Weekly D'var

PARASHAT EIKEV
George Siegel

In the Wall Street Journal, Saturday, August 10, 2025, Barton Swaim, Editorial Page Writer, wrote: “The socialist impulse, like the poor it’s meant to aid, will always be with us, that it [The socialist impulse] proliferates when three circumstances converge: youth, disaffection and irreligion.” From what do these circumstances arise? We know whence youth comes.  We might agree with Swaim, who writes that “youth are naturally ignorant of history and are generally naive about human motivation [and that] a sensible education can counteract the misguided idealism of youth.”

However, during and after the 1970’s after the cold war ended, education departed from studying what civilization is and what it came from and entered a void taken over by “nihilism and self-hating multi-culturalism.” Thus, for the last wo generations, as Swaim wrote, “America’s young people were taught to think of their country as a hellscape of predatory capitalism and of their world as a cold and godless moral vacuum”. This is a poisonous mixture. As an editorial journalist, Swaim is interested in a political message and he pointed out “that for students raised on that outlook, socialism offers meaning and excitement.” I understand that means that for such an outlook on life, it is a platform on which disaffected youth can gear up for social activism, which is not actually what Torah means by the mitzvah of gifts and charity for the destitute. Swaim did not write this specifically, but I believe that his succinct concatenation of “youth, disaffection and irreligion” combined with the flood of electronic distribution of senseless tripe lead to the inversion of morality and sympathy for the aggressors and dictators and immorality for the defenders against aggression. Even such a hero of WW II as Winston Churchill has been cast by some casters as the chief villain of WW, and “the good guys lost WW2” WSJ, August 9.

But, I was interested in another question: what does religion have to do with all this? By religion. I mean, of course, our religion from which Christianity sprang. And, Swaim, in the very same article answered me: “The only antidote to that outlook is its opposite: What is the opposite to disaffection of youth and irreligion? Swaim’s answer: gratitude to family, to nation and, ultimately, to God.”

This led me to our sedra today. I thought this is exactly what Moshe is talking about in his final oration to Benai Yisroel as they are encamped across the Jordan from Jericho readying to enter the promised land as a nation.

How does the oration of Moshe in this entire book of Devorim relate to youth, disaffection and religion?

I read this as an element in Hashem’s plan for the growth and development of the civilization of humanity in the world. Moshe has been teaching the people of God’s statutes and ethics of freedom, liberty, social propriety, interpersonal propriety, governance propriety, how to protect the continuance in their families into the future of the Faith in God’s world. The world which God has been teaching them through Moshe for 40 years while wandering through the desert. Now Moshe’s and God’s concerns are that the people remember all these safeguards to morality and not forget them when they are successful, living off the land, with their own government and humanistic instincts to sustain them. How will they remember? How do our contemporary generations remember? With all the rituals of service, the rules of behavior from minute to minute while they are awake and traveling or home at night or awakening in the morn and to put into the mouths of their children in every generation wherever they are the teachings they received from God through Moshe.

What is the singular core belief of which they are to be constantly reminded in which to have complete faith? That is given by Moshe as the singular mitzvah separated from all the chukim and mishpatim (chapter 6:1). That mitzvah is love (chapter 6:4). “Shema yisroel, etc “followed by “Ve’ahavta…etc.”. This is the singular core mitzvah of Torah, upon which all else rests, and it is expressed by love.

But looking toward the future when he is not even going to enter the land, Moshe is imbued by Hashem with a fervor to ensure that the Children of Yisroel in all future generations, wherever they are, will not forget his teaching or suffer a void of education in the history of their people’s development and moral structure so as not to accede to the disaffection of the youth that Moshe , as a great teacher, knows will come if the basic history of civilization and the guardrails of morality , starting with love of God as the ultimate authority, are not taught diligently. I think this is what Swaim understands in his article in the WSJ.

Love goes with reciprocal gratitude and that reciprocity preserves peace whether among family, people or nations. Love stemming from love for God and from God’s love for the people chosen to disseminate these beliefs to the world. Rambam, in his listing of mitzvot, places #1 and #2 “Believing in God” and “Unity of God” which are both in the Shema Yisroel and immediately next #3 is “love for God”.

And, why is it so, that all else rests on Love? This is a good question for kabbalists, poets and philosophers. We all here probably have different answers. I think that where there is real love there is reciprocal gratitude and how can you have anything else but peace where this reciprocity exists?

With this I say thanks to my beloved wife, Marion, for the growing of our mutual love-gratitude reciprocity and to our children visiting now from Las Vegas for our anniversary and a couple of birthdays.

Shabbat shalom.