Parshat Ekev (Deut. 7:12 – 11-25) starts off using the Hebrew word ekev to mean “if” as in “If you will listen to these laws…” But the word has another meaning in Hebrew and that is heel. We can understand how the word heel can lead to the the meaning if when we consider the phrase “on the heel of” meaning as a result of. So instead using the word if, we can translate the sentence as “As a result of your keeping these laws … God will keep you”.

If we turn to the end of the parsha we find the words “sole of the foot”. So we can say the parsha starts at the heel and goes to the sole. This verse 11:24 reads “Every place which the sole of your foot will tread will be for you, from the desert and the Lebanon, from the River, the Euphrates until the Sea behind will be your territory.”   This might be taken to mean that the more places the Israelites walk on and conquer so will their homeland be greater in size. So it is a kind of encouragement to walk on and conquer more territory. But why wasn’t the all the territory they had previously conquered in trans-Jordan also to be theirs? Because that wasn’t Israel.  So then there are definite boundaries to the Holy Land. It is not something that can be expanded by the success or failure of military campaigns.  So the verse probably shouldn’t be understood as an imperative, go out and conquer, but more of a welcoming.  Know, that from now on , the places that you will be wandering about in are really yours.  You are home now. Once you cross the Jordan, any place you walk, is justly yours already.

I would like to suggest a different meaning in the spirit of the Hassidic style of explanation.  The verse doesn’t just mean the wherever you walk the land is yours, rather it tells us that wherever we go in life we should view that place as our own and treat it that way.  So if we are renting an apartment, we should leave it in a better state than we found it.  We should fix things and improve things.  The sidewalk in from of our house may not be ours, but we can view it as ours and keep it clean.  So too in social matters.  If there in injustice in our locale we should go about setting it right.  The Torah it telling us the we need to view our greater surroundings as our own and therefore treat them better.

-ND