NOTES for Deu 11:18

What wants to say the holy writer, by calling "to tie on the hands" and "bind on the foreheads" the words of the Torah? At first sight, this call can be perceived only allegorically, understanding it as a call to always have the Torah before the eyes and to be guided by it every minute, suiting with her every action. But, by considering the historic realities of the period of the writing of the book, we can suppose that even the literal understanding of the text in this case has its sense. Amulets in the heathen antiquity were very widely spread; they were very often worn on the hands and the forehead, using them as protectors. And the author of the book, as seen, calls to replace sacred amulets likeness of small plates or medallions with texts from the Torah.

At first sight such a replacement seems a mere formality: because it will not make automatically a believer the one who wear this kind of signs, not accidentally the author reminds that the Torah has to be above all in the heart of man, defining all his internal life ("the mind"). But except for the internal life, there is also the outside life, which in this period was riddled with paganism, not only at the level of the state and of the society, but also at the level of the everyday life. The paganism formed the tissue of life, which defined its daily quality, and it is particularly this tissue, which was absolutely necessary to clean from paganism. Of course, to replace certain symbols by others was far of being sufficient.

But it was also impossible to do without such a replacement. In fact, the daily life of the fallen man consists in many of the semi-deliberated habits, of this automatism that obliges rather often man to act before he has time to think of what he is doing, and even before he has time to understand that it would be necessary to stop and to think. And the familiar environment recreates such behavioral models, closing the loop from which to escape is far of being easy.

Well then is born to the holy writer a very clear and natural idea in such situation: and what, if inside this familiar environment, where the eye is used to see familiar heathen symbols, we put in their place something that will remind not of paganism, but of the Torah, not of the gods, but of God? Of course, such a replacement in itself guarantees nothing yet. But it at least gives to each, living in the familiar environment, an extra chance to escape from there. Thus, also the chance to stand on the way of righteousness, leading at the end the one going on this way, to the Kingdom.

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.

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.”