The Rejoicing Was Part Of It

Aviel learned the ceremony from a man who taught it in a shed, and he learned it perfectly, and he learned it wrong.

The man was called Berel and he was not unkind. He was a careful teacher of a particular kind that exists everywhere, in every trade and every faith, who gets a thing exactly right and slightly cold.

Aviel was fourteen. He learned the whole passage. He learned what the basket was and where it went and what the words were and why the words mattered more than the fruit. He could recite the history part at fourteen and he can recite it now at forty-one.

What he never learned, and this is not really Berel's fault because Berel was teaching what he had been taught, is that the passage does not end where they stopped reading it.

He found out on a Thursday in October, at forty-one years old, at a kitchen table, because his daughter was doing a project and asked him to read her the actual text.

He read it out. He got to the bit he knew and then he kept going, because she asked him to, and there was another line.

He stopped. He read it again. He put the book down.

His daughter said, "What?"

And Aviel said, "There's a party at the end of it."

She said what do you mean.

He said, "The last line. It says to be glad about it. All of you. Everybody in the house and anyone who's around. That's not something people added. That's in the instructions."

He sat there at that table for a while.

Twenty-seven years. He had carried that ceremony as a solemn thing to be got right, and had got it right, and had never once been told that the text itself finishes with everybody enjoying themselves.

His daughter, who was eleven and wanted to get back to her project, said, "So can we have cake."

He said yes.

You have probably been handed the solemn half too. Whatever version of this you were taught, it was taught as a duty to be discharged accurately, and somewhere in it the gladness got treated as an optional extra for people of a certain temperament. And nobody has read you the last line.

The Instruction Ends With Enjoy Yourself

Here is the sentence that ends the oldest ceremony about the first in Scripture, and it is one of the least quoted verses in the whole passage.

"And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you."Deuteronomy 26:11

Thou shalt rejoice. That is an imperative in the same grammar as everything before it. It is not a footnote and it is not a suggestion about mood. It is part of the instructions.

And look at the guest list, because it is the whole character of the thing. You, your house, the Levite, who owns no land, and the stranger, who is not from here. The rejoicing is deliberately arranged to include the people who have nothing of their own to bring.

You have been handed a gladness that was written into the text rather than added by enthusiastic people later. Deuteronomy 26 finishes on rejoicing and includes the landless and the foreigner in it by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a last line nobody read out and puts it in front of a man at a kitchen table at forty-one.

And notice the order once more, because the order is this whole site. History first. The naming of where a life came from. Then the basket. Then, last, the party.

You were meant to enjoy this, and the enjoying is part of the thing rather than a reward for completing it. That is what the written word actually says about the first, and it is the Spirit of God who takes twenty-seven years of solemnity off somebody in about four seconds.

Nobody Owes Anybody A Feeling

Now the guard, and it needs to be here because a page telling somebody to rejoice can become the heaviest page there is.

Nobody is required to feel glad. If you are reading this in a flat stretch, or a hard one, or one where good news has not come near you for a long time, the last line of Deuteronomy 26 is not a rebuke and it is not a target.

Rejoicing in that text is a communal, practical thing. It is people eating together over a good harvest. It is not an emotional performance and there is no minimum standard of gladness anywhere in it.

And the harvest in question is whatever there actually is. The verse says every good thing which the Lord has given, which for one household is a great deal and for another is a very short list, and the text does not grade the list.

You are welcome at that table with a short list. It is written that He gives to all men liberally and upbraids not, which means the giving comes without a lecture attached, and His Spirit is the one who is glad about the small true things you would not think worth mentioning.

And say it as plainly as this site says everything else. Nothing on this page asks you for anything. No amount, no proportion, no practice, no schedule, and nothing routed to any person, cause or work anywhere at all, this one included. You are as fully His on a flat Thursday as at any celebration, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the ground where obligations grow.