Eikev: Remember the Entire Road

By Zachary Fish

“Trauma” is a buzzword nowadays. In the modern language around trauma and trigger warnings, the instinct is often to avoid revisiting painful experiences and, as much as possible, leave them in the past.

In this week’s parsha, though, the Torah tells us something almost opposite:

וזכרת את כל הדרך אשר הוליכך ה׳ אלהיך זה ארבעים שנה במדבר למען ענתך לנסתך לדעת את אשר בלבבך התשמר מצותו אם לא. ויענך וירעבך ויאכלך את המן אשר לא ידעת ולא ידעון אבתיך למען הודיעך כי לא על הלחם לבדו יחיה האדם כי על כל מוצא פי ה׳ יחיה האדם“You shall remember the entire way upon which Hashem, your God, led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to afflict you, to test you, to know what is in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He afflicted you and made you hungry, and He fed you the mann which neither you nor your ancestors had known, in order to teach you that a person does not live by bread alone; rather, a person lives by everything that comes forth from the mouth of Hashem.”(Devarim 8:2–3)

The Torah goes on to describe the many miracles Klal Yisrael experienced in the desert. But even when introducing the miracle of the mann, it first emphasizes the pain that came before it: ויענך וירעיבך ויאכלך את המן. Hashem afflicted you, made you hungry, and then fed you the mann.

Why are we commanded to remember the affliction itself? Why not focus only on the miracle that came afterward?

The Haamek Davar does not ask this exact question, but on these pesukim he asks a related one: Why did Hashem have Klal Yisrael wander in the desert for forty years in the first place?

Based on the Midrash, he explains that a nisayon can serve three different purposes:

• To strengthen a person, like flax that improves when it is beaten.

• To reveal a person’s strength, like a potter striking a strong vessel to show what it can withstand.

• To place the burden of the generation upon someone capable of carrying it, like a strong horse given a heavy load.

  
  

Here, the Haamek Davar explains that the nisayon was the second kind: לדעת את אשר בלבבך, to reveal what was in the heart of Klal Yisrael.

The forty years demonstrated that they could internalize a commitment to mitzvos even before many of those mitzvos could practically be fulfilled. He connects this to the Gemara’s statement that a person does not fully understand the mind of his rebbe until forty years have passed.

I think the first two types of nisyonos can give us a powerful way to understand the struggles in our own lives.

Some challenges make us stronger. Others reveal a strength or depth that was already inside us but could never have fully come to light until we were tested.

I have been thinking about this a lot while building Sofer.Ai. There have been plenty of hard moments along the way, including setbacks and mistakes, some of which caused real problems. Obviously, I would have preferred for everything to go smoothly.

But looking back, those hard periods are also where I learned the most and grew the most. They forced me to become more capable, more mature, and more certain about what I am doing. It is a cliché for a reason: you really do learn far more from your mistakes than from the things that go smoothly.

The second type of nisayon speaks to something different. Sometimes the challenge does not create the strength. It reveals what was already there.

The moments when we are between a rock and a hard place are often the moments when what we are actually made of comes to light. Sometimes, it is only under pressure that the deepest parts of a person can fully emerge.

I think about it like a movie or novel. If everything goes smoothly from beginning to end, there is no story. The difficult scenes create the plot and reveal who the characters really are. In the same way, the challenges in our lives are often what bring out who we really are.

And there is something deeply powerful and enriching about discovering that part of yourself, about truly seeing who you are and coming to understand yourself more fully. 

This is not meant to romanticize suffering. We do not ask for hard times, and when pain can be avoided or healed, it should be.

But once a difficult road has become part of our story, we do not have to view it as meaningless or try to erase it. We can remember what it taught us, what it developed within us, and what it revealed about us.

Perhaps that is why the Torah does not merely tell us to remember the mann. It tells us to remember את כל הדרך, the entire road.

Hopefully, the tough times in our lives can both strengthen us and teach us that we are capable of more than we thought, and allow that discovery to make us better people, better Jews, and better versions of ourselves.