Parashat Etchanan - 11 Av 5768 / July 24, 2026

The Shema, recited by our people for millennia upon waking and sleeping, upon death and times of danger, and is part of every morning and evening service.  Although in the Torah, there is nothing indicated it was to be used in liturgy, the Mishnah tells us that the Shema was recited twice a day by the priests in the Second Temple.  The Mishnah and Talmud both begin with a very detailed debate about when we are supposed to say the Shema in the evening and morning. 

It is interesting that something as central to Judaism as the Shema is something of an enigma in terms of exact meaning.   There are, for example, better ways to say “God is One” in Hebrew.  In fact, in this same portion, just a couple of chapters earlier, we read,

 יהֹוָ֖ה ה֣וּא הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ין ע֖וֹד מִלְּבַדּֽוֹ׃ 

“Ein Od” Milvado is much clearer and the Adonai is God is used to end our prayers on Yom Kippur.  

Jeffrey Tigay, Professor Emeritus at U. Penn, and famous for his work on Deuteronomy points out the precise meaning of the Shema is uncertain. The four Hebrew words "Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad" literally mean "Adonai our God Adonai one." Grammatically, it could be rendered several ways, such as 1. Adonai is our God, Adonai alone. 2. Adonai our God, Adonai is One. 3. Adonai our god is one Adonai...

Here is his attempt at a good translation:

Focus your attention and heed the following teaching: though other peoples worship various beings and things they consider divine, Israel is to recognize Adonai alone.

Jewish scholar, poet and liturgist Marcia Falk argues that the point is that we perceive behind the many images of the divine a unity, and she translates it this way:

Hear O Israel--The Divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything; the many are One.

Rab Zalman Schachter Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, puts it this way:

Listen, you, Yisrael person, Yah who Is, is our God, Yah who Is, Is One, Unique, All there Is. 

Regardless of the exact translation, what is clear in the meaning is that we as Jews were called upon to let it sink in, really sink in that there is a unity behind all our experiences of the divine, of transcendence, of meaning, of God.  We must remember that and teach it to our children, and discuss it, but first we have to let it sink in.  We have to adjust the way we understand the world to include this profound challenge to our perception. 

Humans are so divided today, and have always been.  We are groupish, as Jonathan Haidt and others point out, and we have an instinctive impulse to divide in the competing factions.   That is inherent in being human.  The Torah conveys this in the story of Cain’s jealousy and killing of his brother Abel.   And Israel, which is first in the Shema, is another name for Jacob, who wrestled in the womb with his brother Esau. 

This part of human nature is key to human politics and economics. 

The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, famously argued that without society, the human condition devolves into a war of everyone against everyone.  William Golding captures this in “Lord of the Flies.”  For Hobbes,  a strong government is needed to keep people’s competitive and jealous nature for escalating into constant feuds, raids and retaliation.  In economics, socialism might be seen as an attempt to rewire our competitiveness into cooperation, capitalism can be understood as trying to harness competitiveness for the individual and common good. 

How to constructively balance our impulse toward conflict and competition with our need of stable societies to flourish has been at the heart of much philosophy and political science.

Judaism also asks this question.   The Talmud teaches us that we are all born with a good inclination, the yester hatov, and the evil inclination, the yetser hara.  Of course, spiritually, we are to spend our lives acting to strength our good inclination and tame our evil inclination through habits of practice, such as prayer, tzedakah, teshuvah and humility.   But the rabbis were more nuanced than that.  They also said that, practically, we need our evil inclination to survive, because without it, we wouldn’t be motivated to build houses, and raise children, and create things. 

Judaism also argues that a clear, fair dependable legal system that people trust and abide by is key to keep society stable and our impulse for revenge restrained. 

But Judaism’s most radical answer to this problem is to assert that instead of many gods that war with each other the way humans do, there is only one God, who has no form, no gender, no nationality; and that we are all descended from the primordial couple so that all humans are also family.  And since God created us all, we are all made in the image of God, both the people we like and agree with, and the people we see as the enemy.  

That’s what the Shema calls on us to do:  to remember that while we are a tribe, Yisrael, and as such have a special connection with one another, we are also, at the same time, all creatures of one Creator and so we are all equal and all of immeasurable worth. 

The Shema calls us to let that sink in, both sides of it.  At times like these, when antisemitism pushes us toward more and more defensiveness and tribalism,  the Shema commands us to listen more deeply to the part of our perception that also knows that there is also profound, ineffable Unity behind all of this existence.  

The Shema asks us to let that sink in.  Perhaps this is why it is a tradition to cover our eyes when we recite the Shema, and see the letters as we say them.  It is also a custom to make the letter “Shin” for “Shaddai” or Almighty, the same letter that is on our mezuzahs, and place that over your eyes while we recite the Shema, to remind us that we are not all powerful.

My teacher, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, taught that Jewish law.

“The Halakhah prescribes sitting not standing for the Sh'ma. The issue goes back to a debate between Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai, in which Bet Hillel ruled successfully that the Sh'ma should be said in whatever position one happened to be when the time of its recitation arrived. In the ninth century, the Babylonian Gaon, Amram, enforced that position, as part of his religio-political attack on the Palestinians who still said the Sh'ma standing. His successful championing of the Hillelite perspective eventually entered the codes of Jewish law, which justified the Hillelite-Amram position with a variety of ex post facto arguments, that became standard Halakhah. When the Crusaders overran Palestine, destroying native Palestinian Jewish custom in the process, the Palestinian practice of standing died too, so that Jews around the world now sat for the Sh'ma as Amram had insisted.

He continues:

Reform Jews, however, saw the Sh'ma as central to their claim that Judaism's uniqueness lay in its discovery of ethical monotheism. Wanting to acknowledge the centrality of the Sh'ma, and recognizing that people generally stand for the prayers that matter most, they began standing for the Sh'ma...how could one not stand to proclaim God one?

So tonight, I am going to ask you just as an experiment to stand, and cover your eyes and concentrate on the profound meaning of this seemingly simple affirmation:  Hear of Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One. 

Shabbat Shalom.