Last night I made my rounds, saying the Shema with each of my children before they fell asleep. By the last bed I was mostly saying it alone, the words going out into a dark room over a child who was already gone, repeating them a beat behind me and then not at all.
The Shema is the closest thing Judaism has to a creed, and it comes from the Torah portion of Va’etchanan (Deuteronomy 3:23–7:11). It opens with a single verse,
and continues into the paragraph that follows: love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might, keep these words on your heart, teach them to your children, speak of them when you sit at home and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise.
A Jew is obligated to say the Shema in the morning and again in the evening. He says it a third time at his bed before sleeping, even if he has already said it in the synagogue that evening.
That third one has no audience. No congregation, no quorum, nobody to hear it. Whatever else the Shema is, it is the sentence a Jew says into the dark before falling asleep.
It is also what a Jew says as his last words. Rabbi Akiva said it while the Romans were flaying him with iron combs, and the tradition remembers that he drew out the final word until his soul left him. Jews walked into the crematoria saying it. Fathers said it over children they could not save, in the same words they had used over those children at bedtime a year earlier.
In this sentence, Israel is addressed by name. The God in it is described as ours. It is a family sentence, whispered at bedtimes and gasped at deathbeds, and nothing in the Hebrew Bible seems to belong more completely or more exclusively to the Jewish people.
So it is worth asking why Rashi reads the last word of it as a statement about every person on earth.
His comment divides the sentence in two, and only the first half is about Israel. “The Lord our God” means the God who is ours now, and not the God of the other peoples of the world. Then the second half. “The Lord is One” means He will at some future time be the one Lord, as the prophet says, “For then I will turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord” (Zephaniah 3:9), and as it says, “On that day the Lord shall be One and His name One” (Zechariah 14:9).
Read that way, the Shema is not one claim but two. The first is a description of the present. God is ours. The second is a forecast. A day is coming when the peoples of the earth will call on His name in a language God Himself will give them, and He will be sovereign over all of it.
The most particular sentence in Judaism ends on the most universal word in Judaism, and Jews have been saying both halves in one breath, three times a day, for three thousand years.
This is Universal Zionism at its root, long before it had a name or a movement. Notice what the prophets Rashi quotes actually describe. Zephaniah says the peoples will call on God’s name. Zechariah says God will be King over all the earth. The Torah stays where it is, given to Israel, kept by Israel, binding on nobody else, and the God who gave it becomes known to everyone. Israel does not shrink to make room for the nations, and the nations do not become Israel. The particularity is not an obstacle to the universal outcome. It is the vehicle for it.
Moses says as much a few chapters earlier in the same portion.
The nations recognizing Israel’s wisdom is a result, not a purpose. Israel keeps the commandments because God commanded them, and the world’s recognition follows on its own.
Rashi wrote his comment in Troyes, in northern France, in the eleventh century. He had no state, no army, and no reason on the evidence available to him to believe the nations of the world would ever call on the name of the God of Israel. The Crusades began in his lifetime and destroyed the Jewish communities of the Rhineland. He wrote it anyway, because the promise did not depend on anything he could see.
The Torah portion of Va’etchanan is read on Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of consolation that follows Tisha B’Av, and the reading from Isaiah give us the same idea.
At the time of the redemption, the God of Israel will be recognized by all flesh.
Rabbi Akiva could only dream of such a reality. Rashi never saw it happen. And the Jews who entered the crematoria with those six words on their lips would not believe that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would one day say them out loud, in Hebrew, in a Jewish home in a Jewish country, with millions of Christians around the world standing alongside them. We are living in the first hours of it. Millions of Christians now love the God of Israel, bless His people, and read His book.
When I say Shema with my kids tonight, I will be saying words that have crossed every dark century to get to that room. There have always been righteous people among the nations. There have never been this many, loving that God and standing with His people. Echad. One. It was always a promise. We are finally close enough to hear it coming.
