The Meanings of Shema
“Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). These words are the supreme testimony of Jewish faith. Each word in this sentence needs careful study, but in this and the next essay I want to focus on only one, the first: the verb Shema. In the next essay I ask why we are commanded to listen, rather than to see. In this I want to understand the range of meanings of the verb itself. This will prove fundamental to our understanding of Judaism.
The Mosaic books are, among other things, a set of commandments, 613 of them. That is the primary meaning of the word Torah – law. The Torah is not fundamentally about the salvation of the soul. It is about the redemption of society. It is about how to construct a social order that will honour the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the twin imperatives of justice and compassion. It is about our life together, not about the inner life of the soul, for which we have the book of Psalms.
Hence the Torah’s emphasis on law: not secular law, such as every society has, but Torah min hashamayim, law as prescribed by Heaven itself. As Psalm 147 puts it: “He has revealed His word to Jacob, His laws and decrees to Israel. He has done this for no other nation” (Ps. 147:19–20). Law is the basis of liberty. Without it, there is chaos, violence, injustice, and the will to power. Judaism is a religion of law, not because it is solely concerned with justice rather than love. To the contrary, Torah is the source of the three great love commands in Western civilisation: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, might, and soul; you shall love your neighbour as yourself; you shall love the stranger for you were once strangers. But love alone cannot structure grace in society.
It would seem to follow logically that a book of commands must have a verb that means “to obey.” That is the whole purpose of an imperative. Obedience stands in relation to command as truth does to making a statement. Yet there is no verb in biblical Hebrew that means to obey. This is an astonishing fact.
So glaring is the lacuna that when Hebrew was revived in modern times a verb had to be found that meant “to obey.” It was obviously necessary, for example, in the case of Israel’s defence forces. An army depends on obedience to the command of a superior officer. The word chosen was letzayet. But this is an Aramaic word that does not appear in this sense anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. The Torah itself uses a quite different word, namely, shema, meaning, “to hear, to listen,” and several other things besides.
The root SH-M-A is absolutely fundamental to the book of Deuteronomy, where it appears in one or other forms some ninety-two times (by way of comparison, it appears only six times in the whole of Leviticus). It conveys a wide range of meanings, clustered around five primary senses:
1. to listen, to pay focused attention, as in “Be silent, Israel, and listen [ushema]” (Deut. 27:9);
3. to understand, as in “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand [yishme’u] each other” (Gen. 11:7);
4. to internalise, register, take to heart, as in “And as for Ishmael I have heard you [shmatikha]” (Gen. 17:20), meaning, “I have taken into account what you have said; I will bear it in mind; it is a consideration that weighs with Me”;
5. to respond in action, as in “Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you [shema bekolah]” (Gen. 21:12).
It is this last sense in which shema comes closest to meaning “to obey.”
It has yet other meanings in rabbinic Hebrew, such as “to infer,” “to accept,” “to take into account as evidence,” and “to receive as part of the Oral Tradition.” No English word has this range of meanings. Perhaps the closest are “to hearken” and “to heed” – neither of them terms in common use today. Psychotherapists nowadays sometimes speak of “active listening,” and this is part of what is meant by shema.
The best way to discover what is unique about a civilisation is to search for words in its lexicon that are untranslatable into other languages. It is said that the Bedouin have many words for sand and the Inuit many terms for snow. The Greek word megalopsuchos – literally, the “great-souled” person, one blessed with wealth, status, and effortless superiority – has no equivalent in either Judaism or Christianity, two cultures that valued, as Greece did not, humility. Shema is untranslatable – understandably so since it belongs to biblical Hebrew, the world’s supreme example of a culture of the ear (on this, see the next essay).
This is a fact of great consequence and should affect our entire understanding of Judaism. The existence of the verb lishmo’a and the absence of the verb letzayet tells us that biblical Israel, despite its intense focus on divine commandments, is not a faith that values blind, unthinking, unquestioning obedience. Though there were those who disagreed, for the most part Jews understood the commands as more, and other, than the arbitrary will of God. To the contrary, they were given by God for our benefit, not His.
There is a reason for the commands. In some cases they are rooted in the fact that God created the universe and the laws that govern it; therefore we must respect the integrity of nature. In other cases they are grounded in history. Our ancestors were slaves in Egypt. They knew from indelible personal experience what it is to live in an unjust, tyrannical regime. Therefore a society based on Torah must be just, compassionate, generous. Slaves must rest one day in seven. One year in seven, debts must be cancelled. The landless poor should not go without food at harvest time – and so on.
The God of revelation is also the God of creation and redemption. Therefore when God commands us to do certain things and refrain from others, it is not because His will is arbitrary but because He cares for the integrity of the world as His work (creation), and for the dignity of the human person as His image (redemption). There is a profound congruence between the commandments and the laws that govern nature and history. An arbitrary ruler demands blind obedience. God is not an arbitrary ruler (Avoda Zara 3a); therefore He does not demand blind obedience. Instead, He wishes us as far as possible to understand why He has commanded what He has commanded.
Hence the emphasis, in Exodus and Deuteronomy, on children asking questions. In an authoritarian culture, questions are discouraged: “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” as Tennyson put it.1Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” found in The Charge of the Light Brigade and Other Poems (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992), 52.
Had this been the case in Judaism, the Torah would have had a verb that meant the same as letzayet, not one with the meanings of shema.
On Passover the least mature child, not the most, is “one who does not know how to ask.” Indeed we are commanded to teach him or her to ask. Even the verb three lines after “Hear O Israel” – usually translated as “You shall teach these things diligently to your children” – means, according to Rashi, “You shall sharpen your children” – meaning, teach them the full depth of their meaning, rather than superficially (Rashi to Deut. 6:7).
To be sure – this should go without saying – obedience to the commandments should never be conditional on understanding them. It is a contradiction in terms to say that one who does not understand or agree with a law is free to break it. Anyone who thinks this has not understood what a law is. But ours is certainly a searching, questioning, rational, intellectual faith, one that calls for the full exercise of the mind.
Shema Yisrael does not mean “Hear, O Israel.” It means something like: “Listen. Concentrate. Give the word of God your most focused attention. Strive to understand. Engage all your faculties, intellectual and emotional. Make His will your own. For what He commands you to do is not irrational or arbitrary but for your welfare, the welfare of your people, and ultimately for the benefit of all humanity.”
In Judaism faith is a form of listening – to the song creation sings to its Creator, and to the message history delivers to those who strive to understand it. That is what Moses says time and again in Deuteronomy: Stop looking; listen. Stop speaking; listen. Create a silence in the soul. Still the clamour of instinct, desire, fear, anger. Strive to listen to the still, small voice beneath the noise. Then you will know that the universe is the work of the One beyond the furthest star yet closer to you than you are to yourself – and then you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. In God’s unity you will find unity, within yourself and between yourself and the world, and you will no longer fear the unknown.