A phrase I heard frequently in my household growing up was, “God will provide.” My sweet father used to say it a lot. Still does, at age 90. He is not a very religious man, but he is gentle and optimistic, which is almost the same thing. His faith is not often articulated at all—much less in fancy words—but more times than I can count, when we asked him how something we had doubts about was going to work out, he would say, “God will provide.”

He was usually right.

Our Torah reading this week, Parshat Vaetchanan, begins with Moshe pleading with God for a bit of grace: the opportunity to enter the Land of Israel despite God’s determination that he wouldn’t be permitted to do so. The word vaetchanan is rooted in the letters chet-nun-nun, and depending on the conjugation, can mean either to be gracious or to seek grace. Rashi suggests that the word could also be interpreted as being from the root letters chet-nun-mem, (as in sinat chinam, baseless hatred) to mean something unearned—so in this case, according to Rashi’s reading, Moshe might be asking for an unearned gift.

The two meanings pair nicely, and the parsha supports both. In chapter 6, verse 10, we read Moshe’s prediction that the Israelites, upon entering the Land, will find waiting for them: cities they didn’t build, houses full of things they didn’t fill them with, cisterns and vineyards and olive groves…  וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ and you will eat, and you will be satisfied. The promise of the Promised Land here is that the Israelites will have their needs fulfilled, without having to work for it. They will have a head start in life, seemingly offered unconditionally from God. This seems to me the very definition of grace, and very much unearned. 

So Moshe goes on to warn the Israelites not to get so caught up in their bounty that they imagine their success to be to their own credit. Usually the so-called self-made man has a whole lot of unacknowledged help. We all do.

Vaetchanan reminds us that there is still a covenant in place. As Moses steps back from his leadership role, he reiterates this foundational teaching: 

הִשָּׁמְרוּ לָכֶם פֶּן־תִּשְׁכְּחוּ אֶת־בְּרִית יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר כָּרַת עִמָּכֶם
Watch yourselves so you don’t forget the covenant
that Adonai your God sealed with you. (Deuteronomy 4:23)

That is, the unearned goodies are actually part of a spiritual ecosystem and we have a role to play. Our role comes from words so familiar that their meaning may have dissolved in our minds; these words, too, come in our parsha this week.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכׇל־מְאֹדֶךָ
You shall love Adonai your God, with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your being. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

You could recite it all by memory, no doubt, but let’s linger over it for a moment and make a point of not taking it for granted. What is it to love God with all the fullness of our selves?

It’s complicated: we don’t even really know Who or What God is, so that makes love hard to define or fathom. And how can we be commanded to love; aren’t feelings out of our conscious control? The Israeli Torah scholar Nechama Leibowitz offers two possibilities for approaching the question of how to love God: she suggests it can mean either to love the world that God created with undistracted passion, or to sever our connections to the world in order to focus solely on God. 

I am typically wary of answers that come in black and white. After all, if we drop everything and focus only on God, we risk isolation and myopia. And if we are locked in undiscerning gratitude, we risk squandering chances to improve the world through acts of kindness and righteousness. I would rather look for a way to unbind the Leibowitz binary and find a flexible approach that allows for a little of both. 

Love, of course, is both a feeling and an action. In any deep and sustaining relationship there are times when the feeling comes to the fore, and times when the feeling might seem dormant but action carries us through. Think of it this way: When your toddler suddenly grasps a concept they have been reaching for, or mixes up their words to say something adorably wrong, or covers you with hugs and kisses, the feeling of love is the most obvious thing in the world. When your toddler dumps baby powder on the carpet five minutes before guests arrive, or falls into a lightning-storm of wild emotion because you served the Ovaltine in the wrong sippy-cup, or rips several pages out of your favorite book, the feeling of love might go quiet for a while, but the action of love will keep you steady. 

So it is with God. At different moments, we have different experiences of our love for God: sometimes all-consuming, sometimes making the long way round through deep appreciation of the world’s many blessings. Sometimes, it’s easy to feel God’s presence and love as an emotion suffuses us; sometimes not so much, and our covenantal responsibility is to love anyway, as commanded. 

Sometimes it is easy to see what God has provided; sometimes God provides us with a challenge or a question. Our task is to love through feeling—through noticing and attending to the world in all its complicated glory, and through action—in the form of mitzvot, the things we do simply because the Beloved asks.