Variations on the Shema
Samuel Fleischacker
Samuel Fleischacker is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Jewish-Muslim Initiative at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His books include The Good and the Good Book and Divine Teaching and the Way of the World.
Theme and variations: you hear a melody, then different versions of it—faster, slower, in a minor key, with different rhythms—turning it, perhaps, from a silly jig into a meditative rhapsody, sometimes rendering it barely recognizable. The variations are scattered about randomly, or so it seems. There is a last one, but not really a conclusion.
In classical music, a theme and variations contrasts with sonata form. Sonata form represents order, rational development from one idea to another; a theme and variations suggests that we don’t need such order, that we can look at the same thing in many ways, without supposing that those ways need to fit together. If sonata form is an emblem of the grand narrative that promises us a comprehensive understanding of our world, then a theme and variations represent a protest against such narratives. It gives us insights into just this or that aspect of our world, rather than a comprehensive understanding of it.
I think the experience of saying the Shema every day, the fact that we repeat it even though we already know it so well, pushes us to see it through the lens of a theme and variations: something we should never expect to grasp fully, and that we approach each day from a different angle, bringing the diversity in our lives to bear on this hymn to unity.
What follows are some excerpts from a collection I call “18 Ways of Looking at the Shema.” Each stands alone but can also be read in light of the other pieces—here illuminating, there questioning or undermining what the others have to say. I hope they will provide readers with new insights into the Shema; at the least, their variety may prod readers into seeking out such new insights—refusing to let the familiarity of its words blind us to the riches they contain.
Middle Ground
The Talmud opens by asking when we should say the Shema in the evening. It’s a perplexing start, clearly addressed only to people who are already immersed in the Jewish tradition.
The Torah, by contrast, starts where one might think any foundational religious document should start: with creation.
Are these beginnings really so different? The creation story in the Torah tells us little about the universe, stressing just that it was created by, and is subject to, one God; the Shema makes the same point, but more explicitly. By beginning with the evening Shema, the Talmud also alludes, implicitly, to the beginning of the Torah, where each day starts with an evening.
There are many beginnings, temporal and logical ones, personal and communal ones, religious and secular ones. Where does Judaism, as a whole, begin?
Well, when do we start to be Jewish? At our circumcision, perhaps, or a simchat bat. But we don’t remember our own circumcisions and semachot bat, and when (if) we perform them on or for our children, we have already been immersed in being Jewish for a long time. Perhaps a convert can regard the moment of coming out of the mikvah as his or her first moment of being Jewish, but most of us are not converts, and even the convert will have spent months learning about Judaism, and engaging in many of its practices, long before entering the mikvah.
So perhaps being Jewish begins with our first day of Jewish education? But long before that, we’ve been to Seder and Kol Nidrei and the lighting of Hanukah candles. We have also become aware of our Jewishness from dinner conversations and offhand remarks that our parents barely notice having made.
Perhaps then it’s silly to look for a first moment of being Jewish. But there might still be a first element of Judaism—a grounding doctrine for it. What would you choose for that role, however? Monotheism? That’s too general: it doesn’t pick out Judaism from other religions. How about the sacredness of the Torah? Better, but surely that can’t be a starting point for our religion: it depends, for one thing, on a belief in God. How about the first thing that the Torah tells us—that God created the universe? But the story about our coming out of Egypt, and receiving the Torah, defines Jewish faith more deeply than the creation story, and indeed, we generally understand the creation story only in the light of its significance for our other commitments. The story of creation in the Torah itself seems oriented primarily towards bringing out the importance of Shabbat.
It’s even hard to figure out what the first Jewish holiday is. Passover is the first holiday of the Biblical calendar, Rosh Hashanah of the rabbinic calendar. Shabbat takes priority in importance over both; it is “more holy than all the other seasons,” we say in the liturgy for Friday night.
So perhaps the Shema—whether that means just the word “shema” (“Listen!”) or the statement it initiates, or the whole three paragraphs that we say twice a day—is the real beginning of Judaism, its true foundation? Central creedal statements like this are meant to sum up the teachings of a religion’s sacred text (compare the Shahada in Islam); the faithful also usually study these texts, in detail, long after they learn the statement. Jews do frame the reading of the Torah on Shabbat and holidays with the Shema: it’s the first thing we say when we take the Torah scroll out of the ark, suggesting that everything we read from the scroll should be understood through that lens.
