Eikev/The Paths of Love and Violence are Interconnected

This week Torah continues plunging head on into the human urge to kill, destroy, take revenge, seek safety by wiping out who and what we believe is threatening everyone and everything we love. What drives one group to follow laws that put other groups in cages, exterminate them, see them as less than human? To train its own to carry this out? And how is it that the people in whose name these heinous acts are done seem to be rewarded? Or are they? Torah does not shy away from these questions that haunt us to this day, when we look deeply at what is going on in our world today?

The opening line of this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, calls upon us to look and listen deeply( “shema” ) at our actions and their consequences (“eikev”). Do our urges to “wipe out” those whom we think of as enemies lead us closer to the safety and security we seek? In Torah, the unpronounceable energy translated as God is the generative and all encompassing Source of the urges, the voices we hear and follow, that impel us to wipe out perceived enemies and the longing for safety and security.

Torah puts front and center before us that the horrors inflicted by humans do arise simultaneously with the human longing to soften and open our hearts, particularly to the stranger, so that we, in Torah’s words, “Cut away the thickening about your hearts and be stiffnecked no longer.” Our actions and deeds actually contain and are inseparable, eikev, from our heart’s longings to pierce through our own internal barriers to compassion and love, to soften the hardness that comes out of fear and desperation.

This week’s Torah story urges the people to “cling to” the Source of all of this, to understand that the nourishment, safety and security we need, and the violence we perpetrate, are from this same Source.

Does this help us out of the cycle of violence, hatred and destroying the very conditions of life we need to survive? The Torah portion says yes, by ending with the call to love. Only by loving the Source of all, the horror and the heart’s yearning to open and expand to love, exemplified by loving the stranger, will we enter the Promised Land where we are offered at least the conditional safety and abundance all humans need to survive. This can happen only by looking and listening deeply and “cleaving to” the understanding that everything is interconnected, including the intentions, actions and consequences of our actions. The Promised Land is the consciousness produced by listening deeply to our own hearts and trusting that our safety and nourishment will come when we remember we too have been strangers, make space for everyone in our hearts and release what holds us back from stretching to do that.

Why do Torah and so many spiritual traditions use violence and hatred to demonstrate the need to embrace love and interconnection?

Many years ago, my friend Diana Wolkstein and I asked this question to Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. He replied that all great spiritual traditions have mindfulness at their heart, and that the way they speak and teach has to do with the historical conditions under which the tradition arose. Our path is to look deeply to find the mindfulness.

One of the fruits Thich Nhat Hanh taught about looking deeply is to understand that our actions and the results of our actions, called karma in Buddhism, are inseparable. This understanding comes from looking deeply, from observing, as the opening verse of Eikev says, the interconnectedness of everything to the shared source.

The Way Out is Through

These teachings of Buddhism and Torah do suggest a way out for us. Nonviolent Communication offers a technology for this. When we understand that our violence and our yearning for love come from the same source and are reaching for the same things, we put before ourselves the choice of love over violence to meet our needs. We can look with compassion to those we consider our “enemies,” because we understand the impulses that arise within ourselves to do what they do. This isn’t an easy path. Torah shows over and over how the path of the human heart leads through a scarred landscape. But it is the only transformative and sustainable path.

For more teachings from Torah at the Intersection on Eikev:

Eikev: Love, not violence, is our medicine

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August 22, 2024

This week we turn to another chapter in Torah that seems to prescribe the horrors of violent conquest, xenophobia and exceptionalism. Torah at the Intersection is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

By Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon

“We do not see ourselves as Palestinians and Israelis, or as Jews and Arabs, but as human beings who believe in fostering a culture of dialogue, a culture of forgiveness, and a culture of peace. To those who see only division lines, we say: If you must divide us, let it be as those who believe in peace and equality and those who don’t ... yet.”

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