Near the end of his life, the greatest prophet in history begged God for a favor and was turned down.
“Let me cross over and see the good land that is beyond the Jordan” (Deuteronomy 3:25). Moses had led the nation out of Egypt, received the Torah at Sinai, and spoken with God face to face. He was standing in Moab, close enough to see the hills of the Land in front of him. God’s answer was that he could climb the mountain and look at it, but he would not cross.
The refusal is one of the saddest moments in the Bible. But what exactly was Moses asking for?
He was not asking for scenery, and he was not asking for retirement. He already possessed everything a Jew could possess. He knew every law of the Land, including the agricultural commandments he would never perform, and he was in the middle of teaching them to the generation that would perform them. If Torah is knowledge, Moses had all of it. If Torah is closeness to God, no one has ever had more. So what was waiting on the other side of that river that a man like Moses did not already have?
The Torah portion of Eikev opens with the words “And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully” (Deuteronomy 7:12). The Hebrew language has ordinary words available for “if you do.” It chose eikev, which also means heel. The medieval commentator Rashi hears the double meaning and explains that the verse is speaking about the commandments a person tramples with his heels: the small ones, the cheap ones, the ones nobody notices you keeping.
The simple understanding of this Rashi is that we must keep all of the commandments, “even the lighter commands which a person usually treads on with his heels.” If we do, God will favor us and bless us.
But Eikev is not a portion about minor details. It is about a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper, a land where you will eat bread without scarcity and lack nothing, a land that the Lord your God cares for, on which His eyes rest from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. It is about whether the rain falls and what a nation’s conduct has to do with it. Why introduce these ideas with a word about the bottom of a foot?
Read the portion with the heel in mind and you notice that Moses keeps talking about walking.
“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways” (Deuteronomy 10:12). A few lines later, the reward for loving God and holding fast to Him arrives in the same vocabulary: “Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours” (Deuteronomy 11:24). The inheritance is not measured in prayers or longings or promises. It is measured in footprints. God had used exactly this language with Abraham at the beginning of the whole story: “Arise, walk about the land through its length and its breadth, for I will give it to you” (Genesis 13:17). Abraham was not told to study the Land or to yearn for it from a distance. He was told to get up and walk around in it.
The Sages heard the same thing. They taught that whoever walks even four cubits in the Land of Israel is assured a share in the World to Come. Nachmanides, who eventually made the journey himself, took this seriously enough to count settling the Land among the commandments binding in every generation, and he faulted those who had let it quietly drop off the list.
This is what Moses was asking for at the Jordan. There was one commandment in the Torah that he could not fulfill through knowledge, teaching, prophecy, or love, and it was the one that required him to put his feet on the ground. He pleaded for a commandment that any ordinary Jew in that camp could perform by crossing a river, and he was refused.
Now notice the sting in Rashi’s comment.
Of all the commandments in the Torah, which one did the Jewish people actually trample? Not the Sabbath, which we guarded through every exile at staggering cost. Not circumcision, not the dietary laws, not the festivals. Jews went to the stake for those. The commandment we stepped over for eighteen centuries, generation after generation, was this one. We prayed toward Jerusalem three times a day, wrote poetry about Zion, mourned her every year on the ninth of Av, and stayed where we were. The commandment of the feet became a commandment of the mouth.
A Judaism in exile drifts that way for understandable reasons. A commandment performed with the head can be perfected anywhere. It travels well, it survives persecution, and it asks nothing of your body or your circumstances. A commandment performed with the heel demands that you physically move, which means uprooting a family, abandoning a livelihood, and accepting risk on behalf of children who did not vote on the matter. Everything reasonable in a person argues that this is the small commandment, the optional one, the one that can wait for better conditions.
Rabbi Tamir Granot tells the story of his wife’s ancestor, a Hungarian rabbi named Moshe Hamburger, who understood that this is the mistake Rashi is warning about. More than a hundred and seventy years ago, he decided he was no longer willing to make it. He had been warned in Vienna by a respected Jewish writer, a man who knew the country firsthand, that children could not survive in the Land of Israel. The warning was neither foolish nor inaccurate. He went anyway, with his wife and nine children.
They reached Jaffa on a Friday afternoon. There was no dock, so Arab boatmen carried the passengers ashore on their backs, and when the family stood on the ground of the Land with their clothes still wet from the sea, Rabbi Moshe bent down and kissed the dirt. Then he straightened up and gave his exhausted family a Torah lesson.
“Today is the eve of the Sabbath, and this week we read the portion of Eikev. And it shall be, eikev, if you heed these ordinances. Rashi says these are the commandments a person tramples with his heels. So which commandment do you fulfill with your heels, with your feet? The commandment of settling the Land of Israel. Today we begin to fulfill it. Let’s start walking.”
The commandment has not changed since that afternoon at Jaffa, and neither has the way it is performed. It is not fulfilled by loving the Land, which costs nothing. It is not fulfilled by defending her in an argument, or by weeping over Jerusalem from a comfortable distance, all of which our people did faithfully for eighteen centuries while the commandment itself sat untouched under our heels. It is fulfilled by feet on ground.
Moses stood in Moab and pleaded with God for a step that most of us can now arrange with a phone and a credit card, and he was refused. The generations that trampled this commandment at least had the excuse of danger, poverty, plague, and closed borders. They were not wrong about the risks. But the Land has never been acquired by longing for it. And today it is easier than ever to walk its streets.
Abraham was told to get up and walk. Moses died wanting to. Rabbi Moshe Hamburger’s nine children inherited the Land because their father carried them onto a wet beach in Jaffa. The commandment is still performed exactly that way.
So let’s start walking.
