By Rabbi Jenni Greenspan
A few years ago, when I lived in the suburbs of Indianapolis, I decided to take a walk rather than drive to my local grocery store one day. On the walk, I had to walk along a section of sidewalk that runs next to a man-made lake that was intended to collect rain runoff.
All over this patch of sideway, there was rather a lot of, shall we say … evidence of some animal. An irritating number of my steps were rerouted to avoid stepping into anything unpleasant.
In that irritation, I assumed that someone had not cleaned up after their dog, and found myself growing angry with an anonymous stranger who couldn’t be bothered to think about how their laziness impacted others, even if minorly.
Then I glanced up at the lake for a moment and realized that it was not, in fact, evidence of a dog with a rude and self-centered owner. It was evidence of the wild geese who liked the little lake, and I simply live in a complex, incredible world that has some creatures who can and do act to help better the lives of others, and some creatures who, well, don’t.
As humans, we can go both ways. We can be the one who calls a friend when she is down, brings a meal to a relative when he is ill and cleans up the sidewalk so our neighbors can live in a clean place. And we can be the one who doesn’t care about how we affect others. I could imagine the lazy dog owner because I know it is possible for human beings to be so.
And this week’s portion seems to know how easily we could turn from one path to another.
Repeatedly, the parshah will remind us to follow God’s commandments, walk in God’s ways, be the champion for the orphan, the widow, the stranger. Indeed, we should walk in the world in a way that reminds us to care for the people who usually get trampled on.
Let’s take a look at the very first verse of this parshah (Deut 7:12): “And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, the LORD your God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant that [God] made on oath with your fathers”
The second word in the Hebrew, eikev, the name for the parshah, is an odd one in this verse. For one, it’s not actually needed to convey the meaning. For another, it’s an unusual word whose meaning is a little unclear.
It’s from the same root as the Hebrew name of our patriarch, Jacob: Ya’akov, so named because he was born holding onto the heel of his twin brother.
Rashi suggests that the root for heel appears in this verse to tell us that when we are told to obey these laws, that includes the minor ones — the ones we might think are less important, the ones we might disregard and trample upon with our heels.
In other words, it is not for us to say which mitzvot are big or small, which should be treated carefully and which we are free to quash and step upon.
And so too with our fellow human beings. We must learn not to step on others, and strive to live out mitzvot in a way that allows all to flourish. How often do we find ourselves trampling on others in minor and major ways, too focused on ourselves? How can we let our Jewish practice keep us from that tendency?
May we not simply watch where we step, but watch out for what or who we might be stepping on.
May we guard against letting the calluses of our feet find their way into our hearts.
Rabbi Jenni Greenspan is the senior rabbi of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia.
