[Avodah] The Most Detrimental Thing to Our Relationship with G-d

[Professor L. Levine via Avodah]

The following is part of RSRH's commentary on Devarim 4:25


25 When you will beget children and children's children, and you will
have grown old in the land, and you then practice corruption and
make an image, a representation of anything, and do what is evil in
the eyes of God, your God, to anger Him;


Nothing is more detrimental to our relationship to God, both as individuals
and as a nation, than "growing old in the Promised Land"; i.e.,
our original youthful enthusiasm, engendered by the awareness that we
are God's, changes to smugness, and the land for which we once yearned
as the promised goal of our hopes and desires becomes "ours" [in that
we take it for granted], and we grow "old" and "stale" in our possession
of it.


The one God, Who is imperceptible to the senses, revealed
Himself to you at the dawn of your history. However, once your belief
fades that this God alone bears you and the entire universe, then the world
of the senses, with its supposedly sovereign realities, will assume in your
minds supreme importance. You will then fling yourselves into the arms
of heathen degeneration, which sees all of human existence - both individual
and national - merely as a product of the physical forces of the
world. You will think that these forces shape a land into the cradle of a
nation, and that the nation must worship these forces in order to be master
of its own fate.

Once this happens, it is no longer God Who blesses you in and
through His land, depending on the extent to which you subordinate your
conduct to His Will. Rather, you will consider the land itself and its physical
potentialities as the source of your success.

__________________________________________________________
I wonder what percentage of Jews living in EY take living there for granted.

YL


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