NOTES for Psa 143:10

The path of righteousness has always been the path of God, and every righteous person in every age asked God to teach him His ways. Everything would be simpler if the issue were only commandments or laws that it is enough to keep in order to be righteous. Of course, the commandments given by God must be kept; otherwise there can be no talk of the path of righteousness at all.

But external, formal keeping of the commandments alone is not enough. If the commandments and the law of God in general were like human laws, if they were only a set of rules invented by God for people to keep, their formal observance would be sufficient, just as formal observance of laws invented by people is sufficient in order not to be their violator.

But with God's law the situation is different. The word "Torah," used in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to designate law, is quite multivalent; it means legislation, the way of life corresponding to it, and even the spiritual state of a person corresponding to this way of life.

This multivalence is due to the fact that, unlike human laws, God's law is not conditional and not arbitrary: it reflects the patterns that characterize the relationships between God and man. It is the objective law of spiritual life reflected in the commandments.

Natural laws are impersonal, so definitions are enough here. Spiritual laws are personal, personal because spiritual life itself is, first of all, a system of relationships linking a person with God and with other people. Here the main thing is the choice made and the decision accepted, the will and the intention, and will and intention are easier to describe in the language of commandments than in the language of abstract definitions.

If the commandment turns into an abstract definition, even one with moral content, then from a concrete and life-filled relationship there remains only a dead abstraction, and from spiritual life only its scheme. That is why the hymnographer mentions the breath, the "spirit," of God: only His breath can make every relationship live, whether with Himself or with any of the people.

Then the path of righteousness proves truly to be God's path, and not the path of rather dreary "moral self-improvement," which can lead to nothing except harsh legalism and dry rigorism. Unlike this dead-end path, the path of righteousness leads into the Kingdom, filled with life and joy, into the Kingdom filled with the breath of God.