(12) And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the LORD your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and soul, (13) keeping the LORD’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good. (14) Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the LORD your God, the earth and all that is on it! (15) Yet it was to your fathers that the LORD was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose you, their lineal descendants, from among all peoples—as is now the case. (16) Cut away (circumcise), therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more.
What do we learn from this? What is the take away?
- Moses is trying to inspire the Israelites and have them feel special that they are the chosen ones.
- Moses is trying to encourage them to become closer to God
- we may feel special, but we have to do the work too
How are we to understand verse 16 (specifically the "circumcise" piece)?
Rabbi Sheldon Blank, a Bible professor at the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, explains that “an uncircumcised heart is a closed mind.” In Biblical understandings as well as many Rabbinic ones, the heart was not what we think of it now – an organ that circulates blood that we use as a symbol for emotions – specifically love, but instead, the heart was seen as an equivalent to the brain – an organ of understanding and knowledge. Rabbi Blank explains that by circumcising the heart, we are taking away the boundaries that are blocking out our ability to receive new information and be receptive to it. Once we have this awakening and realization that we need to put away our boundaries and listen to one another, only then can ideas actually take place.
(Jeremiah: Man and Prophet, Ktav, New York, 1961, pp. 193-207)
So how can we circumcise our heart/open up our minds?
Rashi explains that in order to let God’s wisdom enter the heart and be open to the words of Torah and those around us, we have to work on ourselves. He explains that this “thickening of the heart” comes from neglect of ourselves and those around us. So in order to remedy this, we must constantly study, self-scrutinize, and perform ethical and ritual mitzvot.
(Fields, H. J. (1993). Parashat Ekev. In A Torah Commentary for Our Times (Vol. 3, pp. 117-126). New York, NY: URJ Press.)
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, a commentator from the land of Israel who died in the year 275, explained that this thickening of the heart is a symbol of our yetzer ha-ra, our evil inclination which causes us to only think of ourselves. We can never fully get rid of the yetzer ha-ra, but we want our yetzer ha-tov, our good inclination, to balance out the evil or to be more present than the evil inclination. In order to make this balance happen, we need to cut away pieces of the yetzer ha-ra to let the yetzer ha-tov in. (Fields, H. J. (1993). Parashat Ekev. In A Torah Commentary for Our Times (Vol. 3, pp. 117-126). New York, NY: URJ Press.)