Here is my definition of religion: Religion is an attempt to address the hunger for meaning, understanding, and connection. Religion provides experiences and ideas which evoke awe and tolerates mystery. Religion promotes reflection and awareness. Religion at its best is experienced through acts of lovingkindness, altruism, courage and commitment.
Look at parts of Va’etchanan
- Deuteronomy 4:6 Other peoples will hear of our laws and will say, “Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people;”
Rabbi Ethan Tucker: “At the end of the day, the Torah itself tells us that other peoples will admire it and find its teachings wise. This ought to challenge any desire we have to dismiss the opinions of other people as irrelevant or inherently untrustworthy… If other nations not commanded by the Torah are meant to admire it, then they are clearly doing so based on their own instinctive human assessments. Jews are not obligated to go along with the consensus of any particular place or moment in time, but they are obligated to engage with it. If not persuaded by it, they must persuade in return. And if persuaded by it, they must find a way to integrate that perspective with Torah. Either human morality articulates something the Torah left unsaid, or it points us to a more thoughtful, more accurate application of the Torah to our world and to our lives: One unified question: What does God want from me? We must never forget that we are meant to answer that as Jews and as human beings, all at the same time.”
- The word “yirah,” often translated as “fear,” implies “reverence.” “Yirah” appears in this portion four times: 5:26, 6:2, 6:13 and 6:24. It shares root letters with the word “nora” as in “yamim noraim, “ the High Holy Days. To better understand “yirah,” look at its usage in Exodus 1:17: “The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt told them; they let the boys live.” The courageous midwives had every reason to fear for their safety if they disobeyed Pharaoh, but they believed God’s desires carried great weight. We better understand the midwives’ response by saying, “They revered God,” not “They feared God.”
Is reverence part of your vocabulary or life experience?
In this parsha, Deut. 4:10, Moses states that the purpose of establishing the people Israel is “…in order that they may learn to revere Me as long as they live on earth…”
What aspects of Jewish practice teach reverence?
3.Deut. 4:29 “If you search there, you will find God YHWH, if only you seek with all your heart and soul…” Has your Jewish education prioritized seeking God? How might we teach seeking God with heart and soul? Not, “Do you believe in God?” but “ how do I experience myself as a spiritual being?”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Our radical amazement responds to the mystery, but does not produce it. You and I have not invented the grandeur of the sky nor endowed the human being with the mystery of birth and death. We do not create the ineffable, we encounter it… The awareness of the ineffable is that with which our search must begin. The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide…
- Deut. 4:39 “V’yadata hayom, v’hashevota el l’vavecha. Ki Adonai hu haElohim, ba’shamayim mi’maal, v’al haaretz, mitachat ayn od.” Part of Alenu prayer.
- Deut. 6:4 “Hear O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH alone.” “Bernard Levinson: “The verse makes not a quantitative argument about the number of deities but a qualitative one about the nature of the relationship between God and Israel.” Jewish Study Bible, 2004, p. 380.
- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The supreme religious act in Judaism is to listen. Ancient Greece was a culture of the eye; ancient Israel a culture of the ear. The Greeks worshipped what they saw; Israel worshipped what they heard.
This is how Hans Kohn put it in his The Idea of Nationalism. The ancient Greeks were “the people of sight, of the spatial and plastic sense . . . as if they thought to transpose the flowing, fleeting, ever related elements of life into rest, space, limitation . . . The Jew did not see so much as he heard . . . His organ was the ear . . . When Elijah perceived God, he heard only a still, small voice. For that reason, the Jew never made an image of his God.”
That is why the keyword of Judaism is Shema. God is not something we see, but a voice we hear. This is how Moses put it elsewhere in this week’s sedra, describing the supreme revelation at Mount Sinai: Deut. 4:12 “You heard the sound of words but perceived no shape – nothing but a voice.”
This has systemic implications for the whole of Judaism. Its way of understanding the world, and of relating to it, is fundamentally different from that of the Greeks, and of the philosophical tradition (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others) of which they were the founders. A listening culture is not the same as a seeing culture. In this week’s study I want to explore one of the many aspects of this difference.
