Deuteronomy 3:12-7:11
Thinking about the Shema
According to a rabbinic tradition, when the “men of Jericho” recited the Shema, they would say it in a slightly different way from that followed by Jews nowadays. They would recite the first verse, “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God the Lord alone,” and then go on to the next verse in the Torah, “And you shall love the Lord your God…” without inserting anything between them.
Nowadays, Jews customarily insert between these two verses the words, “Blessed be the Name of Him whose glorious kingship is eternal” (see Mishnah Pesaḥim 4:8, Tosefta Pisḥa 3:19). We don’t know exactly why the “men of Jericho” insisted on skipping these words (except for the fact that they aren’t in the biblical text itself), but whatever their reason, according to the Mishnah, the Rabbis did not consider this practice improper, even though they did not follow it.
What the “men of Jericho” did or did not do might seem like a minor matter, but it isn’t at all. It addresses the very essence of the Shema and its significance in Judaism.
Since ancient times, the Shema has been treated as Judaism’s great confession of faith, the assertion that there is only one God: “Hear O Israel: the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone” (or, in some translations, “The Lord is one”). These six words in Hebrew are considered a concise statement of the belief that lies at the very heart of the Jewish religion, monotheism. And yet, there may be reason to conclude that this was not how this first verse of the Shema was originally understood.
To begin with, there is little evidence before the time of the Rabbis (that is, before the first century CE) that the proclamation “the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone” was understood as a basic teaching of the Torah. For example, the anonymous author of the book of Jubilees, a Jew who lived around 200 BCE, was apparently unaware of any special significance attributed to what we call the Shema. He was a careful reader of the Torah, and as such he referred to many of the Torah’s laws in his book, including the duty to love God that is mentioned right after the opening verse of the Shema (see Jub 20:7). But he never mentions or even alludes to the verse preceding it, “Hear O Israel, the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone”—not once in a work of some 50 chapters.
Other ancient sages do mention the Shema, but they somehow fail to say that its message is that of monotheism and God’s utter oneness. All this suggests that people back then understood the Shema rather differently. It seems altogether probable that they were not reading those first six words in isolation, as a declaration of monotheism, but that they read that first verse as connected to what follows, the duty to love God and to think and talk about His laws.
In fact, this may also explain why the “men of Jericho” did not want to break the connection of the first verse to the one that follows it: the two can indeed be construed as a single idea, “Hear O Israel: the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone, and you shall [therefore] love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and all your strength.”
How did this ever change? It would seem that the rabbis of the first and second centuries CE quite consciously set out to stress the independence of Deut 6:4 as an affirmation of monotheism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone,” period. This may not have been the original intention behind the insertion of “Blessed be the Name of Him whose glorious kingship is eternal,” but it certainly had the effect of creating a full stop after the word eḥadh (“alone”)—and this was apparently what the “men of Jericho” objected to.
The same sort of full stop is reflected in various other customs connected with the Shema (see b. Talmud Berakhot 13b): drawing out the “d” in the word eḥadh at the end of this verse; covering the eyes while saying the first verse; being pores ‘al Shema, an ancient practice explained in various ways today, but which seems to have resulted in isolating the first verse from the rest; and so forth. The Mishnah’s description of the first paragraph of the Shema as embodying the “acceptance of divine kingship” (Berakhot 2:2; this description that best fits the Deut 6:4 alone, rather than the whole paragraph) might be a further example of this tendency. In short, it seems that it was rabbinic interpretation that created the new role for Deut 6:4: it became an isolated assertion of the truth of monotheism.
If so, what are we really meant to understand when we recite the first paragraph of the Shema? “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is the only God; therefore, you shall love Him with your undivided heart and soul and might. [In practice, this means that] you shall always keep in mind the things that I am commanding you today and you shall teach them to your children; talk about them whether you are at home or traveling on the road, when you go to bed and when you get up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your arm, and they shall be as frontlets [i.e., headband ornaments] between your eyes, and you shall write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.”