This week’s Parashá, Vaetchanan, contains two cardinal texts of the Jewish faith: The Ten Commandments and the first part of the Shema Israel. Today we will briefly analyze the first verse of the Shema. See the link below to learn more about The Ten Commandments.
To start, let’s remember that the Shema Israel is not formally a prayer. It is not a prayer in which we praise God or ask for His assistance. The complete text of the Shema, which we recite daily, contains our declaration of faith in the existence and unity of God, educates us to love God, urges us to abide by His commandments, and exhorts us to behave with sanctity.
שמע ישראל ה אלוקינו ה אחד “Listen, Israel, The Eternal (HaShem) is our God, The Eternal is one”
The first verse of the Shema Israel contains three very important messages that constitute the principles of our faith. These three messages are:
- That God exists.
- That we are the witness people of God
- That God is one.
HOW DO YOU SAY “GOD EXISTS” IN HEBREW? We will start with a very significant word that, ironically, is NOT explicitly written in this pasuk (biblical verse). Our verse literally says: “Listen Israel, The Eternal our God, The Eternal is one”. But the correct translation is: “Listen Israel, The Eternal is our God, The Eternal is one”. Why aren’t these two verbs explicitly included in this verse? In Hebrew, and despite what we have been taught in school, verbs are not conjugated in the present tense as in other languages. To indicate the present, one only has to use the pronoun and the noun. When I say, for example, ANI QORE, which is generally translated as “I read”, I am actually saying “I, at this moment, am a reader”. That is why when one wants to say the verb “to be” in the present: “is” or “I am”, nothing is said. If I want to say “this chair is white” I will say “hakise shajor”= “This chair (is) black”. And when I want to say “HaShem is our God” I will say “HaShem… our God”. Even though the word “is” is not written, it is somehow the MOST important message of the Shema Israel. Because by saying that God “IS” we are affirming that God EXISTS. And this is the number one principle of the Jewish faith.
HOW DO WE KNOW GOD EXISTS? The answer to this question is presented in the second part of this verse: “The Eternal is our God”. Here the emphasis is not on the word “is” but on the word “our”. In Judaism, the belief in God is based on two elements. Firstly, it is based on the fact that the Jewish people define themselves as the witnesses of the divine revelation. On Mount Sinai, when God chose us among all the peoples, He made a covenant with us and gave us His Torah, He revealed Himself to the people. As the Torah explains it, the entire people “heard” the Divine Voice revealing the first two commandments. This experience, in which the people “saw” the voices, was not defined with normal words. “Seeing voices” indicates an extrasensory experience, a kind of prophetic telepathy. This “traumatic” event became part of our genetic memory, and thus the Jewish people became the only human group that directly and collectively experienced the divine revelation. Rabbi Yehuda haLevi mentioned about 1,000 years ago, that other religions have not even invented the experience of a collective revelation, which would give more validity to any experience because it is impossible to refute, but instead they rely on “private” revelations to individuals such as Muhammad or Jesus. Now we can better understand the second message of the Shema Israel: HaShem is OUR God, reminds us that He chose us, gave us His Torah, and we somehow inherited through the generations this experience of divine revelation and continue to be witnesses of His existence.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN THAT GOD IS ONE? Jewish monotheism, the belief that there is only one God and that there is no other power independent of Him, is probably the most revolutionary intellectual and cultural idea of the Torah. For the ancient man, it was impossible to think that there is only one God. Since human beings see powers and contradictory events: life and death; light and darkness; war and peace; joy and pain. And it was impossible for the pagan man to conceive that all this came from a single God. The most normal, intuitive, logical thing was to assume that reality is governed by different gods/powers that are in a permanent conflict. From the psychological aspect, polytheism is also the most natural way to project human reality: the gods reflect the same conflicts, interests, and appetites as human beings. To conceive ONE GOD, Creator, and who has dominion over ALL the contradictory aspects of our complex human reality, is absolutely revolutionary. It may be difficult to perceive today the scale of this intellectual revolution, simply because thanks to the Torah, most of the civilized world has rejected polytheism and adopted Jewish monotheism.
The first verse of the Shema Israel is not a prayer that we recite to God. It is a biblical text directed towards us. That reminds us of the most important principles of Judaism and exhorts us to repeat them as a pledge of allegiance to HaShem, our God.
