All the feels in a field...
So much of our lives are dedicated to finding comfort and ease, but the Torah has great wisdom in this week's parasha, Ekev, when it says that comfort leads us to forget God. The "padding" of comfort makes us forget that everything is fragile, that we are totally dependent beings.
On the other hand, those who have known real poverty or suffering have an automatic closeness to understanding our reliance and real gratitude when life gets comfier.
I certainly don't want to glamorise suffering or suggest we deliberately put ourselves in that place. But I do want to say - go live in a field for a few days! Experience the edges of life being a little bit closer.
Also, I realise that I've made a really lovely camping trip sound like terrible deprivation 😆 We're actually having a great time, with lovely people, really good food, warm clothes and a dry, comfy tent. But the acuteness of feeling out here is just closer. You get your vulnerability. You also see the way the sun rises and sets, how wet and dewy it is, even on a summer morning, how the cloud cover affects how warm the night is, and some incredible big moons. Go camping!
"Remember the long way that your God יהוה has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, in order to test you by hardships... [God] subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your ancestors had ever known, in order to teach you that a human being does not live on bread alone, but that one may live on anything that יהוה decrees."
Devarim 8:2-3
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