The Spiritual Danger of Abundance

Hello and welcome to Contact Chai. Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on Saturday, August 1st. We heard a guest drash from Irwin Lowenstein on the challenge of abundance. Sometimes, getting what we want is hard to accept, and harder still to accept that we didn’t really earn our blessings. If you’ve been blessed by this community, we ask you to consider giving out of a sense of abundance to sustain it by becoming a Builder. There’s a link to join or renew in the show notes.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/confronting-white-supremacy-facets-08-02-2026/

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/builder-drive-2026/

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

There's an apocryphal story about a Jewish man running late for an important job interview. He repeatedly circles a packed parking lot, panicking, until he looks to the sky and prays: “God, if you help me find a spot, I’ll go to synagogue every Shabbat… I’ll give tzedakah… I’ll keep kosher!” At that very moment, a car backs out right in front of him. He looks back up and says, “Never mind, God. I found a spot myself!”

I laugh at this story because I see myself in it — how quickly gratitude can turn into self-congratulation. The man didn't sin; he just forgot to be grateful the moment his need was met. That's not evil — that's just a very human tendency. We remember to ask but forget to receive. This story, I'll suggest, is a modern illustration of a core concern in this week's portion, Eikev: that we not take our blessings for granted nor imagine we earned them alone.

Eikev is the third portion of Deuteronomy. It's part of Moses' farewell address to a new generation of Israelites, arriving at the edge of the Promised Land after decades in the desert. Moses urges wholehearted devotion and lays out the path to future flourishing.

But, to my ear, his words felt very transactional — full of “if-then” statements: follow the commandments and you'll be blessed; forget them and you won't. A familiarity unsettled me, until I realized why: it echoed how I once parented my young daughters. “If you eat your dinner, then you can have dessert.” Like all parents, I only wanted what was best for my kids. But from where I stand now — retired, an adult-daughter dad, studying Torah — the reading surfaced harder questions: Do we need to earn blessings, or should they be a gift? Are they a reward for obedience, or freely given?

On the surface, Eikev reads as quid pro quo. Verse 7:12 says: IF you obey these rules and observe them carefully, God will maintain the covenant… and bless you. Conditional. Earned. Or so it seemed.

So, I went looking — in Talmud and in modern teachers — for whether blessings really are conditional.

Unsurprisingly, the rabbis don't agree. Some do accept the straightforward reading: obey and you're blessed; abandon the commandments and you suffer. That's literally the second paragraph of the Shema, drawn from this very parsha. I can imagine the rabbis saying, “it’s your actions that matter in this world”. Actions do matter, of course. As a parent and as a Jew, that rings true to me.

But other rabbis noticed the obvious problem: life doesn't work that way. Good people suffer; the wicked prosper — the theodicy problem Job and Jeremiah wrestled with. One Talmudic voice goes so far as to say “there is no reward for mitzvot in this world” — if we try to match every blessing to a good deed and every hardship to a sin, we'll drive ourselves crazy. It’s a heartbreaking truth: there's no truly reliable formula.

A third stream is more radical still. In Pirkei Avot, Antigonus of Sokho taught “don't serve out of desire for reward — serve simply because the relationship itself matters”. As a parent and as a Jew, this view rings equally true to me!

Rabbi Shai Held, in Judaism Is About Love, names two kinds of love in Jewish thought: Ahava Rabbah, abundant love — blessings that come before we've earned anything, the Exodus, manna, and life itself are examples — and Ahavat Olam, covenantal love, which asks us to remember. Not because God will stop loving us if we forget. Because relationships die when gratitude dies.

With those insights, I went back to Eikev. I noticed Moses isn't only warning against disobedience. He keeps repeating two things: “remember” and “don't forget.” In chapter 8, he warns:

When you've eaten your fill, built fine houses, and your flocks and silver have multiplied — beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Eternal who freed you from Egypt… and you say to yourself, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”

Sounds like the man in the parking lot story.

Moses' real fear, it seems, isn't disbelief — it's forgetting. Not that Israel will stop believing in God, but that success will make them forget they didn't earn what they have. Full bellies, fine houses, healthy flocks — comfort has a way of erasing its own origins. We'll feel like we built it all ourselves.

The rabbis point out something structural here, too: the Exodus came before Sinai. Liberation precedes obligation. God didn't demand obedience before freeing the Israelites — the gift came first, and only then: “Now live differently, with gratitude.”

Moses is speaking to a generation that never knew Egypt or slavery, about to inherit a freedom they didn't win and a covenant they didn't establish. That's our task too. Most of us inherited more than we built: language, tradition, institutions, democracy, family sacrifice. We live in an age of radical abundance our grandparents couldn't have imagined — and it's easy to say, “I made this,” about the house, the business, the kids who are thriving. Moses teaches that abundance may be more spiritually dangerous than scarcity. So maybe the question isn't “How do we earn blessings?” but “How do we respond to them?” — especially in moments of fullness, when forgetting comes easiest.

Don't think that, with this drash, I do this naturally. Far from it. I recently retired after a long career, and I noticed something surprising. I would wake up in the morning with nowhere I had to be, no meetings to prepare for, nothing I had to produce for a client. Instead of feeling grateful, I felt unsettled. An inner voice was asking, "What are you going to accomplish today?" As if simply being alive wasn't enough. As if my worth still depended on earning it.

As I've sat with Parashat Eikev during the past few weeks, I've acknowledged that this inner voice didn't begin with retirement. It's been with me for much of my life. I also believe this voice is larger than just my own story. Many Jewish families, especially those shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust, carried an extraordinary sense of responsibility—to work hard, give back, and justify the gift of life. I cherish that legacy of service. But Eikev has helped me wonder whether we can give from abundance rather than from the fear that we still must earn our place.

This past year at Mishkan has taught me something else. I didn't earn this community. But neither did I find it by waiting for it to appear. I found it by saying yes — yes to showing up, yes to letting people know me, yes to becoming part of something larger than myself. The gifts came first. My part was not to earn them, but to receive them, nurture them, and help them flourish …both for me and for others.

So, in the end, Moses' concern in Eikev is wonderfully ordinary. He's worried that we WILL flourish – we WILL get the good job, the good house, the good diagnosis, the good …..parking space — and say, “Never mind, God. I found it myself.” Eikev teaches that the covenant isn't a system for earning blessings. It's a discipline for seeing blessings …because, perhaps, the gifts have come first all along.

Shabbat Shalom.