NJ Jewish News | Punctuating the verse

by Rabbi Neil Gillman
professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and author of The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought and The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism.

Recently, while strolling through the streets of Cambridge, Mass., I came across a large sign planted on the lawn in front of a church. The message on the sign read “Never Place a Period Where God Has Placed a Comma.” The message was attributed to Gracie Allen. I later learned that it has become the motto of one of America’s Protestant denominations.

The message itself grabbed my attention. Whatever it meant for the church’s culture, I understood it as a statement about how to read God’s revelation, or for me as a Jew, how we should read God’s Torah.

The message came back to me this week as I was trying to unravel the plain sense of Devarim 6:4-9 in this week’s parsha, the Sh’ma and the paragraph immediately following it. The passage is arguably the most familiar text in the entire Torah. It is recited at least twice daily in our liturgy and again at bedtime. Tradition has the first verse of the passage, the Sh’ma itself, recited by martyrs and upon one’s deathbed. No other biblical text is as familiar as this one.

Yet the precise meaning of that first verse is elusive. Jeffrey Tigay, in his commentary to the passage in the JPS Bible Commentary to Devarim (see also Excursus 10) gives three possible interpretations of the verse, none of which, he claims, is certain.

Part of the problem is that the Sh’ma verse has no verb. Tigay’s first interpretation supplies the missing verb, namely “is,” so that the passage reads, “…the Lord [is] our God, the Lord alone.” This translation, based on the medieval commentators Ibn Ezra and Rashbam, has become generally accepted by scholars, and Tigay himself prefers it, though he points to its “serious syntactical difficulty.” The phrase “the Lord our God” without the missing “is” appears consistently as a fixed phrase in Devarim.

Tigay is equally unhappy with the familiar “…the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” If that were the sense of the verse, he notes, “the Lord our God is one” would have sufficed. In place of these, my colleague Professor (of Bible) Stephen A. Geller has suggested a totally original interpretation based on eliminating the period after the Sh’ma verse (Devarim 6:4) and replacing it with a comma.

(We have to remember that in the liturgy, the Sh’ma verse and the succeeding passage with the command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might,” verses 5-9, are separated by an inserted phrase: “Blessed is the name of God’s glorious kingdom forever and ever.” But in the Torah itself, there is no intervening passage.) In the Torah, the Sh’ma verse is followed immediately by the “You shall love…” passage.

Geller suggests that we read the Sh’ma verse as subordinate to the passage that commands us to love God, hence the comma in place of the period. The entire passage then would read, “Hear, Israel, since the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart….” Or more colloquially, “Take heed, Israel, [since] the Lord our God is our one and only God, [then] you must love the Lord your God….” This interpretation, like the first noted above, demands that we insert words, the words “since” and “then,” but apparently we must add some word or words in any event in order to accomplish the translation to English. Geller’s original contribution is to replace the period at the end of the first verse with a comma.

Geller and Tigay agree on one more implication of the passage as a whole. Not simply a statement about the nature of God, it is much more a statement about a relationship. What is demanded of us is total devotion, ultimate loyalty. Because God is our “one and only,” we must accord God our ultimate love. This demand is not only binding on Israel but also on each individual. Geller notes that though the Sh’ma verse is in the plural (“our” God), the succeeding verses are in the singular (with all “your” heart, “your” soul, “your” might).

But why should such an enigmatic passage become the hallmark of Judaism? Its appearance on the lips of Jewish martyrs reflects the talmudic tradition that Rabbi Akiba breathed his last with the word “ehad” on his lips. But its daily liturgical use predates that legend. That use reflects the command to recite “these words” when we lie down and when we rise up, and “these words” would include the introductory Sh’ma verse. Or it may have something to do with relationship. Both morning and evening, the passage that commands us to love God is immediately preceded by a passage that describes God’s love for us. That mutual love is what we mean by relationship, and it is a personal relationship with God that most of us desire above all.