NOTES for Втор 33:1-29
The Book of Deuteronomy ends with the blessing of Moses, followed by a concluding epilogue scene. This blessing recalls the blessing of the people by Joseph, which we find in the closing part of the Book of Genesis. Such parallels are not accidental. Originally the Book of Joshua, judging by the view that prevails today among biblical scholars, formed a single whole with the Pentateuch, serving as the sixth book of the Torah as it was created during the Babylonian captivity. The Torah ceased to be a Hexateuch and became a Pentateuch only after Ezra's reform in the middle of the fifth century B.C. The Book of Genesis was originally a kind of prologue to the Torah, and the Book of Joshua was its epilogue. It therefore turns out that the blessing of the people, or more precisely of the twelve tribes of which it consists, sounds at the very end of the Torah's prologue and just before its epilogue.
In the first case the people are blessed by Joseph, for it was he who made possible the people's move to Egypt and their rescue from death by famine. In the second, they are blessed by Moses, the spiritual leader, organizer, and inspiration of the Exodus, under whom the people left Egypt. Yet in both cases the blessing is always concrete; it is connected with the features of each tribe and its ancestor. There is nothing surprising here: blessing means nothing other than God's giving to a people or to an individual person that power which, first of all, should allow a person to become himself, the one whom and the thing which God intended him to be.
This means, of course, the true self, the authentic quality and authentic calling of a person, not what a person often imagines about himself, considering himself to be something he is not in reality and inventing a "calling" for himself in keeping with his own imagined picture of himself and his life. A person can become who he really is only with God's participation, for in reality a person is always what God intended him to be.
Blessing therefore presupposes God's revealing in a person his most characteristic trait, which in itself is almost always ambivalent and can be used just as readily for good as for evil. God wants each person, with His help, to discover his true self and use the best that has been given to him by God. This is how a person's life is built, and this is how the life of a people is built as well. For God a people is not a mass; it consists of individual persons, each of whom God sees and knows. This is the potential God gives to the people, and how it will be put to use depends on the people themselves and on concrete individuals.