The Shema as a whole (the three-paragraph version) also contains allusions to creation. In the middle of its middle paragraph, we get references to esev, the grass that comes up on the third day in the first creation story in Genesis (1:12), but hasn’t yet sprouted at the beginning of the second creation story (Gen. 2:5); and to matar, the rain that God has not yet sent in the beginning of the second creation story (ibid). There are also two mentions of adamah, the word for “earth” in the second creation story—from which our own being, in the person of Adam, springs—and two of eretz, the word for “earth” in the first chapter of Genesis. The heavens and the earth, the subject of the very first line of the Torah, are also called in at the very end of the second paragraph, as they will be just before the end of the whole Torah (Deut. 32:1), as a kind of cosmic witness to the Jewish mission, or destiny.
So perhaps our lives in the world, as gestured to in the middle paragraph of the Shema, is the true starting point or foundation for how we should think about being Jewish?
But can that possibly be right? The starting point of the Shema itself—its ground, literally and figuratively—would then be found in its middle.
Why not? Many epics, and not a few novels, begin in medias res. That’s after all where we find ourselves whenever we start looking for a starting point. “How did we get here?” is a question asked by people who have already been heading “here” for a long time. Narratives feel realistic when they start in the middle, and work backwards and forwards from there.
Another alternative is that starting points are not very interesting. “Plunge in, wherever you are, and see where you get to!” Not bad advice. Enough with the beginning.
Shema and Haggadah
The Shema makes a famous appearance in the Passover Haggadah: Five rabbis stay up all night in Bnei Brak, talking about the exodus from Egypt; they end their Seder only when their students come in to tell them it’s time to recite the morning Shema. Which leads the Haggadah to consider why we read the third paragraph of the Shema—which mentions the exodus from Egypt—at night.
Why does the Shema come in here at all? How does it function in the context of the Haggadah? Well, the story of the five rabbis in Bnei Brak comes immediately after the Haggadah has told us that all that we really need to say, on Seder night, is the little paragraph beginning, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt…,” but that it is praiseworthy to elaborate upon this paragraph. The story of the five rabbis then illustrates just how much one can elaborate upon this paragraph—and most interpretations view the students’ reminder of the need to say the morning Shema as setting an outside limit on this elaboration. The rabbis should, and we should, stop our sedarim by that point.
But I think this is a misreading of the entry of the students. Especially when we bear in mind that the Haggadah moves on immediately to a discussion of the third paragraph of the Shema, I think that what the students are saying is that the rabbis can continue their discussion by saying the Shema. We mention the going out of Egypt in the Shema after all. So the Seder doesn’t have to end in favor of saying the Shema instead. Rather, the students suggest that the Shema can be regarded as a continuation of the Seder, a way of recalling the coming out of Egypt by other means. This reading fits in better with how a remark by students to their teachers normally functions in the rabbinic world. Students don’t come in to tell their teachers that they are making a mistake. They are much more likely to suggest to their teachers, gently and cleverly, how they can see a certain action as right by their own lights. Here, it turns out that saying the morning Shema is the right thing to do even by the lights of those who want to keep talking about the exodus— because saying the morning Shema is a way to keep talking about the exodus.
If this is right, then the Haggadah is suggesting that participating in a Seder is like saying the Shema and saying the Shema is like participating in a Seder. A wonderful idea! But a puzzling one: the Seder we think of as a lively discussion, the Shema as a moment of meditative devotion. Perhaps that’s the point: when we say the Shema, we should be open always to internal debates we might have with its terms, “elaborating” on them as we go through life; and when we participate in a Seder, we should bear in mind that it is supposed to have something of the mood of meditative devotion, even during its lively arguments.
More deeply, now, if the Haggadah and the Shema are continuous with one another, then the Haggadah may be about keeping commandments, and breaking free of the pull of our arrogant ideologies and selfish desires, and aspiring to holiness, and standing before God, as well as about freedom from slavery. And isn’t it about all these things? We speak, in it, of having originally been idolaters, and celebrate our emergence from that as well as from Egypt. Later, in Dayenu, we suggest that we came out of Egypt in order to come to Mount Sinai and receive the Torah. After we say Dayenu, we move to a commemoration of the sacrificial meal our ancestors had on Passover (symbolically, in mentioning pesach, matzah, and maror, and eating the latter two; and literally, in the meal initiated by these symbolic foods)—the closest they came to being like priests, to taking on the vestments of holiness. And then we sing, joyously, as if in the presence of God.
