Hear, O Israel

Moshe calls out to everybody: listen, Israel. There is one God, and He is ours. Not one god for the sky and a different one for the sea, and not a separate god for every nation - one. This is the first sentence Jewish children have been taught for thousands of years.

The line is famous enough that it stopped being a sentence and became a slogan. Read it as a sentence and it has two halves that do different jobs. Hashem is our God is a claim about a relationship. Hashem is one is a claim about reality. Rashi holds them together by putting them in different tenses: He is our God now and not the God of the nations, and in the future He will be the one God for everyone, quoting Zechariah. Read that way the verse is not saying everybody already agrees. It is saying where things are heading.

Two letters are written oversized in every Torah scroll here, the ayin of shema and the dalet of echad. Rabbeinu Bahya ties them to the word ed, witness: since nobody else can see whether the person reciting means it or is only moving his lips - whether his mouth and his heart agree - God Himself is the witness. Ibn Ezra reads echad as levado, alone, only Hashem, and takes Zechariah’s on that day Hashem shall be one as a statement about human thought rather than about God changing, tying echad there to melech, since the same verse says Hashem shall be king over all the earth. Rashi reads the verse temporally: ours now, everyone’s later. Ramban calls it a mitzvah that explains, unfolding what was already contained in Anochi, and adds that the enlarged dalet points to the splitting of the sea. And the response most Israelis half-know, baruch shem kevod malchuto le’olam va’ed, is not in the Torah at all. Pesachim 56a tells that Yaakov’s sons said shema Yisrael to their father, Yisrael being his name, and he answered with that line - which is why the sages instituted it quietly, said but not read.

Love God with your whole heart, with your whole self, and with everything you have. Everything really means everything - even the things you like best, your own stuff and your own time. Nothing is kept back in a corner.

Three times with all, and they get harder as they go: heart, soul, and me’od, which literally just means very. The Mishnah reads nafshecha as even if He takes your life, and me’odecha as with all your money. The order looks wrong - surely money is the easy one. The answer given is blunt: some people love their possessions more than their own bodies, so the verse has to name both separately. Rabbi Akiva said he had spent his whole life waiting for the chance to fulfil with all your soul, and then he got it.

Rashi opens on ve’ahavta with the point of the whole verse: do His commands out of love, because one who acts from love is not like one who acts from fear - the servant working out of fear walks off the moment his master burdens him. On b’chol levavcha he brings the Sifrei: with both your inclinations, the yetzer tov and the yetzer ra; and its alternative reading, that your heart not be divided against the Omnipresent, which the Sifrei gets by hearing levavcha as b’chol lev bach, with all the heart there is in you. B’chol nafshecha: even if He takes your soul, the reading Rabbi Akiva applied to himself in Berachot 61b under Roman execution, saying that all his days he had wondered when he would be able to fulfil it. B’chol me’odecha: with all your money, since there are people whose possessions are dearer to them than their own bodies; and a second reading, taking me’od in its sense of measure, b’chol middah u’middah shemoded lecha - with every measure He metes out to you, whether the good measure or the measure of calamity, for which Rashi brings David saying both kos yeshuot essa and tzarah v’yagon emtza. That last clause is the hardest sentence Rashi writes here, and it is what turns the verse from a description of devotion into a demand that has to hold when things go badly.

The words are not only for saying out loud. They go on your heart, which means you carry them around and keep thinking about them. And the verse says today, because they are meant to feel new every single day and never old and boring.

Which I command you today. Moshe is speaking forty years after Sinai, so today is not a date. Rashi says it means the words should not sit in your eyes like a stale royal decree that nobody bothers to open, but like a new one that everyone runs out into the street to read. That is a demand about attention, not about information. And notice where the verse puts them - al levavecha, on your heart. Rashi links it straight back to the previous verse: asked what the love of verse 5 actually is, he answers that it is this. Holding the words in mind is how the love gets made in the first place.

Rashi makes verse 6 the answer to verse 5: and what is this love? - vehayu hadevarim ha’eleh, for through this you come to recognise the Holy One and cleave to His ways. Love is not treated as a prior emotion that then motivates study; study is the mechanism that produces the love. On asher anochi metzavcha hayom he cites the Sifrei’s image, using the Greek loanword diyutagma, which he then glosses for his readers as a king’s command issued in writing: the words should not be in your eyes like an old edict that nobody minds, but like a new one that everyone runs out to meet. Worth noticing too that the verse says al levavecha, on your heart, and not b’levavecha, in it. A Hasidic teaching commonly told in the name of the Rebbe of Kotzk takes the preposition at face value - the words are laid on top of the heart, and when the heart eventually breaks open they fall inside. That is a late reading, not a peshat one, and it is in none of the commentators above; but it is honest about the ordinary experience of saying these words without feeling them.

Teach these words to your children, and talk about them everywhere: at home, walking down the street, at night before sleeping and in the morning when you get up. Not once a year in a special place - all the time, in ordinary places.

This is the verse that turned the Shema into something said twice a day, and the argument about how is worth knowing. Beit Shammai read when you lie down and when you rise as instructions to your body: recline for it at night, stand up for it in the morning. Beit Hillel said the verse is fixing the time, not the position, because the same verse also says when you walk on the road, and you cannot recline while walking. Then the Mishnah reports Rabbi Tarfon, who reclined by the roadside to do it the strict way, put himself in the way of bandits, and was told by the other sages that he had it coming for going against Beit Hillel. Being extra strict in the wrong direction is still being wrong.

