Parshat Eikev poses for us the great question: What is the real challenge of a free society?
And in this week's parsha, Moshe Rabbeinu springs the great surprise.
Let us see his words:
"Be careful that you don't forget the Lord your God. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. If you ever forget the Lord your God, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed."
Now what Moshe Rabbeinu is saying - and it is really something very surprising - is he is turning to the new generation and saying: you thought the years in the wilderness were the real trial, and now you're going to enter the Land of Israel and everything will be easy.
He said, Exactly the opposite is the case. The real challenge isn't poverty. The real challenge is affluence. It is when you settle down when you don't have huge challenges, when you grow well off, that is when you are in greatest danger. That is when the spiritual trial will really begin.
Now, what Moshe Rabbeinu is doing here is something very interesting that doesn't happen very often, and it happens only to certain very outstanding historical scholars in the course of civilisation.
One of the first was the great Islamic th century teacher called Ibn Khaldun.
Ibn Khaldun gave an overarching theory of the decline in all of civilisation.
We know that all civilisations or great civilisations begin by military victory by being very powerful or very energetic or very driven.
Then they settle down. Then they become affluent, and then they begin to lose what he called Asaba, which is the Arabic word for what we would call social cohesion.
People begin to get more interested in themselves, and they stop worrying about their neighbours and the good of other people. And they stop worrying about the poor, and that is when they lose social cohesion.
When that happens, they are no longer able to win battles, and they lose their battles to people who are less affluent and more driven.
So that was the first great historian of the decline and fall of civilisations.
The second was the Italian scholar Gian Battista Vico, who wrote in the early th century.
Very, very profound thinker, an absolute one off in Western culture who, in a book of his called The New Science, again drew this picture of the sequence that every civilisation goes through his way of putting it is first people worry about what's necessary.
Then they worry about what's useful. Then they attend to their comfort. Then they start delighting in pleasures. Then they start concentrating on luxuries which leads them to become dissolute, and finally they go mad, squandering their estates. They get into a situation like America and Britain. At that moment, they build up huge levels of personal debt they spend tomorrow and weaken themselves.
Today, the latest person to do so is none other than our Scottish professor of history at Harvard, Niall Ferguson, who in his latest book, Civilisation, says that the West had six killer apps or applications which made their programme work better than anyone else's programme.
They were competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. Those six things made the West beat everyone else.
But today the West is in danger of losing them.
And all of this was said for the first time by Moshe ReNu Millennia before anyone else number one.
If you grow affluent, you may forget where you came from and all the battles you had to fight to get where you are when you forget about your past and you concentrate only on the present, then inequalities grow.
A few people get mega rich and a whole lot of people get mega poor. When that happens, there's a loss of social cohesion. People don't really care about the welfare of other people, and when that happens, society grows weaker, and when that happens, there is eventually defeat and devastation Moshe Rabbeinu is saying the real challenge isn't poverty. The real challenge is affluence.
So how do you defeat what scientists call entropy, which says that all systems lose energy over time?
Can you create a society that is capable of defeating the normal laws of the decline and fall of civilisation? It never happened. Could it happen?
And Moshe Rabbeinu is really spelling out this programme in Devarim of a society that will never grow old.
The first thing you have to do, he says throughout devarim is never forget who you are and where you came from.
You were an ever. You remember the past. We were all once slaves. We shared a fate, so we should care about one another.
Number two. Create a society where there's justice.
Where's the rule of law, where people feel that everyone is behaving responsibly, where there is genuine provision for people who are poor and where everyone has dignity and thirdly, recognise a power greater than yourself.
Always remember that it is God who led you to where you are, and it is God that you have to serve because in the long run, the only alternative to serving God is serving yourself. And when a society is full of people serving themselves, it ceases to be a society.
So we see that Moshe Rabbeinu is putting forward a thesis which is as new as this year and Neil Ferguson's new book, Civilisation.
Let me just quote to you one little wonderful example from towards the end of Neil Ferguson's book, he says, and this is a most unlikely source, cos don't forget.
China was a radically secular communist regime, and Chairman Mao said years ago we have made China religion free.
Towards the end of his book Civilisation, Niall Ferguson talks about a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Science who said that we were set the problem by the government to find out what made the West beat us in everything (because China was ahead of the West until the 17th century, they invented all sorts of things before the West did.) But somehow, from the 17th century onwards, the West started gaining on China and overtook it.
And the scholars said, "At first we thought the West was one because it had better guns than we did. It had better military, it could shoot better. Then we studied a bit deeper and we said no. The reason the West won is it has a better political system that we have. It has democracy."
And then he said "No. We studied further and we realised that the reason the West was successful is because it had a better economic system than we had. It was the free market that led to democracy that led to better guns," he said. "But for the last years we've realised the real answer. It's your religion." And this in China, the most secular of all states, which is now rapidly becoming religious incidentally, so here it is.
It is actually religion.
