A Fuzzy Concept

David Z. Feuer
December 15, 2012

Today I am going to talk about the Shema and V’ahavto.

I will begin by presenting you with several quotes from holy writings. I have edited some of the quotes.

Shema Yisroael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai echad!

Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord is one.

Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord alone.

There is no god but God!

Yet for us there is only one God …

What thing is the weightiest in testimony? … Do you really bear witness that there are other gods? … Say: I bear not witness. Say: He is only One God …

Do these all sound like they would have come from Jewish sources?

Now I will give you the full versions of the edited quotes:

There is no god, but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.

According to Reza Alan, this is the two-fold profession of faith, or shahadah, that defined both the mission and the principles of Muhammad’s movement (No god, but God, p. 43).

Yet for us there is only one God, the Father from whom all things come and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things come and through whom we exist. (Corinthians 1, chapter 8, verse 6)

What thing is the weightiest in testimony? … Do you really bear witness that there are other gods with Allah. Say: I bear not witness. Say: He is only One God … (The Holy Qur’an, chapter 6, verse 19)

In addition I want you consider a couple more quotes from holy writings.

The first is Psalm 86, verse 8:

Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works.

The second is from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12, verses 28 through 30:

One of the scribes who had listened to them debating appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and put a further question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?”

Jesus replied, “This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one, only Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

So, why am I presenting you with all of these quotes? I want to show that the concept of Adonai ehad is a fuzzy concept and that we share this fuzzy concept with the two major religions that evolved from ours.

But before going further into this analysis, I want to present some traditional teachings about the Shema. Rabbi Philip Birnbaum wrote in A Book of Jewish Concepts (pp. 554-555):

The first sentence of the Shema, consisting of six Hebrew words, has been the keynote of Judaism throughout the ages. It contains two statements, proclaiming the Oneness of God and the loyalty of Israel. Its correct English rendering is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” The last letters of the first word shema (hear) and the last word, echad (one), if combined, form the word ad, witness; that is to say; he who recites the Shema bears witness that God is One and the God of all humanity. For this reason, the letters ayin and dalled are written large in the unvocalized text of the Torah.

The Shema reading, composed of three biblical sections, is the oldest and most essential part of the liturgy. The first paragraph, taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, demands that we love and serve God with our whole being. Love goes deeper than fear; love serves unselfishly. …

The second paragraph, taken from Deuteronomy 15:37-41, speaks of the fringes (tsitsith) as intended to remind us constantly of our duties towards God; it contains a warning against following the evil impulses of the heart.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg adds something more to this in his book, The Jewish Way (pp. 26-27)

…there is a deeper Jewish teaching as well. The past is not over, by tapping into the deeper layers of time, the Jew brings the past revelation event into life now, The Sh’ma prayer states: “And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6). Say the Rabbis: They are commanded today – every day. In a mystical sense, under the surface of normal time, there courses a parallel stream of sacred time. In it, the Sinai revelation and the other great events are carried in tandem with present existence. This is the meaning of the rabbinic dictum: “Every day a voice goes out from Horeb (Sinai): Ritual calls up that voice into the life of the present day believer. Energized by that voice, Jews persist on the road to redemption.

I would also like to share the words of Rabbi Arnold Wolf, from his book, The Unfinished Rabbi (pp. 38-39):

The Sh’ma is a pasuk, (verse), or rather several paragraphs, from the Torah. The Torah is the Jew’s only path to God. We could not know God through any natural theology. The heavens declare divine glory only to those who know how to look beyond quarks and black holes and big bangs. Scripture alone authorizes theology and induces to prayer. Only what God tells us about God is available to us and that, of course, only to the extent that we can appropriate it.

The Talmud reminds us the Four Letter Name comes one word earlier in the Sh’ma (which human beings recite) than in the K’dushah , an essentially angelic assertion. The Sh’ma is for human beings who do not “know” but who, alone of all creation, can “hear” and perform God’s will. It is a Law to be performed in faithfulness and in love. There is no God but God, and we are called to be God’s prophets. Hear O Israel – because you are Israel – what God wants you to hear and do what God wants you to do.