So perhaps the mention of the third paragraph of the Shema at the Seder table does not tear one sentence of it out of context. Perhaps, instead, it bestows a richer meaning on that one sentence—reminds us that “coming out of Egypt” is not something we did once, long ago, or can do now only on Seder night, but is instead a constant process of pulling ourselves out of slavery to our own desires and egos, in favor of standing before the ultimate and absolute Good: Who also helps pulls us toward Him or Her or It, lovingly, and in the spirit of One who does not want us to be enslaved.
Unifying Myself
By saying we have just one God, we are also saying that each of us is one—I, who am the same person I was yesterday and last week and 25 and 40 years ago, attest that the God I worshipped then is the God I worship now. If I was not that same person yesterday and last week and 25 and 40 years ago, I could not attest to this: that other person might have worshipped a different God, or several different gods. I call myself, across time, to account before the one God, and I commit myself to standing before the one God in the future.
I may also be unified across time, at least insofar as I identify myself as a religious Jew, by saying the Shema. I remember having said the Shema as a small boy (I imagine that converts and people who became religious later in life may remember saying it from the moment they started to identify as a Jew, or a religious Jew), and I expect I’ll be saying it in all my tomorrows for a long time to come.
Saying the Shema thus helps unify me. Or perhaps God does, as I say it. In any case, I commit myself to having a unified self—to unifying myself—as I commit myself to a unified God.
Unifying myself allows me to make sense of the various things I do, to put my tastes and interests together and have them inform one another.
Unifying myself also pushes me to take responsibility for everything I do. I can’t just say, “That wasn’t me,” when a lie or moment of cruelty in my past comes back to haunt me (I might say, “I’ve changed,” or “I’ve repented,” but that’s different from saying, “That wasn’t me”: to repent, I need first to acknowledge that it was me who did the things I regret). Nor can I cordon off parts of my life from one another, and pretend, say, that I am single when I am in some places, even though I am married in other places.
Unifying myself pushes me to take responsibility for my actions in another sense as well: to integrate my thoughts and feelings with how I appear externally, to make sure I do not divide off a real, hidden self from a false, hypocritical appearance of myself. Unity of myself is, in this sense, quite literally integrity.
Unifying myself allows me to hope that my childhood aspirations will be realized, or at least to bear them in mind and allow them to guide me when I feel disoriented, am at a loss about what to aspire to, in middle age.
I said the Shema as a child, I am saying it now, and I will be saying it tomorrow and next year and when I am old. That means that the child-me is not forgotten, with its naïve hopes and dreams and beliefs about God and how the world could be improved; and the mature me now, more confident but cynical and bitter in many ways, yet still able to recall the child-me and to try to live out its promises to itself; and the old-man-me of the future, who will, I hope be driven by the best of the child-me and the mature me, the person with hopes, confidence and realism rather than the cynicism and bitterness that have grown, like ivy, over my emotional system over time—all of these personae can connect to the me of “there is one God”: one Good unifying the universe, which means that good things can happen for me and for the world. And if all these personae can say this, then I can resist the temptations in me, in the child of the past and the middle-aged cynic, and probably the old man of the future, that call on me to yield to the desires of my eyes and my heart. Then I can resist everything in me that gives up on any higher good, and says instead, “all is vanity, so everything is permitted.”
I was the child who needed the Shema simply to be repeated to me, because I couldn’t yet understand it. I became the adolescent and then the adult for whom this repetition served simply as a background habit onto which true learning, true understanding, could be grafted.
I am the child, still, who needs simply to repeat the Shema to myself, needs habits that I don’t fully understand to carry me through when I despair of grasping anything, and to serve as a practical, habitual background on which my attempts at understanding things can be based. I am also the adult, teaching myself what the Shema may mean and refusing to be satisfied with repetition.
By unifying ourselves, do we perhaps also help unify God? Is God in dispersion, as Lurianic Kabbalah teaches? God’s name—the way we conceive God—is certainly in dispersion: varied, sometimes unspeakably tender or merciful, sometimes upright but harshly just, sometimes terrible, even unspeakably so. By unifying ourselves in a commitment to God, we commit ourselves, among other things, to unifying God’s name. And perhaps that helps unify God as well. We hope, in any case, that one day God will be wholly one, and God’s name one.
I and my God are one. I and my God and the Shema are one.
