Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad: Listen Up!!!! God-Wrestlers! Adonai is our God, Adonai is Unique. This radical translation of our people’s foundational prayer is possible when we hold the learning we have been doing the past several months, in this very column, on the deep meanings of each individual word of the Shema. Once, when I offered this translation, a student reflected that she had never considered that the word Echad could mean one, not as a mathematical statement, but as in “One of a Kind” or “Unique.” When we say the Shema, we are tapping into the unity that transcends us, the oneness that unites us.
Why are these six words, and the short paragraph that follows, what we know as the V’ahavta, our central prayer? The short answer is that they are Biblical in origin and the Rabbis of old, always looking to previous precedent, instituted these words as our first standard prayer, our oldest bit of liturgy. In ancient times the prayer service consisted of the Shema and the Amidah, and that’s all! Everything else that we say and sing in Friday night and Shabbat morning services developed later.
Why did the Rabbis find these verses from Deuteronomy so compelling? One source suggests: Perhaps it is because they contain in just a few lines the basic theological commitments of Judaism: There is a God, there is only one God and God is not only singular but also unique. No other being is like God; the Children of Israel seek an intimate relationship with God and we are enjoined to love God wholeheartedly, to study God’s words and to teach God’s words to our children.
In other words, the Shema and V’ahavta are saying: There is a higher reality or a life-force greater than ourselves. We, who are but flesh and blood, can be attuned to this reality. There is order to the universe and a power that transcends our own will. This force helps to shape our individual human desires and purpose.
Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most important Jewish and secular thinkers of the twentieth century, spoke of philosophy not as the “love of wisdom” but as the “wisdom of love.” Levinas was not a free-love hippie of the 1960s in the United States but rather a Lithuanian-born French Jew who survived World War II as a French prisoner of war. His wife and child also survived, hidden in a monastery, but Levinas lost the rest of his family.
Levinas came to the “wisdom of love” through the crucible of fire. In keeping with the traditional view of the V’ahavta, he believed that the job of the Jew is to serve The Divine “with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.”
He asked: How can we possibly serve God in every moment? He proposed that we serve God, the great Other, by serving the little “o” other right in front of you. For the trace of God is found on the face of the other. Had all humanity remembered this and known the “wisdom of love,” as opposed to striving for the “love of wisdom,” then things might have turned out differently for Levinas and his family.
The Talmud similarly taught: A human king strikes coins in his image and every one of them is identical. God creates every person in the divine image, yet each one is different from the other. Each one is a unique representation of the divine image which is in each person.
In the months and years ahead, how might we better enact the “wisdom of love?” How might we imagine a better future for ourselves and our children? How might we honor the teachings of our tradition that proclaim that:
EVERY human being has irreducible worth and dignity because EVERY human is fashioned in the image of God, B’Tzelem Elohim
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad.
Listen. Understand.
We are a people who struggles with God, Life Force of All.
Our God is the Soul of the World and is Unique.
