NOTES for Deu 10:1-22
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.