Sometimes I feel an urge to run away from myself, to discard my “home” self and live as a stranger. My love for travel probably arises in part from that; others, probably, play out this urge by becoming actors. But after being on the road for a while, I also yearn to come home and return to my familiar home roles; in my experience, actors also yearn at some point to “be themselves” again: to inhabit (to have) their own identity, rather than taking on the personae of other people. The Shema teaches us that our home and away selves must come together—that’s one meaning of saying it when we are at home and when we are “walking by the way.” I am responsible at home for what my away self does, and my away self carries in it my home self. It’s always me, whether at home or away. Saying the Shema reminds me of that: another way in which it brings me together.
The faithful and the skeptical me, the orthodox and the heretical me, also need to be united with one another. There is some of each in the other. What is faith but a pushing-off of skepticism and heresy? What is doubt but a critique of one’s own inclination to believe? From the faithful perspective, certainly, there must be something good, even godly, about the side of ourselves that pulls, honestly, against our unquestioned commitments to the good and godly. These are also “home” and “away” selves.
Keeping Jewish practices helps unify me. Obviously so, in some ways: At each Seder and Shabbat dinner, I remember what I did or what happened to me at other sedarim and Shabbat dinners; as I plan out what I’ll be doing next week or next month, I bear in mind the Jewish holidays, and the bris or shiva minyan I need to get to. I’m also marked throughout my activities, to others and to myself, as the person who needs to set time aside for prayer in the morning, who doesn’t eat certain things or in certain places, who goes to classes and lectures on the Torah or the Talmud, etc. I have “a Jewish identity,” and halakhah plays a central role in shaping that.
But in an additional, deeper sense, a commitment to Jewish practice comes to affect which of my desires and interests I’m inclined to endorse as “really mine.” There are certain things that part of me would like to do but that I keep myself from because they conflict with how I see myself Jewishly. And only this orientation towards keeping commandments, rather than doing just what I feel like doing, guides me ever toward God, or what I take to be God. Others, perhaps, would see themselves as encountering God in a more purely mystical way, independent of commandments; that is not the way of the Shema, or of Jews more generally. As I go along the way of the Shema, I am unified as a particular kind of person: an Israelite, a Jew, and someone with reverence for law, custom, and established practices. I know no other unity—even if someone redeemed from a heteronomy or alienation or oppression not well represented by Egyptian slavery might be able to find one.
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Passing Down (Parenting)
The first two paragraphs of the Shema command us to pass “these words” on to our children. But they use different terms for that, and the command occurs in slightly different contexts. Veshinantem, says the first paragraph—“repeat” these words—“speaking of them when you’re at home and away,” and then moves on to the command about binding them on our hands and between our eyes. Velimadetem, says the second paragraph—“teach” these words—and it places this command after the one about binding the words on our hands and between our eyes rather than before it. The way the second paragraph phrases the bit about “speaking of them when you’re at home and away” is also ambiguous: is it that “you should speak of them (at home and away)”? Or is it that “your children should speak of them (at home and away)”? The second paragraph might be read, that is, as saying that we should teach these words to the children so that they speak of them, rather than mandating that we teach the words by way of “speaking” of them ourselves.
Repeat; teach. I repeat things to a small child when I want the child to learn something from me, and I speak more broadly of those things to help the child understand what I am saying. I teach an older child, expecting and hoping that my child will then speak independently about what I said: argue with me, or come up with a new riff on what I am saying. With an older child, I cannot simply repeat things; if I do, I can expect my child to turn away from me in contempt. I need to deal with my grown children as independent reasoners, with views of their own into which what I teach must be integrated.
I also hold a small child, a very small one especially, close to my body: in my arms. She or he is closer to me than my clothing sometimes—wrapped under my jacket or towel for warmth or protection—and certainly feels closer to me than an awkward object that I bind to myself, like tefillin. I don’t hold an older child that close; there is a separation between us as we speak; my tefillin are closer to me, physically, than he or she is.
So, there are two kinds of passing down here. There is the kind we do with a child who is an extension of ourselves and who we can hope is absorbed in trusting love, without question—the kind of love for God we are also trying to pass down, in the first paragraph. And there is the kind we do with an older, independent child: reasoning, debating, and expecting to be reasoned and debated with, as well. This kind of teaching is suited to the God of law and justice that figures in the second paragraph of the Shema: the God whom Abraham could confront with the words, “Shall not the Judge of all the world do justly?”
