Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms
I’m reposting some of my work that was previously posted in other forums in order to gather it all in one place. This essay was originally posted on my “The Second Son” blogspot blog, August 23, 2010.
Nothing groundbreaking here, just something that’s been rattling around inside my head for a while.
When I was a kid, my mother would say Shema with my brother and me before we went to sleep each night. When my wife puts my daughter to bed, she does the same. Lately, my daughter has been asking me to say Shema with her when I put her to bed (which is most nights). [I barely remember this now, and that little girl is now a teenager.]
Shema has a central place in Jewish prayer. It is one of the first tefillos we learn as children, and it is supposed to be the last thing we say before we die. Along with Shemoneh Esrei, it’s what daily davening is built around. It is generally taken to be a declaration of monotheism. [Article after article about Shema confirm this interpretation. My Jewish Learning calls Shema “An affirmation of God’s singularity,” and the Jewish Virtual Library says “The Shema is an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in one God.”] Yet anyone who takes a moment to read it literally can see that it makes little sense as such.
I think most people in the frum world, and perhaps in other religious Jewish denominations, never read Shema literally. As a kid I was taught that Shema translated as, “Hear Israel, Hashem is Hashem, Hashem is one. (The last bit was understood as translating awkwardly into English. What it meant is that there’s only one God.) But this is not what it says. It says, “Hear Israel, Yahweh is your god, Yahweh is one / Yahweh alone.”
It’s read the first way and not the second way because “Yahweh” and “elohim” are thought of as synonyms for “Hashem,” when in fact Yahweh is a name and elohim is the equivalent of the English little “g” god. Shema is not monotheistic statement about the singular magnificence of God, but a monolatrous declaration of loyalty to a god named Yahweh. It is telling the nation of Israel that while there are many gods, Yahweh is their god. Nor are they to have a pantheon of gods with their national god Yahweh at its head. Only Yahweh is their god.
This is something that would never have occurred to me when reading Shema with a frum worldview. It was only after learning about ancient religions that I realized how strangely Shema is worded – which then led me to the realization that it’s not strangely worded at all if you accept that it means exactly what it says.
[When I wrote this post, it was something that I had come up with based on various things I had read. I poked around online before reposting it, and it seems I was mechaven to the academics. Reuven Kimelman, who is Professor of Classical Rabbinic Literature at Brandeis University, wrote,[i] “Though this opening verse is now taken as the ultimate affirmation of monotheism, it seems likely that the ancient Israelites originally saw it as a declaration of monolatry.”]
[i] (May 2, 2022). The Opening of the Shema Prayer Explained. The Jewish Experience. Retrieved from https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/holidays-religious-traditions/2022/may/shema-explained-kimelman.html