by Oren J. Hayon
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Reform Voices of Torah)

Any Jew who leads a life of active religious practice will undoubtedly be more familiar with the Sh'ma than with any other piece of Jewish liturgy. Its six short Hebrew words have come to represent a sort of Jewish catechism, a one-line summation of normative Jewish belief, accessible even to the least Hebrew-literate among us: "Hear, O Israel! The Eternal is our God, the Eternal alone" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Its central place in Jewish worship seems to indicate that the primary purpose of the Sh'ma is its concise proclamation about Jewish monotheism. If we had to choose, most of us likely would say that its most important word is echad, "one" or "alone", reminding us of the singularity of Israel's God.

Reading it within the context of Parashat Va-et'chanan, from which it was plucked, however, we might well arrive at a different conclusion. For Moses, the original speaker of these cherished words, it seems apparent that the most important aspect of the Sh'ma is not its last word but its first; not its teaching about God's oneness but the exhortation to listen with which it begins.

In fact, much of this week's portion is concerned with precisely this theme: the primacy of hearing over seeing and the enduring power of instructions heard and spoken, in contrast to the fleeting nature of the visual world. Indeed, although we speak comfortably today about "the' Sh'ma, there are at least three different times in this parashah when Moses repeats his commandment for the people Israel to listen (4:1, 5:1, and 6:4).

Why, then, is Moses so intent on teaching his people this particular lesson? In our parashah, Deuteronomy asserts that Moses not only was sent to liberate Israel from slavery, but also was positioned to teach the Israelites certain principles of proper Jewish belief (see 4:14 and 5:28). If this is indeed Moses's charge, then his repeated exhortations about proper spiritual listening must be intended to instruct the people about the rudimentary skills needed for their emerging religious lives.

In order to justify its own authority, the Torah must ultimately rationalize obedience to one god (who cannot be seen at all) and undermine obedience to the idols of other gods (idols which, obviously, can be seen). To this end, Moses assumes an anti-idolatry stance so vigorous that he suggests (in 4:15-19) that opposition to idol-worship--not the unification of Israel, not the coronation of himself as prophet, and not even the revelation of God's Torah--was the sole purpose of Israel's experience at Sinai.

Moses fears that visual observation, even of common natural phenomena, can lead one to the mistaken belief that some power besides God is involved in the governance and maintenance of the cosmos. (Note that his namesake, Moses Maimonides, refines this point further in his Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 1:1; 2:1). And so he teaches Israel to depend less on what it can see than on what it can hear. Even when retelling the story of the Revelation at Sinai, Moses downplays its memorable visual spectacle--the mountain engulfed in smoke and flame--and focuses instead on what Israel heard there. Only the words you hear originate in heaven, he insists; what you see is hopelessly earthbound (Deuteronomy 4:36).

Moses surely knows, however, that attentive religious listening can have unintended consequences as well. God's voice at Sinai was so powerful that it terrified the people and they retreated from it, abdicating their role as sacred listeners and leaving Moses alone to receive the remainder of the laws revealed on the mountain (Exodus 20:15-18; Deuteronomy 5:5, 24). Despite Moses's high hopes about the inspiring power of divine speech, its sheer power led ironically to the spiritual impoverishment of the wilderness generation huddled at Sinai's foot.

Nevertheless, Moses still insists that religious hearing must always trump the inspiration of visual marvels. God demands faith in the invisible, the not-yet-conceived; God's words can make real things that look impossible to our eyes. How else could Moses rationalize spending his time teaching this homeless, landless people about cisterns, vineyards, and olive groves? (See 6:10-11.)

This question continues to press itself against us, then, even across the millennia: If Moses is right, and religious listening is the highest form of spiritual observance, what are we supposed to listen to? Now that Sinai has receded into the distant past and God no longer speaks to us directly, how do we uphold the Sh'ma's command?

The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud suggest that the revelatory history of Judaism is one of gradual diminution: God's voice recedes from its most powerful apex at Sinai, though its echoes continue in perpetuity. The sages suggest that at Sinai, the Israelites heard only the first two of the Ten Commandments directly; the rest were heard only by Moses and translated faithfully to the people (Babylonian Talmud, Makot 24a). Since Moses refers to the entire Decalogue as having been "heard' by the people--heard, in fact, not only by those at Sinai, but also by "every one of us who is here today' (Deuteronomy 5:3-4; see also 4:12-13)--the Talmud's view must be that proper religious hearing possesses a miraculous eternal nature.

Today, God's voice never sounds the way it did at Sinai, but the obligation for us to hear remains in force, and so we must remain attuned to the hum of God's presence in the world. One way for us to accomplish this is to continue the process of sacred learning that began at that smoke-wreathed mountain in the desert, using our minds, as well as our ears, as organs of spiritual listening. Attentively receiving and absorbing the wisdom of Jewish tradition, we continually fulfill the Sh'ma's exhortation. Surrounded by our people and by God's presence, we relive the awesome wonder of revelation whenever we learn and whenever we pray, each time we close our eyes and proclaim, to ourselves and to those with whom we stand: "Hear, O Israel!"

Rabbi Oren J. Hayon is associate rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas. He received his undergraduate education at Rice University, and received rabbinical ordination from the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2004. Rabbi Hayon welcomes feedback from readers at ohayon@tedallas.org.

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