NOTES for Deu 10:19

Readers of the Old Testament often speak of the chosenness of God's people as something that sets them apart from other peoples, giving them certain special rights and developing in them a sense of religious and spiritual, and perhaps even national, exclusiveness. Of course, some Jews had such feelings and thoughts in former times, and some have them today. But in any case, the Torah cultivates nothing of the kind among God's people in any way, and it teaches nothing of the kind.

In the Torah, being chosen by God is understood, above all, as the special responsibility of the Jewish people for the revelation they received and for the Torah entrusted to them. In the Torah one can find quite a few instructions on this point, and one of them can be seen in the demand for equal treatment of Jews and of those who ended up on the land given by God to His people as resident foreigners.

It should be noted that pagan antiquity in general tended to treat resident foreigners, foreigners, and strangers of every kind with disdain. Of course, there was an etiquette, developed over millennia of interethnic and, earlier still, intertribal relations, connected with the status of a foreigner, to whom in special cases considerable respect could be shown. But when such respect was shown, it was only because of the special status of that foreigner, a status determined by interstate or intertribal relations. The "ordinary" resident foreigner, as a rule, did not enjoy respect.

The Torah requires not merely respect, but precisely love for the resident foreigner, the foreigner, the stranger in general, the same love shown to one's own tribesmen. This is understandable: the land given by God to His people was given to them not as unconditional possession, but rather for use, on condition that they keep the covenant once made and fulfill God's commandments. And if so, then with regard to the land the operative principle is not so much right as responsibility: God's people are responsible for ensuring that those who live on the land God has given them live in accordance with the norms of the Torah.

But this responsibility in itself does not imply an exclusive right of the people to the land. It is no accident that on Jewish land and in the Jewish state, in the periods when it existed on the political map, other peoples also lived alongside Jews at all times. And it was precisely on the spiritual choice of God's people that the environment depended, as did the way problems of relations with those whom Jews perceived as strangers were resolved. For the land was given not to a specific ethnic group, but to a people as a community: those who keep the commandments and preserve the Torah.

The whole essence of the Torah comes down to one thing: to love God with all one's heart and with all one's soul, to walk through life by the way He has opened to the human person, and to fear Him. This is, of course, not the fear of punishment or eternal torment that often arises in the minds of Bible readers when they see these lines. In this case it would be better to speak of the holy awe familiar to everyone who has experienced God's nearness, the awe that arises when the finite meets the Infinite face to face. A person's right relationship with God begins with this holy awe, a relationship that in the end can become deep, strong, stable, and conscious.

A person's understanding of his place before God becomes the foundation of the whole subsequent spiritual path. And this path begins with the heart. In the Bible, the heart is usually the deep spiritual "I" of a person, the thing that makes self-awareness and free will possible, and therefore also a person's self-determination before God and other people.

It is there, in the heart, in the depth of a person's spiritual "I," that conversion to God takes place; otherwise it remains only an intellectual choice or an emotional experience, which cannot fully and truly define human life. This deep conversion, in turn, changes the whole inner life, what the Bible usually calls the soul. One cannot love God with the heart and not love Him with the soul, because then a person's whole life would be split in two, and he would become two different people in one body.

Here the commandments begin to play a special role: understood as an inner spiritual and moral imperative, as intentions addressed by God to the human person, the commandments become a kind of spiritual skeleton that gives his life shape and forms its firm, unchanging core, which can build up all of life, both inner and outer. As for the laws ("statutes"), they are important as the experience of practical obedience to the commandments in concrete life circumstances, without which life with God is impossible. After all, one must know how to live with Him not only in a forest cell or a mountain cave, but also in a big city, or in a small village, among people with whom one will have to deal and build relationships. Such is the way of the Torah as the Book of Deuteronomy sees it.

It turns out that God demands nothing beyond our strength. Only reverence and love, only openness and honesty, only faithfulness and gratitude. Perhaps in practice this does not seem so simple? Yet Christ also says that His yoke is easy and His burden light. What, then, is the problem? Why does all this seem such an overwhelming task to us? How are we to love and open ourselves to God? Where is the threshold beyond which the burden of love becomes light?

The Gospel's answer is simple—simpler still than these demands: learn meekness and humility of heart from Jesus. It is so difficult... and so easy.