Not The Performance, The Person.

On heels, Hunger and the lifetime of ordinary Tuesdays.

This is my bar mitzvah parasha.

The Torah has a sense of humor, or at least a long memory. The portion I first stood up and chanted as a thirteen-year-old turns out to contain, more than almost any other, the lessons I have spent the rest of my life actually learning.

I remember working hard at it. It was important to my family, to my community, to me, in the way things are important to a thirteen-year-old who doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain why they matter. And I remember my tutor. He was tough. Scary, honestly. He did not let things slide. He held me to a standard I wasn’t sure I could meet, and he didn’t particularly care whether I was comfortable in the process.

I did not appreciate him then the way I appreciate him now.

We are reading Ekev, a word that means two things simultaneously. First: heel. The back of the foot, the lowest part, the part that touches the ground last. Rashi, in his very first comment, says the parasha is named for the commandments people tend to treat lightly: the ones they tread on with their heel. The small ones. The unremarkable ones. The ones nobody is watching you keep.

The Torah makes a claim that runs directly counter to the way most of us organize our spiritual lives. We think of religion in terms of the big moments: the high holidays, the lifecycle events, the dramatic turning points. But Ekev says, “The blessing lives in the heel.” In the smaller moments. Because Ekev also means consequence, the thing that follows as a result of what came before.

We sing every Shabbat the Lecha Dodi, the piyut Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz of Tzfat wove together in the sixteenth century, and I have been sitting with one line all week. “Sof ma’aseh b’machshava techila”. The end of the deed was first in thought.

In the story of creation, Shabbat was created last. The final act of creation, and yet it was the first in divine intention, the whole point toward which everything else was building. Last in execution. First in purpose. The destination was always inside the beginning. And this is precisely where that line collides with the word that gives our parasha its name. Every consequence should already be present, in seed form, in the thought that preceded it. The life you are constructing, heel by heel, is the materialization of what you believed, at the beginning, was worth building.

The heel is not a lesser part of the body. It is what makes walking possible. A life of meaning is not constructed from peak moments, however real and necessary those are. It is constructed from the heels: the daily, unglamorous, unwitnessed return to the practice, the commitment you made when everyone was watching and have to keep when no one is. Journaling. Praying. Meetings, exercise.. The meeting you go to on the Tuesday nobody’s checking on you.

My bar mitzvah tutor was not warm. He was exacting. He corrected the same mistake more than once without softening the correction. He expected preparation and was visibly unimpressed when it was insufficient.

Moses describes God in the wilderness the same way.

“God humbled you, let you hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your ancestors know in order to teach you that a human being does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)

The sequence is deliberate, and it is not gentle. Humbling comes first. Hunger comes second. Manna comes third. And the lesson the thing that could not be transmitted any other way comes last.

You cannot learn that you don’t live by bread alone while you are full. That knowledge is structurally inaccessible to a person who has never been hungry. The tutor who lets you slide cannot teach you what the tutor who holds you to a perfect standard can.

I say this carefully; we spoke last week about the gratitude that costs something, and I don’t want to collapse into a different kind of spiritual bypassing, where hardship is automatically redemptive. It is not automatically anything. What matters is what you do with it. But there is a specific kind of knowledge: the knowledge of your own capacity, what you are actually made of, that you can do the hard thing even when you are not sure you can. That is only available on the other side of having been pushed further than you thought you could go.

What I know now is that the standard my tutor held me to the refusal to let the difficult passage stay difficult because I had stopped working on it gave me something I carried forward. Not the trope. Something underneath the trope. The knowledge that when something is hard, you do not stop. You go back. You do it again.

That is what the tough tutor was always building toward. Not the performance. The person.

We also read many parts of the second paragraph of the Shema this week. I want to spend a moment here, because the discomfort is worth examining rather than avoiding.

“If you listen carefully to my commandments... I will give rain for your land in its season. Beware lest your heart be deceived and you turn away and God will close the heavens, and there will be no rain.” (Deuteronomy 11:13-17)

Obey: it rains. Turn away: the rain stops.

The easy objection is that this isn’t true: righteous people suffer drought, the wicked prosper. The reward-and-punishment theology seems naive and contradicted by lived experience.

But this is not a vending machine theology. It is describing not the behavior of a punishing God but the behavior of systems of communities, of relationships, of the self when the daily tending stops. You do not need divine intervention to explain what happens when a person in long-term recovery stops attending meetings because things are finally fine. (Have you ever asked the doctor for medicine, and he prescribes it for 2 weeks, and you start to feel good, but then stop taking it?) You do not need a supernatural explanation for what happens to a relationship when both people stop doing the unglamorous daily work. The rain stops. Not because God is angry. Because rain requires the conditions that produce it, and those conditions have to be maintained. Daily. Without applause.

The Sefat Emet reads the second paragraph as much a description of interiority as of exteriority. The rain that falls or doesn’t fall is also the rain inside you: the aliveness, the connection, the sense that what you are doing means something. That aliveness is not self-sustaining. It requires tending. It requires the heel.

And here is where all three threads braid into the same cord.

The heel: the commandments nobody’s watching you keep are exactly what the second paragraph of the Shema describes. Not the dramatic public commitment. The daily private one. The practice you maintain when things are good, when you could tell yourself you no longer need it.

The tough tutor, God in the wilderness, my tutor in the room with the torah, was teaching this lesson from the other direction. You learned in the hunger what you could not have learned in the fullness. Now the question is whether, in the fullness, you remember what the hunger taught.

“Sof ma’aseh b’machshava techila”. The end of the deed was first in thought. Which means that right now in this room, on this Shabbat, the life being built by your next hundred ordinary Tuesdays is already present in what you believe about yourself and what you are willing to tend. The rain falls where the conditions are maintained; the heel lands where the intention sends it.

The destination is already inside this moment. Build accordingly.

Shabbat shalom.