the Shema is therefore not teaching that good people become wealthy and bad people become poor. It is a warning that wealth can cause good people to lose their way.

The Torah’s solution is not austerity. Moses does not tell the Israelites to reject the land’s bounty, refuse to build homes, or refrain from eating their fill. Instead, the Torah prescribes education and practice: “You shall eat, you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless the Infinite your God for the good land God has given you.”

For those of you keeping score, the rabbis understood this as the source of the commandment to recite birkat hamazon, the blessing after meals. Why does the Torah command us to make a blessing after we eat, rather than before? Because hunger makes our dependence obvious. Satisfaction, however, makes us forget. Gratitude does not necessarily arise spontaneously from abundance. It must be deliberately cultivated.

The Torah includes expressions of gratitude in its rules around eating because appreciating what we have protects us from compulsively seeking more to fill perceived — and often fictional — deficiencies. Blessing after eating reminds us that satisfaction is possible, that what we have may be enough, and that we did not produce it all by ourselves.

This is also why the second paragraph of the Shema commands us to place these words upon our hearts and souls, bind them to our hands and between our eyes, teach them to our children, discuss them at home and on the road, morning and evening, and affix them to our doorposts.

The Torah surrounds us with practices of remembrance so that prosperity will not erase our awareness of dependence.

The mezuzah is especially powerful in this regard. At the doorway — the boundary between what we call “my house” and the world beyond it — we place words reminding us that the home is not absolutely ours. It is a blessing entrusted to us and therefore a place from which we are called to serve God.

Deuteronomy’s educational strategy is to surround people, and especially their children, with reminders strong enough to resist the seductions of material success.

But remembering that our blessings come from beyond ourselves is only the beginning. The decisive question is what that memory moves us to do.

Earlier in our parashah, Moses describes God as One who “upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing food and clothing.” And then Moses commands: “You too must love the stranger.”

In other words, forgetting God does not necessarily mean becoming an atheist. It means forgetting who God is and what God cares about.

To remember the God of the Exodus is to remember the God who hears the cries of the oppressed, liberates the enslaved, champions the vulnerable, and provides food and clothing to the stranger.

Forgetting God means becoming the kind of person who can eat well without hearing the hungry.

The Talmud tells of Elijah the Prophet regularly visiting a pious man. But after the man constructed a fortified wall around his property, Elijah stopped coming. According to Rashi, Elijah objected because the wall prevented the people inside from hearing poor people crying for help outside. By protecting his prosperity, the man had insulated himself from the people to whom his prosperity obligated him.

We require protection not only from that which might threaten our prosperity, but also from prosperity itself — because wealth can build walls around our moral imagination, closing our ears and our hearts to those in need.

The moral message of Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is what he calls “Zeus’s law”: Be hospitable toward the beggar and the stranger, because they could be a god in disguise. 

The biblical version of this imperative is similar, but slightly different in an important way. The Torah doesn’t call upon us to treat the beggar or stranger well because they might secretly be somebody — a king, a hero, perhaps even a god. Rather, the Torah demands that we treat the beggar well even when society regards them as a nobody — because before God, there is no such thing as a “nobody.” To the Most High, everybody is a somebody.

The stranger does not have to be secretly important. The stranger need not prove that he is virtuous, useful, deserving, or capable of repaying us. The stranger has a claim upon us because he is a human being, created in the divine image and loved by God.

And because the food was never ours alone.

My home state’s senator, Reverend Raphael Warnock, has something powerful to say about this. Recently, he was talking about America’s affordability crisis, and he pointed out that it’s not really an “affordability crisis” as much as it is a spiritual crisis. We live, he noted, in “a wealthy nation and on a plentiful planet,” yet we increasingly view our neighbors not as bound up with our own flourishing but as competitors in a struggle for scarce resources. Warnock called this “a lapse in the covenant that we have with one another.” Our deepest deficit, he argued, is not that we have a poverty of resources but rather “a poverty of moral imagination and moral courage.”

This is what prosperity can do to us. It can narrow our vision – convincing us that helping another person diminishes us, teaching us to regard our neighbor’s child as someone else’s responsibility, and that child’s needs as competing with our own.

But the Torah demands we cultivate a more capacious moral imagination — the conviction, as Warnock puts it, that our children cannot truly succeed unless our neighbors’ children succeed.

Our society possesses enormous resources; we are perhaps the most affluent society in human history. Yet despite all of our extraordinary prosperity, children remain hungry. Families struggle to afford housing, health care, child care, and education. People work hard and still cannot make ends meet. Resources are not unlimited, and choices must be made. But those choices always reveal our values. We routinely find the money for whatever we have determined matters most.

The question we perpetually face is whether feeding children, housing families, healing the sick, and protecting the vulnerable rank among our highest priorities — or whether we have become like Penelope’s suitors: lavish with ourselves and stingy toward others, even with food that was never exclusively ours.

The Torah does not want us to be poor. It wants us to be able to eat our fill, to build fine houses, and to enjoy the blessings of prosperity. Yet at the same time, it wants us always to bear in mind that we are fundamentally just guests.

Because the moment we forget that we are just guests in God’s world is the moment we begin resenting the hungry for asking us to share.

May the blessings we enjoy open our hearts rather than harden them.

May our prosperity enlarge our moral imagination rather than impoverish it.

May we remember that every home is built upon foundations we did not lay alone, that every table is ultimately God’s table, and that before God there is no such thing as a nobody.

And may we use the abundance entrusted to us to build a society in which every child is cherished as our child, every stranger is welcomed as our neighbor, every cry of need is heard, and all people enjoy a rightful share in the bounty of God’s world.

Then our land will truly become the land Moses envisioned: a good land, a land of blessing, a land where all may eat and be satisfied, and where no one lacks anything.