Witnesses to the One , livre ebook

Witnesses to the One :
The Spiritual History of the Sh ma
2006 First Printing
2006 by Joseph B. Meszler
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Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to use material reprinted from Tanakh: The Holy Scripture , 1985, published by The Jewish Publication Society with the permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meszler, Joseph B.
Witnesses to the One: the spiritual history of the Sh ma / Joseph B.
Meszler; foreword by Elyse Goldstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58023-309-5 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-58023-309-0 (hardcover)
1. Shema. 2. God (Judaism) 3. Spiritual life--Judaism. I. Title.
BM670.S45M47 2006 296.4 5-dc22 2006015174
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States of America
Jacket Design: Tim Holtz
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing
A Division of Longhill Partners, Inc.
Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P. O. Box 237
Woodstock, VT 05091
Tel: (802) 457-4000
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Contents
Foreword
Preface
1 Fighting Idolatry: Moses
2 The Sages Offer Their Lives: Akiba ben Joseph
3 Proving the One: Saadia Gaon
4 Nothing Like God: Moses Maimonides
5 Communing with the One: Haim Vital
6 Master of the Universe : Moses Haim Luzzatto
7 A Nation Reborn: Abraham Isaac Kook
8 One Moral Standard: Leo Baeck
9 A Prophecy- One World or No World : Abraham Joshua Heschel
10 Hearing Today: Becoming the Next Sacred Story
Notes
Discussion Guide
Suggestions for Further Reading

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
Foreword
Sh ma- to hear, to listen, to understand. I ve said it myself every night before going to bed since I was a little girl. In those days it was comforting, quieting. It meant someone was looking out for me, even if I thought that someone was a Divine Old Man with a beard on a throne in heaven.
As I grew up those familiar words became a struggle for my feminist consciousness. The Old Man was no longer relevant; worse, I was angry at Him for His masculine standards that cast me aside as an Other. If He existed at all, He surely wasn t looking down on me, a rebellious teenager who dared to question the status quo for Jewish women.
But I missed the soft feeling of the words of the Sh ma , so I went back to look again. I started to understand that the words signaled not a dogma or a creed, but a process and a journey. On that journey, I could understand the Oneness of everything, both Divine and human. I could listen to the ancient melodies with a new spirit. I could hear the call of the Sh ma as a call to social action leading to the ultimate improvement of the world-a call for both women and men. I see the Sh ma now not as a doxology of faith in the Old Man, but as a dialogue with the Divine in all the forms It takes and however It calls back to us.
As an adult the power of the Sh ma has never left me, but when I chose to make outreach my life s work as a rabbi I came to another place of reconciliation with the Sh ma . I ve been working long enough with unaffiliated, marginalized Jews to know that not everyone resonates with this simplest of Jewish prayers. They haven t heard it, they aren t listening, and they don t understand. It still surprises me, but it no longer shocks me, that there are Jews who never said a bedtime Sh ma , that it wasn t the first prayer they learned in religious school (because they never went to one), that they can t imagine saying it on their deathbeds. For them, the Sh ma holds no historic associations; its mystical beauty is uninteresting, its lyrical, simple meaning worlds away from their daily lives. For me, the Sh ma is poetry; for them, it is only words, words they don t know or care about or feel in their souls. It is hard for most affiliated Jews to understand this. The Sh ma seems the bottom line that, at the very least, every Jew knows and loves. Welcome to the world of Jewish outreach, to the discovery that even the Sh ma in English is foreign to many.
That is why this book is so precious, for it will open a new pathway of communication for so many. Its dialogue with Jewish prayer only begins with the Sh ma , but moves on to the great philosophical questions of a Jewish life: Why bother being Jewish at all? What can modern Judaism do with its roots? Can the teachers and thinkers of the past illuminate this complicated life we lead now?
I think they can, and I think this book will help those teachers reach out across the generations to grab hold of the person who feels adrift, who is bored by conventional answers, who rejects platitudes but still feels the desire to be in this rich heritage. We should be grateful to Joseph Meszler for starting this conversation.