Faith in God, belief in a power greater than yourselves. That is the only thing that actually allows nations to defeat the decline and fall that happens to every great society. Or, in simple words, a society is as strong as its faith. That was what Moshe Rabbeinu was telling the Israelites before they entered the land. It still remains true today.
Shabbat Shalom
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Parshat Eikev poses for us the great question: What is the real challenge of a free society?
And in this week's parsha, Moshe Rabbeinu springs the great surprise.
Let us see his words:
"Be careful that you don't forget the Lord your God. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. If you ever forget the Lord your God, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed."
Now what Moshe Rabbeinu is saying - and it is really something very surprising - is he is turning to the new generation and saying: you thought the years in the wilderness were the real trial, and now you're going to enter the Land of Israel and everything will be easy.
He said, Exactly the opposite is the case. The real challenge isn't poverty. The real challenge is affluence. It is when you settle down when you don't have huge challenges, when you grow well off, that is when you are in greatest danger. That is when the spiritual trial will really begin.
Now, what Moshe Rabbeinu is doing here is something very interesting that doesn't happen very often, and it happens only to certain very outstanding historical scholars in the course of civilisation.
One of the first was the great Islamic th century teacher called Ibn Khaldun.
Ibn Khaldun gave an overarching theory of the decline in all of civilisation.
We know that all civilisations or great civilisations begin by military victory by being very powerful or very energetic or very driven.
Then they settle down. Then they become affluent, and then they begin to lose what he called Asaba, which is the Arabic word for what we would call social cohesion.
People begin to get more interested in themselves, and they stop worrying about their neighbours and the good of other people. And they stop worrying about the poor, and that is when they lose social cohesion.
When that happens, they are no longer able to win battles, and they lose their battles to people who are less affluent and more driven.
So that was the first great historian of the decline and fall of civilisations.
The second was the Italian scholar Gian Battista Vico, who wrote in the early th century.
Very, very profound thinker, an absolute one off in Western culture who, in a book of his called The New Science, again drew this picture of the sequence that every civilisation goes through his way of putting it is first people worry about what's necessary.
Then they worry about what's useful. Then they attend to their comfort. Then they start delighting in pleasures. Then they start concentrating on luxuries which leads them to become dissolute, and finally they go mad, squandering their estates. They get into a situation like America and Britain. At that moment, they build up huge levels of personal debt they spend tomorrow and weaken themselves.
Today, the latest person to do so is none other than our Scottish professor of history at Harvard, Niall Ferguson, who in his latest book, Civilisation, says that the West had six killer apps or applications which made their programme work better than anyone else's programme.
They were competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. Those six things made the West beat everyone else.
But today the West is in danger of losing them.
And all of this was said for the first time by Moshe ReNu Millennia before anyone else number one.
If you grow affluent, you may forget where you came from and all the battles you had to fight to get where you are when you forget about your past and you concentrate only on the present, then inequalities grow.
A few people get mega rich and a whole lot of people get mega poor. When that happens, there's a loss of social cohesion. People don't really care about the welfare of other people, and when that happens, society grows weaker, and when that happens, there is eventually defeat and devastation Moshe Rabbeinu is saying the real challenge isn't poverty. The real challenge is affluence.
So how do you defeat what scientists call entropy, which says that all systems lose energy over time?
Can you create a society that is capable of defeating the normal laws of the decline and fall of civilisation? It never happened. Could it happen?
And Moshe Rabbeinu is really spelling out this programme in Devarim of a society that will never grow old.
The first thing you have to do, he says throughout devarim is never forget who you are and where you came from.
You were an ever. You remember the past. We were all once slaves. We shared a fate, so we should care about one another.
Number two. Create a society where there's justice.
Where's the rule of law, where people feel that everyone is behaving responsibly, where there is genuine provision for people who are poor and where everyone has dignity and thirdly, recognise a power greater than yourself.
Always remember that it is God who led you to where you are, and it is God that you have to serve because in the long run, the only alternative to serving God is serving yourself. And when a society is full of people serving themselves, it ceases to be a society.
So we see that Moshe Rabbeinu is putting forward a thesis which is as new as this year and Neil Ferguson's new book, Civilisation.
Let me just quote to you one little wonderful example from towards the end of Neil Ferguson's book, he says, and this is a most unlikely source, cos don't forget.
China was a radically secular communist regime, and Chairman Mao said years ago we have made China religion free.
Towards the end of his book Civilisation, Niall Ferguson talks about a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Science who said that we were set the problem by the government to find out what made the West beat us in everything (because China was ahead of the West until the 17th century, they invented all sorts of things before the West did.) But somehow, from the 17th century onwards, the West started gaining on China and overtook it.
And the scholars said, "At first we thought the West was one because it had better guns than we did. It had better military, it could shoot better. Then we studied a bit deeper and we said no. The reason the West won is it has a better political system that we have. It has democracy."
And then he said "No. We studied further and we realised that the reason the West was successful is because it had a better economic system than we had. It was the free market that led to democracy that led to better guns," he said. "But for the last years we've realised the real answer. It's your religion." And this in China, the most secular of all states, which is now rapidly becoming religious incidentally, so here it is.
