DEUT635 One of the important implications of perceiving the Torah as a moral-cultic code "fixed in a national framework" is the fact that the Torah addresses primarily the group, the people as a whole. … As a code imposed upon an entire society, the moral and cultic rules take on a legal character, and in order that compliance be achieved, an enforcement policy supported by sanctions is included. Hence, if the Torah embodies the law of the covenanted society, then the judicial system which it establishes can be expected to authorize penalties for the obvious purpose of deterrence: "In order that they may hear and be afraid and not sin" [this verse]. The rewards and punishments contained in the Torah are therefore pedagogical means of inducing compliance, a method familiar to every society, and should not be confused with the ultimate value of the rules themselves. This view of the Torah as addressed primarily to the nation as a whole may provide the key to the problem of why material rewards are stressed to the near-exclusion of spiritual rewards, such as immortality of the soul and the sheer ecstasy of fellowship with God. Spiritual rewards of this nature are directed primarily to the individual. They attach themselves essentially to the self and to the ego. It makes little sense to speak of a nation collectively enjoying the hereafter or of an entire community, as such, meriting immortality in some spiritual sense.