So, to Jews who are moved by social action and tikkun olam , the Sh ma says: be an iconoclast as Moses was; stand in protest as Akiba did; speak the polemic as Saadia spoke; let the Sh ma call you to action as Heschel was called. To Jews who fear being swallowed by the community, the Sh ma says: affirm your uniqueness even in the face of a community as Maimonides did. To Jews who are attracted to a mystical realm, the Sh ma says: try to unify all realms, especially the male and female ones, as Kabbalah and Luria tried; reach for the Messiah, as Luzzatto reached. To the unaffiliated Jewish people who shake their heads at the internal fractiousness of the denominations, the Sh ma says: we are all unified even if we don t act it, as Kook felt. And to those who feel Judaism does not answer them when they call, let the Sh ma leave its imprint, as it did on Baeck, when it says: you are not alone.
Perhaps the Sh ma as a mantra of all these facets can be the door leading them back in. And for those of us already in, it is time to renew and rediscover that what we knew as children holds great intellectual depth for us as adults. As it says in the Talmud ta Sh ma - come, learn, and hear. For some, it will be hearing for the first time and for others as if for the first time-but for everyone, this book is a call.
Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
Preface
Sh ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad . Hear O Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One! (Deuteronomy 6:4). 1
There is no more important statement in Judaism than the Sh ma . Whenever Jews recite or sing these words it is an important moment. If Judaism originated monotheism, the belief in one God, then the Sh ma is the embodiment of this world-changing idea. It is a proclamation and a command, yet people recite it like a prayer. There is even a long tradition of reciting these words when one rises in the morning and before going to bed at night. Many Jewish parents sing these words to their children before they go to sleep.
My daughter, who is almost three years old, already knows these words. We have been singing them to her at bedtime since the first day of her life. When she says them, I feel a sense of awe at her ability to learn, but more than that I feel I am transmitting something sacred.
My son is another matter. At the time of this writing, he is only one and a half years old, and I have no expectation that he should be able to recite a Hebrew prayer. He only knows a few words, like up and down. For most of his life he has had fluid in his ears that has affected his hearing and speech development. The doctors reassure me that he will undergo a very simple, noninvasive surgery to correct the problem, yet for the moment he hears everything as if he were underwater and probably has since birth. He cannot enunciate very much at all. While I know this will pass, I wonder what these words at bedtime sound like to him.
The first two words of the Sh ma are usually translated as Hear O Israel. The O is vocative. Hear. Listen. Pay attention. Early childhood specialists tell us that some 50 percent of our brain development occurs before the age of five. 2 Are these words somehow being impressed upon the makeup of his being? As I hold him in the glider at night, as he clings to his worn teddy bear and closes his eyes, I gently rock him. It is my favorite time of day. Bedtime is the time when I feel most prayerful. I imagine that I am not alone in this feeling, for the idea of bedtime prayers occurs in many religions all over the world. There is something about putting a child to sleep, about reflecting on the day that has passed, about holding a life in my arms that moves me from a place so deep inside I can only call it primordial. So I sing the ancient words of the Sh ma into my son s waterfilled ears.
The words of the Sh ma can be translated in a variety of ways. One complication for translation into English is that there is no present tense of the verb to be in biblical Hebrew. Any English translation has to use the word is, which does not have a direct correlation to the Hebrew.
In addition, the Sh ma contains the Name of God twice, spelled with the Hebrew letters yod-heh-vav-heh . No one knows how to pronounce this name, so Jews as an act of piety substitute the title Adonai during prayer, which means Lord. Others attempt to translate this name into English as best they can, most commonly Eternal. I like to represent it with equivalent English letters in a way similar to how it appears in Hebrew: YHVH.
This leads us to the most literal translation of the Sh ma : Hear O Israel YHVH our God YHVH one.
The meaning of the Sh ma is admittedly ambiguous. Why hear ? Why not see or look ?