Implicitly, of course, there are also two kinds of parenting styles, suited to different stages in our children’s lives. Forgetting this can be disastrous. A small child should not just be reasoned with, but also set limits; an older child should not just be set limits, but always also reasoned with. And letting our older children differ from us in their religious commitments—letting them go “on their way,” if need be, even if that is not our way—is essential to our relationship with them; is itself part of teaching them justice, which is bound up with freedom and dignity. Velimadetem…ledaber bam: they need the option to speak (even “in your home”), and to pursue their way of being religious, if they are to have their own relationship with the one God who has created all of us.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that in both paragraphs, we are told to speak “of” (literally, “in”) the words we pass down, not just to speak those words themselves: vedibarta bam or ledaber bam, not vedibarta otam.” To pass down a teaching is necessarily to gloss it, to make sense of it, to go beyond its literal content. Merely repeating words is not enough. The Shema is more than the Shema: it includes, or spills over into, everything that can be derived from it.
Home and Away
“When you are at home and when you go on your way…” Why distinguish these two things? If I say the Shema day and night, then of course I will say it when I am at home and when I am away. What’s added by the reference to place?
Perhaps the apparent superfluity of the mention of place is why the rabbis in Berachot use “go on your way” for purposes that have nothing to do with being on a journey: they say that it tells us to recite the Shema in whatever position we happen already to be in (“your way”: whether that be standing, sitting, or lying down), rather than standing up for it in the morning and lying down for it at night.
This is a stretch, however: it renders the contrast between being “at home” and being “on the way” meaningless. I have instead incorporated into my own practice a commitment to saying the Shema—its first line, at least—as part of my personal Tefillat HaDerekh, the Traveler’s Prayer. When I leave my home city for any length of time, I make sure that the Shema forms part of my exit.
Why? Well, it often seems to me, as I imagine it does to many of us, that the God I worship when in the familiar, comfortable surroundings I identify as “home”—the environment I know how to negotiate, socially and geographically, almost without thinking—is different from the God I worship while traveling. Our beliefs, attitudes, and sense of ourselves and others are largely shaped and reinforced by our home communities. If we live in a liberal community, we tend to be liberal (or to play the role of the conservative enfant terrible). If we live in a conservative community, we tend to be conservative (or to play the liberal rebel, the brave challenger of the status quo). Our gods—our ideas of the good—grow up, with us, in our communities, and that’s just as true of our ideas of the one true God (if we believe in one true God) as of every pagan fantasy.
So, when we go far from our communities, we often experience a moral and spiritual trepidation, a fear that our moral and spiritual anchors may lose their grip on us—as well as a sense of excitement, a hope that our usual standards can be set aside, in a place where our friends and family aren’t around to watch us. We are up for adventure, which sometimes includes moral adventure: we may have an affair, confident that we can keep it hidden from our home life, or at least flirt, drink a little more, try out hang-gliding, be a bit more reckless. It’s often said about men who have affairs that they think they can live several lives at once. That’s made easier if they can divide their lives between places very distant from one another.
In light of these features of travel, as well as the dangers that can come with travel, the “home and away” clause of the Shema reminds us that the one God we worship at home accompanies us when we travel, and is present as much in our destination as in the place we left—that this one God is not a household or communal god, projected from and limited by local conventions, but the God of the whole universe, overlooking our activities everywhere. The foreign, the exotic: these come under the same good as the homey and familiar, if only we understand them aright. Our one and ultimate and unique God is the “God of gods”: the God that stands beyond and governs all conceptions of God, as one Hasidic teaching has it. Our God is thus a “traveler’s God,” a God of exile, as well as a God of home: present when we step beyond the four cubits of our comfortable moral and spiritual outlooks as well as in the middle of those outlooks. We Jews are carriers of a notion of the good that transcends every limited conception of the good, every attempt to hem it in with a set way of thinking or living; we are carriers of the notion of a God of aliens as much as of the native born, and of new ideas, new social formations, and new forms of art, as much as of venerable, fixed ones. But it can be hard to see this as long as we stay “home” in the familiar: actually going out and discovering what is good and beautiful beyond our homes is crucial to fully appreciating God.
The first test of Abraham, says the Midrash, is the command that he leave his home: go from his land and his city to parts unknown. In his hometown and home country, he knew how to get by and get along. There is a warm glow of security and comfort at home. Things are familiar—landscape, trees, architecture, knick-knacks. The people are familiar; the norms are familiar. The gods of the place are familiar, if one wants to talk that way; one knows how to petition or appease these gods. Outside one’s city and one’s homeland, one can easily get tripped up, taken in, or led astray. The climate and people and norms are strange, hard to understand or get used to. One will not be taken into the homes of others quite as readily, or cared for in difficulties quite as readily, or find others to share one’s joys and triumphs. It is as if there are other gods here, uncanny and off-putting ones.
