Eikev

Our sedra opens with the words והיה עקב תשמעון את המשפטים, if you will listen to the mitzvos וברכך, Hashem will bless you. ‎The sefer רמיזי תורה asks how could the Torah say that if you do these mitzvos you will get material rewards when the gemara tells us that you don't get reward for mitzvos on this world; that's reserved for the world to come when you get eternal reward? 

He answers that the Mishna states that the reward for a mitzva is the opportunity to do another mitzva & the joy a person has when he does a mitzva counts as another mitzvah.  He gets rewarded for the joy he had when he did the mitzvah, separately from the mitzva itself.  

So he explains that the material reward on this world referred to in the Torah applies to the simcha that the person had when he did the mitzvah. The reward for the actual mitzva that you had to do, is reserved for the world to come.

Chazal tell us the word והיה connotes ‎simcha which is what the posuk is saying; when you do the mitzvos with simcha, then you will get all the material blessings of this world.  

Rav Moshe Leib from Sosuv used to say that the same way a person guards his money, he should guard his service to Hashem. The best way to guard your service to Hashem is to do it constantly with joy. 

The classic translation of  והיה עקב תשמעון ‎is if you listen to the light mitzvos, which Rashi interprets as the ones that we trample with our heel, then you will get the blessing. The Midrash tells us that one doesn't know the reward he gets even for polishing his shoes before Shabbos and it quotes the posuk in shir hashirim מה יפו פעמיך בנעלים & the Midrash ends with a posuk in Yeshayhu ויקרא ביום ההוא לבכי, how we will cry when we will see the reward. 

The רה"ק מאפטא  explains this midrash with a parable. There was a poor man who went begging from town to town who  rested along the way between the towns on a big rock or pile of dirt that he found. One day, after he rested on a small hill, he saw that the rocks around there looked pretty so he decided to fill his pockets with them in case they were worth something. However, as he walked from town to town, he got tired from the extra weight of the stones, so he started throwing them out until he had nothing left. When he got to a town where he had a friend, another poor man. They were looking for some money to get food. As he's searching his pockets, he finds one of those stones, so he & his friend say, “let's go to the jeweler maybe they’re worth something.”  

The jeweler sees it & immediately offers them $1000. They’re shocked so he takes their silence for a refusal & doubles his offer. When the friend sees that, he says, “wait a minute. let's go to town & see the big jeweler. we'll for sure get more.” He turns to his friend, sees him crying and says, “what's wrong. You’re gonna be rich!” The poor man tells him, “do you know how many of these I had that I just threw away? Do you know how much more I could have had?

This, רה"ק מאפטא explains, is going to be us at the end of our days. When we see the eternal reward that awaits us even for the smallest mitzvah, we will cry over how many we threw away. How can we avoid this? How do we capitalize on our available mitzvos so that we don't leave them behind?

Perhaps, if we accept upon ourselves one mitzva that we enjoy and do that mitzva with simcha, then our reward will be another mitzva that we enjoy.  Then, we will keep going up in our joy in mitzvos, making sure we don't lose out on any. In addition, we will merit the material rewards of this world, too, for doing our mitzvos with simcha!