For Deuteronomy, this quintessential treatise of the heart, gratitude is a most powerful force.
One glimpses layers of the Bible’s fecundity in medieval editorializing and in summary declarations. Let’s begin with the medievals: the verse and chapter divisions that were added during that era hew to the side of convention. Chapters in given work are of predictable length, verses are inserted according to patterns that can be recognized and described, and so on.
Against this backdrop of habitual treatment of the text, the lengthy chapter 28 of Deuteronomy-no fewer than sixty-eight verses-is a triumph of coherence over convention. By grouping the mirror-image blessings upon obedience and curses upon forgetfulness in one single chapter, the versifiers made a heroic concession to the poetics of justice and are to be lauded.
With the limited tools available to them, they have reminded generations of readers that gratitude and forgetfulness are truly what Deuteronomy has been getting at all along. Over against the tendency to lose oneself in the details, this becomes an editorial gift of abundant proportions.
The summary declaration inserts its reminder as well, though now at the hands of the writers of the book rather than its medieval sectioners. In the midst of a tedious, if soul-wrenching, enumeration of the cataclysm that would fall upon an unobservant Israel, the text permits itself this diagnosis of cause:
For you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and with gladness of heart for the abundance of everything.
In the final analysis, the good heart accumulates for its human possessor a dynamic of abundance, gladness and good-hearted receptivity gaining for itself continued abundance for generations into the future.
One discerns in this most heart-centered of judicial and economic realities a note that would be sounded with some regularity in the Bible’s pages. The joyful and the good-hearted are so easily confused with the idle, the lackadaisical, and the woefully unpragmatic.
Who would have imagined their laughter a powerful motor of blessing deep, wide, and enduring?
Canter Bridge 
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