Why?

You shall also teach them to your sons, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up.  Deuteronomy 11:19  NASB

Speaking – It should be obvious that Moses expects the people to instruct their children audibly.  He doesn’t direct them to send their children to school to learn God’s commandments.  He doesn’t suggest they open a book or click on a web link.  This activity (as commonly understood in the ancient culture) was direct, spoken communication.  Parents are to speak to children about God.  It doesn’t even involve a Yeshiva or a rabbi.  Why?

Well, your first answer might be, “All those other educational means weren’t available.”  That answer implies that if they were available, those other means would have been acceptable.  They certainly seem to be today.  But I would suggest to you that they aren’t acceptable substitutes for the education of children, even if they are acceptable additions.  Why?  Because the teaching process of first-hand verbal communication isn’t just for the children.  It’s also for the parents.

“For the most part, your brain is a product of the past.  It has been shaped and molded to become a living record of everything you have learned and experienced up to this point in your life. . . . the only place that the past actually exists is in your brain—and in your body. . . Experiences not only enhance the brain circuitry, but they also create emotions.  Think of emotions as the chemical residue from past experiences . . .”[1]  When a parent recounts God’s commandments to a child, the parent activates the memory circuit in the brain and relives the experience.  That process reinforces that emotional value of the past experience.  The past experience becomes real again.  The child learns more than the communicated words.  The child senses the parent’s emotional state and participates in the recollection of the experience.  A neutral teacher can never do this because the teacher’s experience doesn’t match the emotional connection of the parent.  Consequently, if the parent doesn’t speak with the child, something irretrievable is lost.  God is displaced.  The child is left with information instead of symbiosis.

You will also notice that Moses’ instructions require continuous repetition.  Moses is interested in what today we would call “cognitive loop theory.”  What happens when a particular set of mental and emotional sequences are repeated over and over.  “ . . . you get caught in a loop where your thinking creates feeling and your feeling creates thinking.  If thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain and feelings are the vocabulary of the body and the cycle of how you think and feel becomes your state of being, then your entire state of being is in the past.”[2]  Of course, this loop can be a terrible thing.  It’s the process of addiction, for example.  But in this case, it is the process of enhancing God’s personal involvement.  It’s the reinforcement of God’s care.  It’s the communicated emotion of witnessing the salvation of the Lord.  And that’s why it needs to be done again and again and again.  The neurophysical divine connection.

Topical Index: speak, teach, repeat, past, Deuteronomy 11:19

[1] Joe Dispenza, Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon (Hay House, 2017), p. 28.

[2] Ibid., p. 29.