The Mosaic books are, among other things, a set of commandments, 613 of them. It would seem to follow that a book of commands must have a verb that means “to obey”, for that is the whole purpose of an imperative. Obedience stands in relation to command as truth does to statement. Yet there is no verb in biblical Hebrew that means to obey. This is an utterly astonishing fact.
So glaring is the lacuna that when Hebrew was revived in modern times a verb had to be found that meant “to obey”. This was an obvious necessity – especially in the case of Israel’s defense forces. An army depends on obedience to the command of a superior officer. The word chosen was letsayet, an Aramaic term that does not appear in this sense anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. The word the Torah uses is quite different, namely lishmo’a, Shema, “hear”.
The verb lishmo’a is a key term of the book of Deuteronomy, where it appears in one or other forms some 92 times (by way of comparison, it appears only 6 times in the whole of Leviticus). tradition. No English word has this range of meanings. Perhaps the closest are “to hearken” and “to heed” – neither of them terms in common use today. Psychotherapists nowadays sometimes speak of “active listening”, and this is part of what is meant by Shema.
The best way to discover what is unique about a civilization is to search for words it contains that are untranslatable into other languages. It is said that the Bedouin have many words for sand and the Inuit many terms for snow. The Greek word megalopsuchos – literally the “great-souled” person, one blessed with wealth, status and effortless superiority – has no equivalent in either Judaism or Christianity, two cultures that valued, as Greece did not, humility. Shema is untranslatable – understandably so since it belongs to biblical Hebrew, the world’s supreme example of a culture of the ear.
This is a fact of great consequence and should affect our entire understanding of Judaism. The existence of the verb lishmo’a and the absence of the verb letsayet tells us that biblical Israel, despite its intense focus on Divine commandments, is not a faith that values blind, unthinking, unquestioning obedience.
There is a reason for the commands. In some cases they are rooted in the fact that God created the universe and the laws that govern it: therefore, we must respect the integrity of nature. In other cases, they are grounded in history. Our ancestors were slaves in Egypt; they knew from indelible personal experience what it is to live in an unjust, tyrannical society. Therefore, a society based on Torah will be just, compassionate, generous. Slaves must rest one day in seven. One year in seven, debts should be cancelled. The landless poor should not go without food at harvest time – and so on.
The God of revelation is also the God of creation and redemption. Therefore, when God commands us to do certain things and refrain from others, it is not because His will is arbitrary but because He cares for the integrity of the world as His work, and for the dignity of the human person as His image. There is a profound congruence between the commandments and the laws that govern nature and history. An arbitrary ruler demands blind obedience. God is not an arbitrary ruler; therefore, He does not demand blind obedience. Instead, He wishes us as far as possible to understand why He has commanded what He has commanded.
Hence the emphasis, in Exodus and Deuteronomy, on children asking questions. In an authoritarian culture, questions are discouraged: “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die” as Tennyson put it. Had this been the case in Judaism, the Torah would have had a verb that meant the same asletsayet, not one with the meanings of lishmoa.
Shema Yisrael does not mean “Hear, O Israel”. It means something like: “Listen. Concentrate. Give the word of God your most focused attention. Strive to understand. Engage all your faculties, intellectual and emotional. Make His will your own. For what He commands you to do is not irrational or arbitrary but for your welfare, the welfare of your people, and ultimately for the benefit of all humanity.”
In Judaism faith is a form of listening: to the song creation sings to its Creator, and to the message history delivers to those who strive to understand it. That is what Moses says, time and again in Deuteronomy. Stop looking listen. Stop speaking listen. Create a silence in the soul. Still the clamor of instinct, desire, fear, anger.
Strive to listen to the still, small voice beneath the noise. Then you will know that the universe is the work of the One beyond the furthest star yet closer to you than you are to yourself – and then you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might. In God’s unity you will find unity – within yourself and between yourself and the world – and you will no longer fear the unknown.
Marcia Falk’s Shema:
Hear O Israel
The divine abounds everywhere
and dwells in everything.
Its faces are infinite,
its source suffuses all.
The many are One.