NOTES for Deu 11:1

The blessing and curse of which God speaks are expressed with utmost simplicity in the Book of Deuteronomy: they are life and death. We rarely discuss religion in such terms. We better understand talk of peace of mind, a moral foundation, and so on. Nevertheless, the nature of the relationship with God has not changed in three and a half thousand years: with Him there is still life, and without Him death. We begin to understand this only in extreme situations, when we have to cry out, “Lord, save me!” Then the question of religion moves from the plane of “how to fast,” or even “how to pray,” to the plane of “to be or not to be.”

By revealing His Torah to the people, God places them in a situation of choice. The choice of a way: the way of life and the way of death. Though it would be more accurate to speak of one way, because the way of death is essentially pathlessness, leading nowhere. In the text, however, the issue is not life and death as such, but blessing and curse, and in the original sense of these words. In that original sense, blessing means God's granting a person strength, and curse means taking it away.

Originally the matter, of course, might not have concerned only God, but in the Yahwist context of the Book of Deuteronomy this definition can be considered exhaustive. The way of receiving God's strength and the way of losing it: these are the two ways from which the people will have to choose. Studying the Torah, teaching the Torah, the Torah on the forehead and on the hand, the Torah on the doorposts: all this is important insofar as it helps a person choose the right path and remain on it. The Torah must enter the heart, the soul, and the life of each concrete person. Then his path can become the way of life.

Of course, this is not only about the text; knowledge of the text alone is not enough. What matters is the awareness of the commandments as God's intentions, directly addressed to the human person, as God's will present in inner experience. Then the commandments become for a person a spiritual and moral imperative that organizes his whole life, and the Torah becomes living, not remaining only a text carved on stone or written on papyrus. Then the land too becomes truly promised, the very one God had promised to Abraham.

Indeed, God never promised the people only a geographical space, soil, or territory. He promised them the land as the space where the people could live together with Him. First of all as a spiritual space, and only afterward as territory, land, as geographical space. To enter such a land, or rather, to enter the land promised by God in that way, one must walk the way of the Torah.

Of course, one must also pass through the land itself, since this is about real history and real geography, but the path through the land must be traveled together with the way of the Torah, which opens for the human person the space of relationship with God. And one can live on the land only by remaining in that space. That is why following the Torah becomes the condition for remaining on the land given by God. There is no other way. Otherwise sacred history will end and the most ordinary kind of history will begin, the kind of which there has been and will be much in the fallen world, and in the course of such history anything at all can happen to any people. Even to the people of God.