Canter Bridge

The Deuteronomic insistence that YHWH-conversation must pervade all of life is not so much the imposition of religion upon one’s every minute as it is the dissolution of religion as a category.

Cult, it is true, survives this perspective, for it concentrates a life orientation towards YHWH into a precise and highly conscious enactment that can be shared with the entire community. Yet the practice of the awareness that the rescuing, demanding presence of YHWH is among is a different thing from cult or liturgy. The hearers of Moses’ Deuteronomy speeches are told to train themselves and their families for a spiritual athleticism that takes no breaks, though it energetically feasts when the moment for that has come:

You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the LORD swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.

The description of 24/7 Yahweh-faith is, like the detailed articulation of case law, representative. The examples that are given as moments that are ripe for Yahweh-talk are just that, examples. The larger point is that the practice of the awareness that Yahweh is present is never to be remote from, never alien to, any aspect of life as one experiences it. It is not to be religious, a matter roped off from the normal corridors in which one makes life’s progress and regress.

Yahweh, whether the Israelite householders know it or not, is always about. Yet, to paraphrase a much later Israelite whose fealty to Torah was both intense and complicated, even the demons know that fact. It is responsive, articulate gratitude that Moses is after here. The most basic covenantal dictum demands this kind of intelligent obedience, insisting as it does on a marvelous reciprocity: I will be your God // and you shall be my people.