Layers of Meaning in the Shema

This line is addressed to the community: “Hear O Israel”—Listen, Jews!—“Y-H-W-H is our God; Y-H-W-H is one!” How are we to understand Judaism’s great proclamation of our monotheistic faith? Let us begin by asking a functional question, the most important question regarding human behavior. What difference does monotheism make? One god, ten gods, a thousand—so what? We Jews seem to put so much store in the fact that we believe in one rather than many gods. Why? What is the payoff of the great monotheistic revolution? The only value of monotheism is to make you realize that all beings, every creature—and that means the rock and the blade of grass as well as your pet lizard and your annoying neighbor next door—are all one in origin. You come from the same place. You were created in the same great act of love, God bestowing God’s own grace on every creature that would ever come to be. Therefore—and this is the key line, the only one that really counts—treat them that way!

...we do not know fully what "name" [meant in ancient times]. It surely meant more than it does today. A change in name was a change in essence, for example (as with Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah), so declaring God's name to be blessed was tantamount to acknowledging God's very being.

...How do we render that mysterious name Y-H-W-H, once badly reproduced in English as “Jehovah”? The mystical tradition within Judaism insists on translating God’s name as “Being.” Really it’s not a name at all, not even fully a noun. Y-H-W-H is an impossible conflation of all the tenses of the verb “to be” in Hebrew. HYH means “was” in Hebrew; HWH indicates the present, “is;” YHYH would mean “will be.” Put them all together and you get the implausible, and therefore mysterious, verb form Y-H-W-H. It probably would best be translated as “Was–Is–Will Be.” But since that’s a little awkward to say each time, “Being” will have to do, a “Being” that embraces all of time and space as one, then reaches beyond them into impenetrable mystery. The meaning here is profound. “God” and existence are not separable from one another. God is not some entity over there who created a separate, distinct entity called “world” over here. There are not two; there is only one.

G-d, the sole object of worship, is invisible. God transcends nature. God created the universe and is therefore beyond the universe. God cannot be seen. God reveals Godself only in speech. Therefore the supreme religious act in Judaism is to listen. Ancient Greece was a culture of the eye; ancient Israel a culture of the ear. The Greeks worshipped what they saw; Israel worshipped what they heard. (https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5770-vaetchanan-the-meanings-of-shema/)

...unity...[emerges] from the multitude of voices that compose a human community - men, women and children; rich and poor; learned and unlearned; communal leaders and marginal characters; those who fight valiantly, those whose defiance is passive, and even those who try to run away. All of this human variety is "unified" itself in the moment it meets its God.

Reform congregations say "Hear O Israel..." and "Blessed is..." standing. [Jewish law] prescribes sitting not standing for the Sh'ma...Reform Jews, however, say the Sh'ma as central to their claim that Judaism's uniqueness lay in its discovery of ethical monotheism. Wanting to acknowledge the centrality of the Sh'ma, and recognizing that people generally stand for the prayers that matter most, they began standing for the Sh'ma despite [Jewish law].

Adonai Echad [wrote] that nothing exists but God...God is not only the basis of reality, God is the only reality; God is all there is. Creation is continuously brought into being through the divine word. If our eyes truly see reality we would see no material world at all, but instead, behold God's continuous utterance of the Hebrew letters, the real matrix of all being.

...there is no existence whatsoever apart from God's existence; the whole Creation is nullified within God as the rays of the sun within the orb of the sun...The question is how do we bring the awareness of that higher unity into the everyday reality of this world? That is the challenge of sacred living: to realize more unity...The Baruckh shem which is not in the biblical text itself, but was added by the rabbis as a congregational response...is our attempt to bring back into this world the supernal unity spoken of in the first line.

There is another way to understand oneness, however, and that is as inclusiveness. In Marcia Falk's words, "The authentic expression of [belief in one God] is not a [single] image but an embracing unity of [many] images."...God is all in all. This is the God who "forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates everything," because there can be no power other than or in opposition to God who could possibly be responsible for evil. This is the God who is male and female, both and neither, because there is no genderedness outside of God that is not made in God's image. [Belief in one God] is about the [ability] to glimpse the One in and through the changing forms of the many, to see the whole in and through its infinite images. "Hear O Israel": despite the fractured, scattered, and conflicted nature of our experience, there is a unity that embraces and contains our diversity and that connects all things to each other.

Shema‘ Yisra’el, Y-H-W-H Elohenu, Y-H-W-H ehad! “Listen, all you who struggle, all you who wrestle with life’s meaning! Being is our God, Being is one!” Don’t look beyond the stars. There’s no need to stretch your neck. God is right here, filling all of existence with endless bounty. Look around you. Look within. Open your eyes. Find God’s presence in each and every creature and in the unified, transforming vision of all that is. That’s what it means to belong to Israel, the people who struggle with God.