My Birthday Comes with a Performance Review

Tomorrow is my Hebrew birthday: 18 Av. This year, it falls on Shabbat and arrives carrying Parashat Eikev, which feels less like a birthday gift than an annual performance review personally delivered by Moshe Rabbeinu.

Some people receive flowers. I receive five chapters of Deuteronomy reminding me not to become arrogant, forget G‑D, worship anything inappropriate, or claim sole credit for my achievements.

There is also cake, presumably, although Eikev has quite a lot to say about what happens after one has eaten and is satisfied.

I turn 57 on the secular calendar the following day. Fifty-seven is an interesting age. It is too old to describe poor decisions as youthful indiscretion, but apparently not old enough to stop making them. By now, I should possess wisdom, serenity and a sophisticated understanding of what truly matters. Instead, I possess three cats, an unfinished television series and an impressive ability to enter a room without retaining any information about why.

Fortunately, Eikev is a parashah for people whose spiritual development has not proceeded according to schedule.

Moshe is nearing the end of his life and continuing his farewell address to the Israelites. “Farewell address” makes it sound rather more concise than it is. This is Moshe’s opportunity to revisit forty years of national history, and he has kept the receipts.

He reminds the Israelites of the Golden Calf, the broken Tablets, the rebellions, the complaints and the many occasions on which they managed to witness an open miracle and respond with something resembling a negative TripAdvisor review.

They were freed from slavery, the sea divided for them, water emerged from rock and food fell from heaven. Still, somebody invariably wanted to speak to management.

I find this enormously comforting.

We tend to read biblical stories with the flattering assumption that, had we been there, we would have behaved much better. We would have crossed the Red Sea calmly, trusted Moshe completely and waited beneath Mount Sinai with disciplined patience. We certainly would not have contributed jewellery towards the manufacture of unauthorised livestock.

This is nonsense.

Most of us become distressed when WiFi disappears for 11 minutes. Forty days without Moshe and there would have been three WhatsApp groups, two rival leadership committees and somebody circulating a voice note announcing that his cousin had reliable information from inside the mountain.

Eikev does not present human beings as naturally obedient, consistently grateful or particularly sensible. It presents us as we are: capable of faith and panic, gratitude and entitlement, revelation and almost immediate amnesia.

Moshe’s great warning concerns what will happen once the Israelites enter the Land and become prosperous. They will build good houses, accumulate wealth, eat well and feel secure. Then, he says, their hearts may grow proud, and they may think:

“My power and the might of my hand have produced this wealth for me.”

It is one of the Torah’s most accurate observations about human nature. During hardship, we pray with impressive concentration. Once things improve, we develop a remarkable retrospective conviction that we handled the entire matter ourselves.

Success, according to Eikev, is not sinful. Forgetfulness is.

The danger is not having a beautiful home, money, food or professional achievement. The danger begins when blessing is rewritten as personal brilliance, and gratitude is quietly removed from the acknowledgements.

That is a particularly pointed message on a birthday.

Birthdays encourage the fiction that we are celebrating something we accomplished. In truth, my contribution to my own birth was limited, disruptive and almost certainly impolite. Everything since then has depended upon an incalculable number of people, circumstances, mercies, second chances and interventions I noticed only later—if at all. (Third and sometimes, fourth chances).

At 57, I can point to things I have built, survived, written and changed. I can also point to spectacular errors of judgement, abandoned plans, improbable recoveries and several periods during which my continued existence owed far more to G‑D and other people than to any “might of my hand.”

I have reinvented myself so often that reinvention may now be my only stable characteristic.

I have lived in South Africa and made aliyah to Israel. I have worked in law, public relations, hospitality, education, sales and pet care. I have written essays, scripts and opinions, some of which were even requested. I am now trying to turn writing from the thing I compulsively do into the thing for which someone might compulsively pay me.

Eikev advises me to acknowledge the work without mistaking myself for its sole author.

The parashah also contains one of Judaism’s most enduringly practical instructions: after you have eaten and are satisfied, bless G‑D for the good Land He has given you. Gratitude is not reserved for deprivation, crisis or the miraculous arrival of something desperately needed. We are commanded to practise it precisely when we are full.

When the crisis is over. When the table is laden. When we are comfortable enough to forget how uncertain everything once felt.

So tomorrow, on 18 Av, I will celebrate another year of life on a Shabbat devoted to memory. I will remember the wildernesses I crossed, the manna I complained about, the calves I should not have built and the Tablets that somehow kept being offered again.

I will appreciate what I have without taking credit for it alone. I will give thanks for family, friendship, survival, home, work, words and the stubborn appetite for life that has outlasted several excellent reasons to misplace it.

And when I have eaten and am satisfied, I will bless G‑D.

Then I will have another piece of birthday cake.

Gratitude is important, but one should not become fanatical.