Shabbat Parashat Eikev - 5785

Shabbat Parashat Eikev - 5785

Rabbi Hal Miller

  You shall remember the entire road on which Hashem your God led you these forty

  years in the wilderness so as to afflict you, to test you to know what is in your heart,

  whether you would observe His commandments or not. [Devarim 8:2]

Was not the forty years in the desert in order to kill off the generation that came out of Egypt and then failed with the incidents of the calf and the spies? What is the affliction, what are we being tested about, and does God not know what is in our hearts and what we will do?

If we read "to afflict you" as applying to the nation as a whole, referring to the dying out of the previous generation, we have an answer to one of our questions. But at this point in the narrative, at the end of the forty years, the people standing before Moshe are the follow-on generation, so there must be another affliction involved. Onkelos reads it "to humble you and to test you", but humbling is more commonly a different word, such as haknei'a or hashpeil. In verse 8:16 we read "Who feeds you Manna in the wilderness which your fathers did not know, in order to afflict you and in order to test you, to do good for you in your end" using the same word for afflict. Thus our verse could be referring to Manna.

Ramban understands the verse along these lines, that the people went out into the desert completely unprepared, that it was a great trial for them to follow Moshe and God to a place without food, in which case the Manna was the cure for the affliction of lack of food.

Rashi concentrates on the testing, to see whether the people would observe God's commandments and whether they would refrain from testing God or questioning His ways. This is two ways to look at testing, one of God testing the people, and secondly of the people potentially testing God.  Our verse only mentions the first, so it seems out of place for Rashi to mention the second. Most of the commentators agree with Rashi, at least as to the first reason, although some add other thoughts.

Malbim suggests that there is a difference between bechina, examination, and nisayon, test or trial. He writes, "Bechinah seeks to determine if existing properties are genuine. Nisayon seeks to discover new, hitherto unknown properties of an item. Nisayon implies an ascent to a new and higher plane, and thus Israel's wandering in the wilderness was designed to discover their latent spirituality and to elevate them to ever higher levels." The word in our verse is nisotecha, which supports Malbim that the test here is for us to learn something as opposed to letting God know something that He might not have known. Rav Hirsch agrees, "To test you: so that you learn to know yourself, learn to know how much of that moral strength you possess" and he specifies "God wished to educate us during the forty years".

Ramban takes this viewpoint farther. He writes "you will be able to know that through the performance of the commandments there is complete goodness". The verse is saying that we must learn to follow the Torah, and that if we do, God will take care of our needs.