NOTES for Deu 30:15

Sometimes we look around and think: "Well, other people live without God, and they live no worse than we do!" It seems to us that the question "with God or without God" is on the level of "worse or better."

God says that the level is completely different: life or death. Because true life for a human being created by God is not drinking, eating, sleeping, working, reproducing, getting sick, and dying, but loving God, abiding with Him in His life filled with love. In such a way that our own life too is filled with that love which "never ends" (1 Cor 13:8).

The Bible, the word of God, always places a person before a choice. The Torah, the prophetic books, the psalms, and the Gospel: all the biblical books speak of two ways. The way of righteousness and the way of sin. The way of good and the way of evil. The way of life and the way of death. But the point is not that God rewards some and punishes others. The gods of the pagan world reward and punish those who, respectively, keep or violate the laws they have established. It is no accident that the idea of recompense after death, of rewards and punishments beyond the grave, appears where pagan religiosity reached its greatest development and reflection, for example in ancient Egypt. It was all too obvious that just recompense was not working properly in this world.

So perhaps in another world everything will fall into place? But the Bible says nothing about recompense after death. Nor does it say anything about the afterlife. The Torah speaks of life in the land given by God, here. The Gospel speaks of the Kingdom. Many people think that, in this sense, the Old Testament books differ sharply from the New Testament books: that the Old Testament books are about happiness and recompense "here," while the New Testament books are about happiness and recompense "there."

In reality, the Bible is not about "here" and not about "there." It is about God. About life with God, which by definition is possible only here and now. And about life with Christ in His Kingdom, which is even more possible only here and now, simply because there is no "before" and "after" in our sense in the Kingdom. The happiness and joy of life in the land given by God do not lie in the land being the most beautiful in the world in itself (although Palestine has always been one of the most beautiful places in the world). The happiness is that God's presence abides in this land. It is a foreshadowing of the Kingdom on earth. People do not receive it as a reward for good behavior, just as they do not lose it as a punishment for bad behavior. They receive it by living before God.

By fulfilling the first commandment of the Decalogue, which begins not with a ban on pagan cults but with a proclamation: I, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, stand before you. It is a commandment that requires a person to stand before God. And the land given by God is the place for such standing before Him. It is given for the fulfillment of the first commandment. It becomes beautiful when it is used for its purpose. Otherwise comes the degradation of the land that God leaves behind, a land on which it is impossible to live while ignoring God and His commandments, using it for a different kind of life.

Indeed, a person has no other life than the one God gives for communion with Him and for standing before Him. Everything else is death. If a person accepts this God-given life, the path to the Kingdom begins, starting from the land God gives so that this path can begin. If not, the path to nowhere begins, starting from the land God leaves. Not because He has hated it, but because He is driven out of it by the person who has chosen death instead of life.

Apparently, to avoid unnecessary responsibility, we have grown accustomed to living in a world of abstractions. What could be more abstract than “good” or “evil”? And if they are far removed from us, and neither true good nor true evil lies within our power, then we can all sleep peacefully and not worry about either one. But the point is that nothing, as it turns out, is more concrete or closer to us than good and evil, the immediate manifestations of our spirit. This is why the biblical commandment is close to us—closer than our skin—in our mouth and in our heart. Today's chapter of Deuteronomy says precisely this: do not say that it has nothing to do with you; it concerns your heart and your life. With this approach, the Word of God becomes the word closest to us.

The Torah offered to the people, judging by Moses' words, is not simply a law or a moral code, even one given by God. The issue is a path. More precisely, two paths: the path of life and the path of death. The connection of each path with blessing or curse is not accidental here. A blessing, in the original sense of the word, presupposes that God grants a person strength, not necessarily some special, supernatural strength. It may mean the strength needed for the most ordinary life in this world.

From the beginning, after all, God intended the human being to live in constant communion with Him, not separately from his Creator. Constant communion also presupposed that the human being did not possess the autonomous source of energy that all animals have. According to God's design, the human being could receive everything necessary directly from God, and receive it in abundance. He did not need to make stores of energy. It was enough simply to give room within himself to that "breath of life" that everyone receives at the moment of birth. Before the fall, that is exactly how it was; afterward, however, the problems began. The human being became too much like an animal to live by God's "breath of life," drawing all necessary energy directly from it. Human nature changed after the fall, but for the human being, unlike animals, such a condition proved unnatural and brought with it many problems.

God's blessing is what returns the human being to the long-lost norm, to the extent that a person can and is ready to receive it. The Torah becomes the path on which a person sets out when he receives God's blessing. This path leads him to the land promised by God, but it also turns out to be an inner path, leading the person deep within, where he can meet God by becoming aware of His presence in his own heart. This path is not easy, but it is accessible to everyone: the commandment is not across the sea and not in heaven; it is "on the lips and in the heart." One can, of course, refuse the path, but then the alternative to life is death. The loss of strength and the loss of God, and therefore also the loss of the God-given land, which can belong to the people only as long as they themselves remain God's in the full sense of the word.