But perhaps Abraham doesn’t at first see why he should leave his home, given that he’s already recognized that there is just one God. God seems to need several different phrases, perhaps several different attempts to get His message across, in order to persuade Abraham to leave. “Go forth from your country, from your native land, from the house of your father,” says God to Abraham (Gen. 12:1), in a cascade of phrases that foreshadow the one by which He will later tell Abraham to offer up his son: your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac” (Gen. 22:2). Just as that would be a great test of faith, so is the going forth from Babylonia a great test of faith. About the Akedah, the Midrash reads the various phrases as responses to a dialogue between God and Abraham:
- Take your son.
- Which son? I have two.
- Your only son.
- Each is the only son of his mother.
- The one you love.
- I love both of them.
- Yitzchak!
We can read a similar dialogue into the first test:
- Go forth from your country.
- My country is the whole world: I’m a cosmopolitan, finding You everywhere.
- I mean from your native land.
- Which native land? Ur or Haran? Anyway, I’m native to the entire earth: that’s my birthplace.
- From your father’s house!
And then Abraham finally gets the point: his conception of God, universalist as it is in principle, is still the product of a particular “father’s house,” and he needs to leave that family, that sense of familiarity, in order really to grasp what it means that God is present everywhere. Babylonia (Babel) figures, here as elsewhere in the Tanakh, as the great would-be universalist civilization of the day, with many different peoples within it—the New York of its day, a cosmopolitan center. As our rabbis understand him, Abraham becomes a monotheist in the midst of this universalist world. Yet he must leave it, cross the river Euphrates—become a Hebrew (Ivri), “one who crosses” (ya’avor)—and move to a small provincial land far away, before he can truly find God everywhere. He therefore initiates the great paradox of Judaism: that we proclaim universal truths and goods from within a local, tightly limited community, demonstrating in our lives how difficult it is truly to recognize goodness everywhere and in everything, how much that requires us again and again to cross rivers, boundaries, and find God anew in a strange place. (Which raises the question of whether it is wise, from a Jewish point of view, to rest so much today on our life in one place, even if we see that place as our true home.) Even Abraham the universalist was used to gods that grew up, with their believers, in a hometown, like Ur or Haran. He proved his faith, and developed it, only when he took his God with him to strange parts he had never seen.
And we echo that conviction whenever we leave our four cubits of Jewish life in Chicago or New York or Jerusalem and remind ourselves that the God we worship is also present with us in a remote rainforest or windswept Tibetan steppe: whenever we say the Shema “as we go on our way.”
Some of us fall in love with being “away”: we feel we can find God only when we are alienated, encountering the uncanny. Some of us feel more spiritually alive, more in touch with a transcendent good, precisely when going beyond or defying our conventions. I belong to this camp, actually—I relish being a traveler and having a traveler’s God. For me, and people like me, saying the Shema upon reentry to our homes is thus the crucial test of faith. We need to remind ourselves that the exciting adventures we may have had on the road are not the whole of our lives, and that the good does not only transcend limited conceptions of itself but also works within such conceptions; establishes itself—must establish itself—in settled practices and ways of thinking. Saying the Shema at home is just as important as saying it “on the way,” and for some of us, it is the moment when we express our deepest faith in God.
I lived with this way of looking at the “home and away” aspect of the Shema for many years. Then I had a stretch of time—not over yet—in which I felt my faith in God weakening, and also watched my children drift away from the level of observance in which my wife and I had raised them. In this context, another explanation of the Home and Away section occurred to me: We are “at home” when we are comfortable with our spiritual lives, confident of our God and our community and our practices; we are “on the way” when we feel distant from God, skeptical and alienated from our community or our practices. In On Repentance, Joseph Soloveitchik talks about the God before we sin and the God after we sin. We might add that there is both a God near to us and a God distant from us. And the Shema allows for these both to be aspects of the one God, for us to be reassured that God is with us both before and after we sin, and both when we are near and when we are distant. The one God is present in our firm, homey faith as well as in the journey of doubts that tempts us to leave that faith. We must listen for God’s presence in both conditions.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2022 and received Honorable Mention for Excellence in Writing about Jewish Thought and Life from the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA).
