Parshat Ekev
Rav Johnny's original thoughts on the weekly parsha
This Shabbat we read Parshat Ekev where Moshe famously asks: ‘So now (וְעַתָּה), Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only this, to revere the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul’ (Devarim 10:12).
On first glance, this verse simply seems to command the Jewish people to be loyal servants of God. However, as Rabbi Abba bar Kahana notes (see Midrash Bereishit Rabbah 21:6), the word וְעַתָּה – ‘so now’ – seems superfluous. Given this, he suggests that this is actually a code-word for Teshuvah (repentance).
Perhaps we may ask how Rabbi Abba bar Kahana knows this deeper meaning of וְעַתָּה. His answer is drawn from one of the earliest stories in the Torah where, after Adam and Chavah eat from the Tree of knowledge of Good & Evil, God expresses concern that they will consume from the Tree of Life by saying: ‘So now (וְעַתָּה) he (i.e. Adam) must be prevented from putting forth his hand and also taking from the Tree of life’ (Bereishit 3:22). Here too, the word וְעַתָּה seems superfluous, and given this, Rabbi Abba bar Kahana explains that its purpose is to offer Adam the opportunity to do teshuvah.
In his 1990 essay ‘The Word ‘Now’ - Reflections on the Psychology of Teshuva’ (found in Tradition in an Untraditional Age), Rabbi Sacks reflects on this insight of Rabbi Abba bar Kahana and, with respect to the above-mentioned verse from Parshat Ekev, he asks:
‘Normally we have some clue, in the verse itself or the semantics of the word, as to the logic of the interpretation. Here, though, the evidence is slim. True, the verse could be construed as a call to repentance: it follows Moses’ reminder of the golden calf, Divine forgiveness, and the second set of tablets – given on Yom Kippur, the great symbol of reconciliation. But where is the connection between the word ‘now’ and teshuvah? What do they have to do with one another?’
To this, Rabbi Sacks answers:
‘I found illumination from a most unusual source. My father once told me how he gave up smoking, the habit of a lifetime. He said: there is only one way. You take your cigarettes and your pipe and you throw them in the dustbin. You have to decide here and now to make the irrevocable gesture. It’s an experience I have since heard recounted many times by many people. They say, in effect, that to break any longstanding habit or dependency, there has to be a decisive ‘Now’. Tomorrow is the enemy of teshuvah.’ And this is because, ‘at the heart of teshuvah is the faith in human freewill which makes no destiny inevitable... for where we will be is dependent on…the direction we now choose to face’.
Still, while the Torah apparently uses the word וְעַתָּה to nudge us towards teshuvah, and while Rabbi Sacks explains that ‘tomorrow is the enemy of teshuvah’ and that we must seize ‘now’ in order to change, neither of these sources quantify what ‘now’ means.
However, soon after recently re-reading Rabbi Sacks’ article I then read Greg McKeown’s book Effortless, which references Laura Spinney’s 2015 NewScientist article ‘The time illusion: How your brain creates now’, which itself draws from research conducted by Dr. Marc Wittmann, who – on the basis of huge amounts of data which has been gathered on the subject - has reached the conclusion that, ‘the now we are conscious of seems to last between 2 and 3 seconds’.
This itself is startling. True, we often speak about ‘now’. But when we do, we often use it as a synonym for soon. This is why recognizing that ‘now’ is such a small window of time is not only meaningful in terms of our understanding of how our mind works, but also in terms of how we seize opportunities for change.
Given all this, what we learn from Moshe’s use of the word וְעַתָּה is that God wants us to change, and grow - and that there’s no time like the present!
Shabbat Shalom!
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