Longevity Requires Humility
God Opposes Vanity Metrics in Eikev
Should you say to yourselves, “These nations are more numerous than we; how (eicha) can we dispossess them?” You need have no fear of them. You have but to bear in mind what your God the Lord did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians.” (Deuteronomy 7:7)
As Rabbi Eliezer interpreted the verse: “Not because you are more in number than any people did the Lord desire you and choose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples” (Deuteronomy 7:7), as follows: The Holy One said to the Jewish people: I desire you, since even at a time that I bestow greatness upon you, you diminish, i.e., humble, yourselves before Me. (Chullin 89a)
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
What is might? What makes for security? In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are told that their power comes not from their numbers but from their chosenness, their mission. There is something humbling about this point—the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite stories have fallen away, while the Jewish story has endured. Jews continue to occupy a small share of the global population, yet contribute profoundly to the overall culture of every host country in which they happen to live. The Jews are a paradigmatic diaspora, a social network that has outlasted countless empires and will likely outlast the nation-state, should it have to. We have not optimized for numerousness through conversion or conquest and yet we are a mighty people. Ironically, 30 million Jews may have a better chance of ensuring the survival of Judaism than 1 billion. But the text doesn’t say that. It just says that there is no correlation between magnitude and defensibility.
It is well known in the study of organizations that once you reach a certain headcount productivity diminishes. More redundancy and regulation and coordination costs accrue and you need managers to manage managers managing managers and nothing innovative happens because of risk-aversion and consensus cascading down from the top. Sure, we can say that God punished the Egyptians with plagues—but you can also say that Egypt collapsed under its own weight, that the enemy of longevity is bloat, and that the only way to prevent against that social pattern is to have a clear mission upon which everyone is focused. The Jewish people may not have a 100 percent saturation of mission-aligned Jews—there are plenty who dilute the culture—but by staying small and promoting education, the Jewish people has managed to scale its values.
To defend against the imperative to scale simply on the assumption that bigger is always better you need to be contrarian and humble. Thus, Rabbi Eliezer in Tractate Chullin adds that might comes from humility, from diminishing oneself precisely at the moment that one is given power. Power is a test. Will we let it get to our heads, or will we remember that we were slaves in Egypt and try to do something different with it?
A hint of the teaching that greatness lies in humility and modesty rather than vanity metrics like headcount comes from the fact that verse in Deuteronomy uses the Hebrew word “Eicha.” Eicha means “how” but it also means “alas.” There is a double entendre to the question “How can we dispossess them?” Eicha suggests that we don’t always succeed, that sometimes we really do ask “How” because we are not in positions of empowerment. But it also teaches the inverse point: if you want to avoid living in a state of lament, get out of your sorrow and start empowering yourself by believing that you have a holy mission. Nobody conquers anything by feeling stuck. Snap out of Eicha mode. Two weeks after Tisha B’Av, that’s a fascinating point—what if the reason the Temple was destroyed was because we already energetically manifested it by walking around like mopers and melancholics? What if the cause of our political fall had less to do with our numbers and more to do with morale?
Morale that is dependent on ego and accomplishment is fragile and easy to burst. That’s why Egypt, an arrogant civilization, also falls from power. But a modest and humble person or civilization cannot be shaken. There is no counter-factual that can unseat it. Eicha—even the experience of loss and catastrophe—can alchemize into Eicha, a call to action, a way forward, a summons to overcome. The key to good morale is modesty and humility, the expectation that one is going to ebb and flow and that one will be ready no matter what. You can’t be modest and humble if you think power comes entirely from your own making. That’s why belief in God is so critical to the longevity of the people. God simply reminds us that we are not gods, which in turn reminds us that we can’t be complacent or self-worshipping or too attached to the status quo. Typically pagan gods can’t be questioned and don’t take well to feedback. Thus, they don’t learn and grow. They point to the metrics that make them feel good about themselves without questioning the wisdom of those metrics. Size is a stand in our verse for any metric that misleads. God is not impressed by large, yet transient civilizations, but by those which stand the test of time because they believe in something besides themselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
And that too is perhaps why the book of Lamentations -- literally beginning with "Eicha" -- focuses on a catastrophic humbling and diminishment of numbers. "How (alas!) she sits alone, the city once great with people." The challenge of the book of Eicha, as you have alluded to before, is to be humbled by that diminishment without it causing us to wallow in victimhood, to acquire from the shock of aloneness the strength and determination to stand together again when the occasion demands.