Ekev also signifies “heel.” Every generation is a heel generation, in the sense that everything previous has contributed to everything we do, all previous actsrest on the heel of the present, and so every act, every word, every gesture, every mitzvah, every one of us commits now is contributing in some inscrutable, dimly discerned, non-obvious way to the future, to redemption, to repair, just as we are a heel generation on us too everything rests. Everything rests on the heel.

Ekev is a curious word, it also sets up a conditional situation: If you do such and such, such and such will happen. Because if you do or if you say such and such, it will come to pass.

It’s a conditional, the word sometimes classified as a conjunction.

A conjunction is a holy part of speech. To be a part of something, as in that sacred word: And. Something a preposition might admire.

Be a conjunction for a while, be a preposition, be an article. Ooh an article, like a or an. Better: Be a diacritical point. We have many of those in our sacred language.

Every single word, every dot, every gesture is necessary.

Conditional: You know the laws that I gave you to protect? Do them and I’ll keep the covenant and the kindnesses. You know the ones that you didn’t keep? The ones that you walked on? The ones that were thrown under your heel?

For that too I will keep the faith. It all rests on the heel of your generation maybe on you yourself. Everything contributes. Try that on. 

Big small good bad beautiful lowly lofty intentions mistakes — all of it.

Also in this portion: “So G-d afflicted you and made you hungry, and had you eat the manna which you had not known and which your ancestors had not known, in order to make you know that not by bread alone do human beings live, but by everything that issues from the mouth of G-d do human beings live” (Deut. 8:3).

Drugs won’t do it, booze won’t do it, sex won’t do it, money won’t do it, food won’t do it, only the living G-d, only HaKol, Everything. Not the Dow, the Tao.

You can’t eat enough, you can’t drink enough, you can’t love enough to satisfy a hunger that isn’t physical. My soul thirsts for G-d, the living G-d, this from Psalm 42:3. That’s the remedy, the enduring remedy, the perennial wisdom.

Now be Nothing again, a diacritical point. Try that on again. 

Then — be something. Become bittel (diminished) in our language, then become yesh (something).

Every word, every conjunction, every preposition, every mitzvah light and/or heavy — counts, contributes. Everything. 

Everything matters. Every single thing.