Engraved for Freedom (Ekev)
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Today is day 678 since October 7. We have been counting - one day at a time - since that horrific morning. We have been responding, tirelessly, to the threats that have not relented. Faithfulness to that daily discipline matters: faithful to memory, faithful to our people, and faithful to who we are on the inside.
Dr. Edith Eger, psychologist, author, and Auschwitz survivor, once said that she wakes up each morning and asks herself: “Do you want to be soft and warm or cold and stiff?” It isn’t easy—how could it be?—but it is our calling. Even when reactivity feels warranted, tradition invites us to keep our inner core supple and resilient. That inner warmth isn’t weakness; it’s part of the treasured legacy that empowers us to defend our people without surrendering our souls.
My dear mentor and friend, Yossi Klein Halevi, wrote recently about what he termed “the end of the post-Holocaust era,” the shattering realization that what we thought was unimaginable could again be spoken aloud and acted upon (Times of Israel, October 7, 2024). We see it in the public square, even in cultural spaces that ought to celebrate human courage—stories of family rescue and moral clarity sometimes meet resistance. Too often, only a passionate, principled response nudges the world back toward decency. It’s complicated. And it’s why our inner work must be as strong as our outer work.
Just as the entire book of Deuteronomy is not bare history but rather a heart telling its story, Ekev is Moshe remembering. He worries about us (for good reason), warns us not to harden into arrogance, and pleads that we “circumcise the foreskin of our heart” (Deut. 10:16) - to remain tender, responsive, human.
Amid his memories, one quiet verse shimmers: “I turned and came down from the mountain… and I placed the tablets in the ark that I had made; there they are, as Adonai commanded me” (Deut. 10:5). Our sages teach that the whole tablets and the shattered ones both rested in the Ark (Menachot 99a). Both. Our wholeness and our brokenness travel together at the center of the sacred.
Another teaching (Shemot Rabbah 41:7) lingers on the word “charut - engraved” on the tablets and reads it as “cherut - freedom.” When Torah becomes truly ours, it is engraved not only on stone but on the human heart. After the Temples fell, the Holy of Holies moved inward; the Ark’s address is now our own interior life (Zohar). Which means the tablets are still here - right here - summoning us to live the covenant in two directions at once: between us and God, and between one human being and another.
Ekev also means “heel,” which Rashi sees as a cue to remind us to never trample what we consider lighter mitzvot under our heels. In a season of great alarms, Ekev insists that freedom is engraved in the small daily choices: how we speak, whom we notice, what we refuse to excuse, when we soften rather than harden.
If the tablets are still in the heart, then so is the reminder of what it means to be human. The rabbis said long ago: “In a place where there are no human beings, strive to be human. (Pirkei Avot 2:5)” Today, when interpersonal cruelty and idolatry (of power, tribe, and self) abound, we are called to activate what is already engraved within us until everyone has what they need.
All of this remains true.
All of this defines the extent of our freedom.
