Hear
The Lord is our God
The Lord is one
And you shall love the Lord your God
With all your heart
With all your soul
And with all your strength
Jesus was a master rabbi and taught within a Jewish context that knew much of the Hebrew Bible by memory. The gospels record many conversations between Jesus and the Teachers of the Law and Pharisees. These rabbis were masters of the Hebrew Bible and respected teachers in their communities. Often Jesus made connections that only someone well versed in the Hebrew Bible would have picked up on. In his conversation with the Teacher of the Law in Mark12, Jesus makes both a spiritual and a linguistic connection to another verse in the Hebrew Bible.
?Of all the commandments, which is the most important??
?The most important one,? answered Jesus, ?is this: ?Hear O Israel, the Lord is our, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. The second is this: ?love your neighbor as yourself.? There is no commandment greater than these? (Mark
The word for and you shall love, appears three times in the Hebrew Bible. It appears once in Deut. 6, once in the rephrasing of the Shema in Deut. 11 and once in Leviticus
Jesus was linking love for God with love for your neighbor. To make his point even stronger, his Hebrew speaking audience would have understood that Jesus was saying that the Torah itself paralleled love for God with love for your neighbor.
In addition, Jesus was part of a rabbinic tradition that emphasized love for ones neighbor. The Talmud records an interesting story of Rabbi Hillel who lived and taught just before Jesus. A heathen came to Hillel and asked to be taught the whole of Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied, ?What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary? (Shab. 31a). Rabbi Akiba, said that the command to love thy neighbor was a ?fundamental principle of the Torah.?3
The early church was originally almost entirely Jewish4. Many of the ideas that became central to Christian thought and practice came from obedient Jewish followers of Jesus. The early church too chose to emphasize the importance of these two verses from the Torah. ?The way of life is this: First you shall love God who created you, second, your neighbor as yourself.? (Didache 1.2)
What did it mean to love God with all your heart, soul, and strength? Practically, it meant to love your neighbor as yourself. It is easy to say that you love God with everything, but it is hard to welcome your neighbor with love. It is hard to live as if God?s Kingdom was really ruling.
To begin and end the day with the words of the Shema is not about paying lip-service to the scriptures. To live the Shema, one must live Leviticus 19. I wonder if the disciples began saying Leviticus 19 at the end of the Shema after this encounter with the Teacher of the Law.
If we truly want to be like our Rabbi we must live as if these two verses from the Torah were a part of our very being. Take time to internalize these texts and speak them ?when you are at home, away on a journey, when you lie down and when you get up.?
Notes to Shema Part 1 and 2
- See Randy Buth, Living Biblical Hebrew II, Jerusalem 2003, pg. 94. Information on biblicalulpan.org.
- For the likelihood of Paul reciting the Shema see John McRay, Paul, His Life and Teaching, Baker Academic 2003, pg. 34.
- For a summery of Rabbinic thought on Leviticus 19 see Abraham Cohen, Everyman?s Talmud, pg. 212.
- See Acts 2:46, 3:1-3, 4:1-21, 4:36, 5:12-27, 5:42, 6:7-9, 7:58, 8:1-3, 9:2, 9:17-20, 11:2-3, 15:1, 15:5,16:1-3, 15:28, 16:4, 18:26-28, 19:9, 21:20-21, 21:24-26, 22:19, 23:6, 26:10-11.
