NOTES for Deu 4:9

These words are always opportune, when something ends for us forever and begins a new stage of life. For us, believers, sadness is probably the greatest enemy. Sadness take away strengths, kills hope. But here is what the Holy Scriptures says to us: keep in you the memory of good, seeing in it the glorious deeds of God. Then there will be in the heart gratitude, expelling sadness, so hope will revive. And it is very important that it is spoken here about our witness to the children and grandsons. There is nothing worst, than contaminating them with our sadness, poisoning their young souls with the poison of the incredulity towards God.

Readers of the Bible often ask: what makes the Jewish people better than others, that God chose them in particular? Meanwhile the Torah gives a clear and unambiguous answer: it is not about the people as such, but about that Torah, those commandments and laws that God gave to this people. In this lies both the strength of God's people and the very meaning of its existence. And in it, in the Torah, lies its superiority over all other peoples. The point here is not that knowledge of the Torah in itself makes a person or an entire people better. The point is to follow these laws and commandments.

Of course, if such following turns into religious formalism, nothing good will come of it. It will simply produce one more more-or-less religious people. With its own religion, which in all likelihood will be interesting only to itself. But if following the Torah, following the laws and commandments given by God, becomes genuine spiritual work, God's people will become the spiritual leaven that leavens all humanity.

After all, the commandments are not simply rules written by God for human beings. Not simply a moral code, even one given from above. The commandments are God's intentions addressed to human beings. Intentions that, if a person wants it, can determine his whole life. They can make a person a vessel of God's breath and an instrument of God's action. And for a people that accepts the commandments as concrete manifestations of God's will, they can make that people God's people in the full sense of the word: a people spiritually gathered around God's presence, in the Tabernacle, in the Temple, in every place that God will choose. A people-community. A completely unique people, unlike any other.

And in this difference, in becoming and being a people-community, lies the strength of the Jewish people. It is what gives them an advantage over any of the peoples who lived before them on the land God gave them. And it is what in due time will make them the beacon that lights the way for other peoples. But not at once. Later, when the Messiah comes and brings the Kingdom to the world. He will have someone to come to. And God's people will have something to live for. For this goal is the most worthy of all.

The Book of Deuteronomy did not receive its name by accident. To be fair, it should be noted that it was named this by the translators who translated the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch into Greek in the second century BC, but the name proved very successful: it is a matter of a second law, a new version of the Torah that appeared later than the first, earlier one that we find in the Book of Exodus. Biblical scholars speak of the late origin of the Book of Deuteronomy, while its author himself places his text in the time of Moses; but, whatever the case, it is at least understood that the laws we find in the Book of Deuteronomy appear later than those contained in the Book of Exodus.

Law develops: this is the main thing, and everything else is only historical detail that does not change the essence of the matter. If the Torah can change over time, it is no longer so important whether forty years or six centuries pass from one change to another; what matters is the very fact that the Torah changes, develops, and takes shape in the process of history. The Book of Deuteronomy, its first introductory chapters containing a historical survey of the path the people have traveled, bears witness precisely to this development of the Torah. Here the legislation is preceded by a description of the path that has been traveled, and it is on the basis of that path that the legislation is given.

The Torah changes in accordance with this path, and at the same time it defines the path, giving it meaning, without which the whole path traveled by the people would have been worth nothing. One could say that, in a certain sense, the Torah itself becomes the path: the path of the people before God, for which the external, geographical, and historical path proves to be the outward form. The path of the Torah cannot exist without that outward path, but the outward path itself, without the Torah as its spiritual core, remains only an empty shell. There is no history without the Torah, at least no history of the people of God precisely as the people of God.

Yet there is no Torah outside history either. For even if the Torah is viewed only as legislation or only as a moral code, it is unthinkable without the people who will fulfill it, outside the context of their history and their spiritual and life journey. The Torah is embodied in history, above all in the history of the people of God, and at the same time it becomes the power that gives history its spiritual form and quality, filling it with meaning: not passing human meanings, but God's meaning, eternal and unfading, the meaning that links earthly history with the Kingdom.

Who is God? What is important for us to know about Him? The God of heaven and earth, invisible and unimaginable, appearing in darkness and flame, gives people the law, the commandments. Through understanding these commandments we can come to know Him Himself.

We will never know everything about Him: He is incomprehensible. But we can know Him, know Him personally, as a friend. This is all the more possible now, when we have heard the joy promised to all people: God became Man, opening for everyone the possibility of a personal relationship with Him.