And what is that? It is to love God with all that we have and are. It is to believe the improbable, that due rain will fall and that peace will come if only we hear what God tells us. It is not going about after our own eyes and our own hearts but conforming to Divine direction. It is to stop whoring and to start performing. It is to act like Jews who may not know much about God but who have a terrifyingly clear idea of what Jews must do – in Gaza and in Glencoe, in synagogue and in business, in prayer and in sex, in hearing and in doing according to what we hear.

God is one. God is unique. God tells us Torah. God demands obedience. God is more that our idea of God. God is our agenda. God is not an idol. God is not silent.

The rest is commentary. Go and learn.

Now that we have considered some commentary on the Sh'ma, let’s take a closer look at the key words, Adonai echad. They have been translated as God is one, and they have also been translated as God alone. Each of these meanings has a special historical significance. About three thousand years ago, when these words were first written, the goal of the leaders was to get Jews to stop worshiping other gods and to stop the practice of Jews having idols in their homes. At that time in history, the translation God alone was more relevant.

Earlier I said that our concept of Adonai echad is a fuzzy concept. I don’t quite know how to reconcile the Shema with Psalm 86, verse 8, “Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works.” If we take Adonai echad to mean God is one rather than God alone, we could be declaring not that God is the only God, but that God is a unified whole, not a composition of spirit.

We might also be declaring that God is unique because of what she has done. She has created the heaven and the earth and she gave us the Torah! The words of the Psalm do not clash with this meaning of Adonai echad.

The theological anomaly of one god composed of two or more parts did not present itself until the Christian religion matured. The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost came to be the God idea with which the Christian theologians were trying to replace our God idea. At this time in our history, the translation God is one was much more useful. God was not three. The teaching of Mark was rejected and refuted. A great many midrashim were written in which powerful angels or other celestial beings were seen to be very God like. Metatron was the greatest of the angels, and he sat on a throne, like God.

In other stories, it was King David or Ezkiel sitting on thrones with God. Clearly the Christian writings about the Holy Spirit and about Jesus, being the Son of God were in relation to our ideas about the Shekhinah and about Metatron and King David and Ezkiel and others. There was agreement that God was alone. We learn from the words of Mark that the Christians believed in the trinity, but nonetheless believed that there was only one God.

There are two historians who are presently presenting competing theories about the development of Christianity and Judaism in the first few hundred years of the Common Era. These are Peter Schaefer and Daniel Boyarin. At the risk of oversimplification, let me simply say that they agree that these religions evolved in relation to each other. Mr. Schaeffer believes that the Jews were greatly influenced by the Christians. Mr. Boyarin thinks the Christian theologians were writing in response to Jewish beliefs and practices. Both agree that the rabbis who wrote the Babylonian Talmud were quite troubled by the word Elohim because it was plural; it could be interpreted to mean gods. These rabbis wrote masterful and fanciful stories to explain that the word Elohim did not imply that there were two or more gods.

The followers of Muhammad have always condemned the Christians much more than the Jews because of the Christian belief in the trinity. As Rabbi Wolf alluded to in his piece, we agree with the Muslims that God is the only god and we agree that man can prophesize. Our fundamental disagreement is in regard to Mohammad; we do not accept him as a prophet.

I leave you with the traditional Jewish wisdom that when two or more sides disagree, all can be right! The Shema means that God is a unified, undivided whole. It also means that God is unique and that there are no other gods. And it also means that we should continue to perform the will of God because of our love for God. And finally it means that we stand in relation to God. In ways that we see and in ways that we don’t see, we reap rewards from living our lives in accordance with the principles we find in the Torah. The receiving of rain in season according to our needs can be viewed both literally and metaphorically. The hope is that we will lead better lives if we remind ourselves about God’s laws at regular intervals throughout the day.

I hope my presentation of a fuzzy concept wasn’t too fuzzy after all.

Shabbat Shalom

Sources:

• Aslan, Reza; No god but God – The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Random House Trade Paperbacks; New York; 2005.
• Greenberg, Rabbi Irving; The Jewish Way – Living the Holidays; Summit Books; New York, London, Sydney, Toronto, Tokyo; 1988.
• Schaefer, Peter: The Jewish Jesus – How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other; Princeton University Press; Princeton & Oxford; 2012.
• Wolf, Rabbi Arnold Jacob; Unfinished Rabbi; Ivan R. Dee; Chicago; 1998.
• Catholic Online Bible

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