SH’MA: AT EVERY BOUNDARY, THE WORLD IS ONE

Rabbi Arthur Waskow

One of the three paragraphs that in Jewish prayer traditionally follows the recitation of the Sh’ma, affirming God’s unity, appears in Deuteronomy 11: 13-21, and is read as part of the Torah portion this Shabbat.

?13 And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,  14 That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.  15 And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.  16 Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them;  17 And then the LORD’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the LORD giveth you.  18 Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.  19 And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.  20 And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:  21 That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.?  Deuteronomy 11: 13-21

This paragraph often gets the silent treatment: The first paragraph is usually sung aloud;

? 4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.  5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.?Deuteronomy 6:4-9

?37 The LORD said to Moses:  38 Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. 39 You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eye.  40 So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. 41 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.?  Numbers 15:37-41

But in most congregations the second paragraph is at best murmured, and in some prayer-books it is actually left out.

Before we explore its meaning, how do we understand the whole pattern of the three paragraphs? Why do they follow the Sh’ma, and how do they support its assertion of Unity?

They all talk of some crucial boundary in space, time, or consciousness ? a boundary that might seem to divide the world radically in two.

We start with the doorway between the risky world and our safe homes; or between our boring homes and the exciting world. Either way, we might believe the doorway separates two utterly different worlds.

So we stop there to remind ourselves to go beyond their separateness, to experience what is One beneath: “Listen up, you Godwrestler: The Breath of Life is your God, and the Breath of Life is One.”

Then we come to the doorway in time between our active rising up and our dreamy, sleepy lying down, when we might believe these are two separate worlds. ? So again we pause at that moment to remember to remind ourselves: These two are really One.

We affirm the use of t’fillin to bind our eyes and hands: Eyes that observe, hands that act. We might believe these are two utterly separate worlds, the world of observing, watching, and the world of doing, making. But we pause to bind our eyes and hands together and we remember: Beneath their differences is One.

And when we come to the gateway of our cities, the boundary of our own cultures and communities, when we might truly believe these are two separate worlds—the world where everybody speaks my language, and the world of those bar-bar-barbarians out there—then we pause at that gateway to remind ourselves of Unity.

Then we turn to the second paragraph of the Sh’ma, the one in Deut. 11. We look beyond all human life at those beings that do not speak at all—mountains and rivers, ozone and oak trees, beetles and krill. We might imagine they live in an utterly separate world beyond us, on which we have no effect at all.

So we pause to remember that if we pour poison into earth and air and water, it is poison that we will eat and drink and breathe.

If we chop up the sacred reality that all life flows and breathes as One, if we elevate useful parts of the Whole like our own prosperity and ambition into Godlets and Addictions that we worship, then the rains will dry up or turn to acid, the atmosphere itself will scorch us, the very heavens become our enemy. So we remember: Sh’ma! ? All life is One!

Why has this paragraph become so muted? Some of the sages of the twentieth century thought it taught a falsehood: That our good actions bring good consequences; our bad ones bring ill upon us. They did not want to teach and inculcate this falsehood.

At the individual level, this wistful hope of just reward and punishment is indeed very often false. But when society as a whole pursues decency, the chances are much higher (not 100%) that it will prosper, while a society that makes a habit of evildoing is liable to have evil fall upon its head.

Interestingly, the “you” that is singular in the first paragraph ? “B’chol levavcha”—becomes plural ? “levavchem” ? in the second. The text is teaching a distinction that some of its interpreters did not notice.

In our own generation, when the earth is so much endangered by human idolatries of huge societies that are recoiling upon us as disasters, this paragraph should be rescued from silence and made a vigorous reminder in all our congregations.

Finally, there is the third paragraph. When we might assert, “Inside my skin I know what hurts, inside my skin I know my ecstasy; but everything outside me is mysterious and alien—these are two separate worlds!” ?
Then we look at the tzitziot on the edges of our selves, we look at these fuzzy fringes mixed always of my own cloth and God’s air, we look to see that not good fences but good fringes make good neighbors, we look at these threads of connection that bind us to each other: ONE!

Rabbi Akiba, dying at the hands of Imperial Roman torturers, called out the Sh’ma. At the ultimate doorway of Death, whose other side we cannot see, he affirmed that “this world” and “the coming world” were One. So today, the tradition is that every dying Jew should affirm that Unity, should say the Sh’ma.

And even more ? Akiba saw that the world—so broken that his loving learning of the Torah could be rewarded by this blinding pain—this broken world could be repaired. Must be repaired. Could only be repaired by affirming the Unity that implores us to reconnect the shattered, scattered pieces that are potential Wholeness.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the author of GODWRESTLING ? ROUND 2,  and director of
The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org The Shalom Center voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click on—
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