If You Truly Listen

This is the second part of the Shema, the piece that comes straight after v’ahavta. It begins with the word if. If you really listen - the Hebrew says listen twice over, shamoa tishme’u, which is how Hebrew says listen properly - and if you love Hashem and serve him with your whole heart and your whole self, then something follows. The next verse says what.

Everything here hangs on the first two words: v’haya im, and it shall be, if. It is a condition, and the sentence does not finish until the rain arrives in the next verse. Something has also quietly changed since the paragraph you said a minute earlier. The first paragraph of the Shema is singular - b’chol l’vavcha, your heart, one person. This one opens in the plural, l’vavchem, nafshechem, and it ends in the plural too, in the warning. (The two verses of promise in between slip back into the singular, which is a puzzle of its own.) That switch decides who the promise is about, and it is the reason the paragraph can be a claim about a country and still look false about the person next to you. Worth noticing what is missing too: the first paragraph adds uv’chol me’odecha, with all your might, and this one does not.

Rashi reads v’haya as continuous with verse 11, where the land is described as drinking water from the rain of heaven - the paragraph is not a general doctrine of reward but a statement about this particular ground. On shamoa tishme’u he takes the doubled infinitive as sequential: if you listen to the old, you will listen to the new, learning being cumulative. On hayom he says the commandments should be new to you every day, as though you had heard them for the first time. On l’ahava he rules out instrumental religion outright: do not say I will learn in order to become rich, or to be called Rabbi, or to collect a reward; whatever you do, do out of love. And on ul’ovdo b’chol l’vavchem he supplies the definition that shaped the liturgy - service that is performed in the heart is prayer, which he proves from Daniel praying at his open window in Babylon. The Gemara in Taanit 2a opens with the same derivation from this verse, and reads it straight into the rain of verse 14: rain is asked for during the service of the heart. On the plural of b’chol l’vavchem, Rashi cites the Sifrei - the earlier warning, in the first paragraph, was addressed to the individual, this one to the community. Ramban quotes that line here and builds his entire reading of the paragraph on it.

In Egypt the water came out of the river. Here it has to come down from the sky, and nobody can make it. The promise is rain at the right time - the first rain after the seeds go into the ground, and the last rain just before the harvest - and then three things to gather in. Dagan is grain, for bread. Tirosh is grapes, for wine. Yitzhar is olives, for oil. Bread, wine and oil: that is a table with food on it.

Rashi puts it as a straight exchange: you have done what was yours to do, I will do what is mine. That bluntness is usually where people start to argue, and the Talmud argues too - over two words of this verse. V’asafta d’ganecha, and you shall gather your grain. Rabbi Yishmael reads it as instruction: the Torah assumes you will work the field, so run your life the ordinary way, part learning and part earning. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai answers that when Israel does what it should, the work is done by others. Abaye, generations later, gives the verdict from observation: many did as Rabbi Yishmael and it went well for them, many did as Rabbi Shimon and it did not.

Rashi on b’ito offers two readings, both about not being inconvenienced by the blessing: rain at night, so that it does not trouble you, or on Friday nights when everyone is indoors. He defines the two rains functionally - the yoreh is the rain that falls after sowing and soaks the ground and the seed, the malkosh the rain that comes just before the harvest to fill out the grain on its stalk. Ibn Ezra reads yoreh as the rain that indicates a good year, taking the verb in its sense of showing, which puts it on the root י-ר-ה, the root of Torah and of moreh, a teacher. In practice the yoreh is the autumn rain around Cheshvan and the malkosh the last rain of the spring; the whole agricultural year sits between them. Notice that the number changes inside the verse: the rain is given to metar artzechem, your land, plural, and then v’asafta d’ganecha, and you shall gather your grain, is singular - and the singular holds through verse 15 until the warning restores the plural. On v’asafta d’ganecha Rashi adds that you will gather it in, and not your enemies. Those same two words carry the dispute in Berachot 35b: Rabbi Yishmael takes them as a mandate for ordinary working life alongside Torah, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai insists that when Israel does God’s will the labour is performed by others, and Abaye closes the sugya empirically - many followed Rabbi Yishmael and succeeded, many followed Rabbi Shimon and did not.

Grass in your own field, for your animals, so that you do not have to walk them a long way to find something to eat. And then the smallest words in the whole passage: you will eat, and you will be full. Having food and feeling full are not quite the same thing, and the Torah promises both of them.

Rashi treats v’achalta v’savata as a blessing separate from the food itself - a blessing on the bread once it is already inside you. That sounds like an odd thing to need promised, until you notice how ordinary it is to have plenty and still feel short. Hold on to where this sentence sits, because the very next verse turns on it. Being full is not where the passage stops. It is where the warning starts.

