Consumed with Care
“V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta” (Deuteronomy 8:10). “And you will eat, and you will be satiated, and you will bless!”
With these three words, Moses outlines how the Israelites are supposed to retain a sense of humility in the “good land” they will soon enter. Wandering in the wilderness created a sense of dependency in the people, unmoored and relying on God for manna and direction. Once they are settled, though, and contributing their own labor to cultivate the land, Moses worries they will over-inflate their role in creating the abundance they will experience. And so, when they eat their fill, they should bless God as their ultimate benefactor. Blessing is intended to decouple having full bellies with having (overly) full egos.
In Jewish halakhic tradition, these three words establish the blessing after meals, birkat hamazon, and give shape and substance to the blessing as well.
I also see in these words an inner dynamic that functions beyond our relationship to food. The word for “eat”, achalta, is also used to describe what fire does to things - consumes them. God is described as an esh ochla, “consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24). In the Talmud (Sotah 14a), the sages struggle to reconcile this image with another image of walking after God (Deuteronomy 13:5). How are we supposed to walk after fire? Doesn’t that sound dangerous? Instead, they describe following God as modeling our behavior on God’s - to clothe the naked, visit the sick, to console mourners, etc. What they are describing is practicing care. And I think the experience of caring and the feeling of a consuming fire are not so far apart after all. Often, it is a spark of empathy that ignites a sense of responsibility and energizes our acts of care. Acting with care often leaves us feeling warm inside.
But acting from a place of care can also leave us burnt out. Which leads us to “satiation / saturation / too-much.” There is a fine line between feeling satiated and feeling sick. Medieval commentator Chizkuni defines sava’ta as when “one’s soul becomes disgusted by food.” When you have taken in so much - of work, family care, attention in one area or another, news - that you cannot possibly imagine biting more off, something has to change. The fire has gotten out of control.
Poet and critic Maggie Nelson writes that, “while we may fantasize about our care as limitless - and it may even be so, in a spiritual sense - in our daily lives, most of us run up against the fact that care, too, is an economy, with limits and breaking points… [Art critic Jan] Verwoert goes to note that, to stay engaged in the ‘disciplines of care’ that matter to us most in a media environment and economy dedicated to exhausting time and attention, one has to learn how to set limit. In some situations, Verwoert observes, ‘to profess the I Can’t’ can sometimes be ‘the only adequate way to show that you care - for the friends, family, children or lovers who require your presence, or for the continuation of a long-term creative practice that takes its time…’ It may sting when you get (or give) an I Can’t, but it likely indicates that care is engaged elsewhere.” (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint).
At the point of being consumed and saturated, burnt out from the infinite demands of care, we have two levels of response. First, set limits. We are only human. Second, bless God. By that, I think we are talking about acknowledging the fullness we are feeling and re-orienting to something larger than ourselves, perhaps to the Source of Compassion (av harachaman), the orchestrator of care in myriad and mysterious ways beyond any individual’s capacity to accomplish.
V’achalta, v’sava’ta, u’veirachta. Let us be consumed by care, satiated and saturated to the right degree with how we tend to each other, and resting in the blessing that it isn’t all on our shoulders, even if at times it feels like it.
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