Veshinantam is not the normal verb for teaching. Rashi calls it leshon chidud, a term of sharpening: the words should be sharp in your mouth, so that if a person asks you something about them you will not have to stammer but can answer him immediately. On levanecha he brings the Sifrei’s rule that students are called children - banim atem laHashem, bnei hanevi’im, Hizkiyahu calling all Israel banai - and that correspondingly the teacher is called father, since Elisha calls Eliyahu avi avi. The obligation therefore reaches whoever you teach. On vedibarta bam he adds that these should be your principal subject of conversation, made primary and not incidental. And on uvshochbecha he says the Torah speaks derech eretz, in the ordinary manner of living: the time when people lie down and the time when people rise. That is Beit Hillel’s position in Mishnah Berachot 1:3, reached from the same phrase they use - you cannot recline while walking on the road - against Beit Shammai’s reading of the verse as a posture. Rabbi Tarfon’s admission in the same mishnah, that he reclined on the road to follow Beit Shammai, endangered himself before bandits, and was told he was liable for having transgressed the words of Beit Hillel, is one of the sharpest rebukes of stringency anywhere in the Mishnah.

Bind them as a sign on your hand. These are the tefillin - small black boxes tied onto the arm and worn on the head, with tiny handwritten scrolls inside them. These very words are written on one of those scrolls. When someone puts on tefillin in the morning, this verse is the thing they are doing.

Nobody actually knows what totafot means. Rashi gives an old explanation that the word counts the compartments - tat is two in one language, pat is two in another, so four. Rashbam, who was his grandson, went the other way on the parallel verse in Shemot and said the plain sense is a comparison: let this be a permanent memory, as though it were written on your hand, like set me as a seal upon your heart in Shir HaShirim. Two men reading the same words, and both of them wore tefillin every morning. The halakhah went with the object, and the object is real - the little bag in a soldier’s kit holds boxes with these verses written inside them.

Rashi assigns the two clauses to the two tefillin, the arm and the head, and gives the etymology of totafot as a count of the parshiyot: tat is two in Katpi and pat is two in Afriki, hence four compartments. The word occurs nowhere outside this commandment, which is why Rashbam’s comment on the parallel verse at Shemot 13:9 carries weight: lefi omek peshuto, by the deep plain sense, it shall be a constant remembrance for you as though it were written on your hand, on the model of simeni kachotam al libecha; and bein einecha like an ornament of gold that people are accustomed to place on the forehead for beauty. Rashbam is disputing the peshat, not the practice. The practice itself is worked out in Menachot 37a, where Rav Ashi derives the left arm from the spelling yadchah with a final heh, read as the weak hand; where the school of Menashe puts al yadecha at the kibboret, the muscle of the upper arm, and bein einecha at the kodkod, the crown of the head; and where the school of Rabbi Yannai fixes that spot exactly: the place where an infant’s skull is still soft. Not literally between the eyes at all. Two of the four passages written inside the head-tefillin are this one and Vehaya im shamoa (Devarim 11:13-21).

Write them on the doorposts of your house. That is the mezuzah - the little case fixed on the doorframe of almost every Jewish home in Israel. Inside it there is a small rolled scroll, and written on that scroll are the very verses you have just been reading, together with a second passage from later in Devarim.

This is the verse that put an object on almost every Jewish doorframe in the country. What is inside it is not a blessing, not a lucky charm and not a name. It is this passage and the second paragraph of the Shema, written out by hand. Rambam is unusually sharp about the difference. He rules that a person must be careful with the mezuzah because every time he goes in or out he meets the unity of God’s name and remembers his love for Him; and elsewhere he says that people who write angels’ names inside have not only cancelled the mitzvah, they have taken one of the great commandments and turned it into an amulet for their own convenience. The test is simple, and most of us fail it: do you know what is written in yours?

Rashi’s text of the verse spelled mezuzot defectively, mem-zayin-zayin-tav, and from that he says only one doorpost needs one; our scrolls print it with the vav. Menachot 34a reaches the same halakhah by quite different routes: Rabbi Yishmael from the plural turning up a second time in the next passage of the Shema, a ribui after a ribui, which limits rather than adds; Rabbi Akiva from the fact that Shemot has to say the two doorposts explicitly whenever it means two. Rashi also reads uvish’arecha as taking in the gates of courtyards, of provinces and of towns, so the obligation is not confined to private houses. The word mezuzah means the doorpost itself - the mitzvah is named for the place, and only later did the object borrow the name of the spot it hangs on. Rambam, in Hilchot Tefillin, Mezuzah v’Sefer Torah 6:13, gives the reason: a person is obliged to be careful with mezuzah since it is a constant obligation on everyone, and whenever he enters and leaves he encounters the unity of the Name of the Holy One and remembers His love. A chapter earlier, at 5:4, he is severe about the alternative: those who write the names of angels or holy names on the inside are among those with no share in the world to come, since these fools not only nullify the mitzvah but take a great commandment, the unity of God’s name, and make of it an amulet for their own benefit. Between those two halachot lies the entire difference between a mezuzah that is read and one that is only touched on the way past.