Rashi gives two readings of the grass: that you will not need to drive your animals out to distant pasture, or that you will be able to cut fodder through the rainy season and throw it in front of them, stopping only thirty days before the harvest, and the field will still not yield you any less grain. On v’achalta v’savata he says explicitly that this is another blessing, a distinct one - that there be a blessing on the bread inside the stomach, satiety itself being granted rather than assumed. The phrase carries weight elsewhere: in Devarim 8:10 the identical v’achalta v’savata continues uverachta, and Rav Yehuda in Berachot 21a derives from those words the biblical obligation of birkat hamazon. Here the same phrase is followed by hishamru lachem. Two words of Hebrew, two different continuations, and the difference between them is most of this paragraph’s theology.

Now comes a warning, and it is a quiet one rather than a shouting one. When everything is going well and you are full and comfortable, it is easy to stop paying attention. The Hebrew word is yifteh - your heart might be talked round, persuaded, the way somebody talks you into something you would not have picked yourself. First you drift a little, and then you find yourself somewhere you never meant to be.

Look at the verb: yifteh, from pituy, seduction. Not decide. Not choose. Nobody in history has woken up and resolved to worship an idol. Rashi describes the order it actually happens in - first a person moves away from Torah, and everything else follows from there - and he attaches the whole warning to being full, on the grounds that no one rebels out of hunger. Which leaves the honest question about this verse, which is what idolatry looks like in a country with no idols in it. What quietly takes the place of the thing you said you were serving, in a good year, when nothing at all is wrong.

Hishamru echoes shamoa from verse 13 by sound while coming from a different root - ש-מ-ר against ש-מ-ע - so the paragraph’s opening demand and its central warning rhyme without being related. The plural also returns here, after two verses that had slipped into the singular. Rashi makes the connection to the preceding words explicit: when you have eaten and are full, take heed that you do not kick, for a person only rebels out of satiety - and he proves it from Devarim 8, where lest you eat and be full is followed a few verses later by and your heart will be lifted up and you will forget. On v’sartem he supplies the mechanism - to depart from Torah, and through that you will come to serve other gods, since as soon as a person leaves the Torah he goes and attaches himself to idolatry. The drift is the sin; the idolatry is what the drift arrives at. His comment on elohim acherim is the sharpest line in the passage: gods that are other to those who serve them - a man calls to it and it does not answer him, so it becomes to him like a stranger. The definition of an idol is not what it is made of but that nothing comes back.

If that happens, the Torah says the rain stops. The sky closes, the ground gives nothing back, and the people cannot stay in the land. It is a hard verse and it is meant to be hard. What it is saying is that this land and the way people live in it are tied to each other, and that neither one can be taken for granted - not the land, and not the rain.

This is the verse that makes people put the siddur down, and it should not be smoothed over. It says drought is a judgement, and everyone knows droughts do not sort the decent from the indecent. So be exact about what the passage does and does not claim. This verse is addressed entirely in the plural: the anger is against you all, and it is all of you who will be lost from the land. It is speaking about a nation across time, not about your neighbour’s failed crop. Ramban says as much: the weather answers a whole society, an individual lives or dies on his own account, and most people most of the time live inside ordinary cause and effect. That is a real answer and it is not a complete one. It still leaves the person standing in the drought who did nothing wrong, and the paragraph offers him no sentence of comfort at all. You are allowed to say this twice a day and keep the objection.

Rashi reads the loss as total: et yevulah means the ground will not return even the seed you carried into it, and he brings Haggai 1:6 - you sow much and bring in little. On va’avadtem meherah he adds exile on top of everything else: beyond all the other punishments I will banish you from the land that caused you to sin, and he tells the parable of a king who sends his son to a banquet with instructions not to eat past his limit; the son eats too much, is sick over the company, and is thrown out of the palace. On meherah itself he says that no reprieve will be granted - the generation of the Flood was given a hundred and twenty years because it had nobody to learn from, and you have teachers. The verb is va’avadtem, you will be lost, from א-ב-ד, rather than a verb of being destroyed by an enemy. Two serious attempts exist to make the whole paragraph coherent. Ramban, commenting back at verse 13, keeps the plain sense and narrows the scope: the sign works at the level of the majority of the nation, outright miracle is reserved for the wholly righteous and the wholly wicked, and the ordinary person lives under nature according to his way and his doings. Rambam, in Hilchot Teshuvah 9:1, takes a different route altogether - rain, peace and plenty are not the reward for the commandments at all but the removal of the obstacles, the conditions under which a person is free to learn and to act; the reward itself lies elsewhere. Neither answer dissolves the plain sense of the verse, and neither is intended to.