It is actually religion.
Faith in God, belief in a power greater than yourselves. That is the only thing that actually allows nations to defeat the decline and fall that happens to every great society. Or, in simple words, a society is as strong as its faith. That was what Moshe Rabbeinu was telling the Israelites before they entered the land. It still remains true today.
Shabbat Shalom
What is the real challenge of maintaining a free society? In parshat Eikev, Moses springs his great surprise. Here are his words:
What Moses was saying to the new generation was this: You thought that the forty years of wandering in the wilderness were the real challenge, and that once you conquer and settle the land, your problems will be over. The truth is that it is then that the real challenge will begin. It will be precisely when all your physical needs are met – when you have land and sovereignty and rich harvests and safe homes – that your spiritual trial will commence.
The real challenge is not poverty but affluence, not insecurity but security, not slavery but freedom. Moses, for the first time in history, was hinting at a law of history. Many centuries later it was articulated by the great 14th century Islamic thinker, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), by the Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), and most recently by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. Moses was giving an account of the decline and fall of civilisations.
Ibn Khaldun argued similarly, that when a civilisation becomes great, its elites get used to luxury and comfort, and the people as a whole lose what he called their asabiyah, their social solidarity. The people then become prey to a conquering enemy, less civilised than they are but more cohesive and driven.
Vico described a similar cycle:
Bertrand Russell put it powerfully in the introduction to his History of Western Philosophy. Russell thought that the two great peaks of civilisation were reached in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. But he was honest enough to see that the very features that made them great contained the seeds of their own demise:
Niall Ferguson, in his book Civilisation: the West and the Rest (2011) argued that the West rose to dominance because of what he calls its six “killer applications”: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic. Today however it is losing belief in itself and is in danger of being overtaken by others.
All of this was said for the first time by Moses, and it forms a central argument of the book of Devarim. If you assume – he tells the next generation – that you yourselves won the land and the freedom you enjoy, you will grow complacent and self-satisfied. That is the beginning of the end of any civilisation. In an earlier chapter Moses uses the graphic word venoshantem, “you will grow old” (Deut. 4:25), meaning that you will no longer have the moral and mental energy to make the sacrifices necessary for the defence of freedom.
Inequalities will grow. The rich will become self-indulgent. The poor will feel excluded. There will be social divisions, resentments and injustices. Society will no longer cohere. People will not feel bound to one another by a bond of collective responsibility. Individualism will prevail. Trust will decline. Social capital will wane.
This has happened, sooner or later, to all civilisations, however great. To the Israelites – a small people surrounded by large empires – it would be disastrous. As Moses makes clear towards the end of the book, in the long account of the curses that would overcome the people if they lost their spiritual bearings, Israel would find itself defeated and devastated.
Only against this background can we understand the momentous project the book of Devarim is proposing: the creation of a society capable of defeating the normal laws of the growth-and-decline of civilisations. This is an astonishing idea.
How is it to be done? By each person bearing and sharing responsibility for the society as a whole. By each knowing the history of his or her people. By each individual studying and understanding the laws that govern all. By teaching their children so that they too become literate and articulate in their identity.
Rule 1: Never forget where you came from.
Next, you sustain freedom by establishing courts, the rule of law and the implementation of justice. By caring for the poor. By ensuring that everyone has the basic requirements of dignity. By including the lonely in the people’s celebrations. By remembering the covenant daily, weekly, annually in ritual, and renewing it at a national assembly every seven years. By making sure there are always Prophets to remind the people of their destiny and expose the corruptions of power.
Rule 2: Never drift from your foundational principles and ideals.
Above all it is achieved by recognising a power greater than ourselves. This is Moses’ most insistent point. Societies start growing old when they lose faith in the transcendent. They then lose faith in an objective moral order and end by losing faith in themselves.
Rule 3: A society is as strong as its faith.
Only faith in God can lead us to honour the needs of others as well as ourselves. Only faith in God can motivate us to act for the benefit of a future we will not live to see. Only faith in God can stop us from wrongdoing when we believe that no other human will ever find out. Only faith in God can give us the humility that alone has the power to defeat the arrogance of success and the self-belief that leads, as Paul Kennedy argued in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), to military overstretch and national defeat.
Towards the end of his book Civilisation, Niall Ferguson quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, part of a team tasked with the challenge of discovering why it was that Europe, having lagged behind China until the 17th century, overtook it, rising to prominence and dominance.
At first, he said, we thought it was your guns. You had better weapons than we did. Then we delved deeper and thought it was your political system. Then we searched deeper still, and concluded that it was your economic system.
But for the past 20 years we have realised that it was in fact your religion. It was the (Judeo-Christian) foundation of social and cultural life in Europe that made possible the emergence first of capitalism, then of democratic politics.
Only faith can save a society from decline and fall. That was one of Moses’ greatest insights, and it has never ceased to be true.
With thanks to the Schimmel Family for their generous sponsorship of Covenant & Conversation, dedicated in loving memory of Harry (Chaim) Schimmel.
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