EPISODE 5: Shema/V'ahavta
Shabbat Unbound is the world's longest Friday night Sabbath service, stretching over eight episodes. Instead of rushing through all the Friday night Shabbat prayers in one sitting, like we might in a classical synagogue environment, we're taking our time diving deep into one prayer each episode through song study and sacred conversation. It's the most original and traditional way to engage in the transition into Shabbat, taking each prayer as its own world with its own Torah to teach us. Miriam Terlinchamp, Lex Rofeberg and an incredible group of musicians invite you to discover what happens when Shabbat slows down. The fifth focuses on Shema/V'ahavta.
SHOWNOTES
[1] You can watch this entire episode in video format here.
[2] Want to watch the music video of our version of "And You Shall Love"? Great you can find it here.
[3] Love the song "And You Shall Love" by featured composers Jessalyn Levine and Annie Villareal-Belford? Great! Check out the original here.
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[Podcast Theme Music]
Miriam: Welcome to Shabbat Unbound. Shabbat Unbound is an experiment in sacred slowness. Eight episodes, eight prayers and a lot of creativity. This week we're diving deep into the Shema and Veahavta prayers Hear O, Israel, listen up, all of you, the Divine is one. And here's how we live like we mean it with love. These are the first words we teach our children. The last words we whispered before death and the declaration we make every time we walk through a door. What does it actually mean to say it's all one? And then choose love as our answer. I am Miriam Terlinchamp
Lex: and I’m Lex Rofeberg
Miriam: Welcome to Shabbat Unbound
Lex: Six words from the book of Deuteronomy have become some of the best known words in all of Jewish tradition for our rendition of Shema Vehavta, And You Will Love. We're bringing a melody from Jessalyn Levine and Annie Vereal Belfort. They wrote it together and it incorporates beautiful English words. For those of us who don't necessarily know the Hebrew with the first words of Veahavta, you will love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your oomph. It brings those two themes together in a melody that can be sung as a round and we will bring it to you right now.
[And You Shall Love]
Miriam: The prayer, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad, Shema, Ysrael, our God is one. It's a declaration of faith. It's pulled from three separate biblical passages in Deuteronomy and Numbers. It's unclear exactly when this phrase started being used as liturgy, likely in the second temple period. It's used as part of the Temple service and certainly post-Temple period. It's used as part of liturgy and sung three times a day in the morning, in the evening, and at bedtime. We say Shema when we wake up, and also before we go to sleep, it's the very first line that we might learn as children. And it's the last words we're supposed to say before we die. It's associated with the confessions of the martyr, and it's a single line that we can turn to that encompasses the Jewish faith. Shama means listen or hear rael. Means people of Israel, but it's also Jacob's name, our forefather's name for the words God wrestler. So it could mean, listen up all you God wrestlers. Adonai is the name that the Israelites are calling God. It also means Lord. And so some people might just choose to say Yah, or Yahweh or Havaya because the spelling is Yud-hey-vav-hey, which also is the sound of breathing. So Adonai is God. And then Eloheinu is literally our God, but it's associated with the word Elohim, which is another name for God that we used all across the biblical texts. Adonai Our God is a monolactic statement, meaning that at the time we acknowledged that there are other gods in the world, but our God, our God's name is Adonai. So we'll say Adonai our God, Eloheinu, to signify that moment and differentiate ourselves that we're talking about the God of the Hebrew Bible. Eloheinu reflects the two different names that are used by God in the northern and southern kingdoms. We join them together here saying, Hey, you might have called God this, and I might have called God this, but it's actually kind of the same thing, so we're just gonna bump 'em together and say, we're all talking about the same entity here. And then the last part of the statement. Adonai Echad. . That entity we're calling Adonai is one, and it goes from a monolactric statement to a monotheistic statement that there's only one God. That then becomes the baseline for the Jewish understanding of monotheism and the Jewish faith. Dan Leibenson, founder of Judaism Unbound has a different take on this statement. Shema Israel, hear O. Israel is still the entity that we're engaging with Adonai, and this thing we're talking about is Adonai.
Adonai as the breadth of the world. It's actually Adonai Echad. He understands this phrase as a testament to the oneness of all creation. A love for oneness. That doesn't have to include a proper name, nor does it require us to believe in any particular element of the Divine. Leibenson vision invites us to think about Shema as a way to say that, whatever we want to call it, nature, God, the collective unconscious, the mysterious thread that binds all living things, the internal call to love others. Those are all facets of the same oneness, different ways of saying, we're all one, so let's act like it. Shema is often introduced as the watch word of our faith. It's the closest that we get to in Jewish liturgy to a creed, and like any good Jewish theological statement, it does not exist on its own. It's coupled with the via hafta, and you shall love when you lie down and when you rise up. On the doorposts of our house, we are commanded to see love and to act in love is our oneness. And if shamma is linked to action and it's all one, then the way to live out that oneness is to act from a place of one. To be Jewish is to live a life that is driven by love and manifested in our conduct. But here's the catch. If Shama is the watch word of our faith, our creed, then it matters how one understands its meaning. If Shema is a monotheistic statement that connects the people Israel in covenant with the divine, then our actions, our love are primarily particular. If it's about the covenant, then the invitation to do justice, to act out in love starts with our own people and inevitably, our motivations for engaging in action circle back around to our own needs for safety and security. We care for our own, our family, our tribe. First, and then we engage in the greater world beyond our family, beyond our tribe, so that we can be safer even in our particularism. the orientation of Particularism gets corrupted easily and quickly can become strategy because there's really good ROI in loving your neighbor if it makes us safer or more likely for our neighbor to love us. But strategy isn't the same thing as morality. we need to be careful and aware of what it means to stand behind a particular statement. That there are consequences to centering ourselves and also consequences for not doing so. If Shama is, as Libenson describes it, a credo that claims that everything is one, then the invitation to justice is not for our own sake. The need for justice and loving action is universal If we're all one, and the division between us and them is imaginary. We engage in the greater world because we're all family. It's all of us. And just as there are consequences for orienting from a particulars point of view, there are consequences from orienting from a universalist point of view. For instance, when we see everyone as one, and then something happens in the world that affects, particularly the Jewish people in our particular orientation, and then our allies don't show up. What does it feel like not to be included in the sphere of universal love? Do we keep engaging? Do we have to decide if we actually mean all this stuff? But Zel made in the image of God, Tikun Ola, healing the world, are all living beings actually worthy of dignity and love. I know it feels super dramatic to say it like that. And the truth is both in the particular understanding of the Shema and in the universal, the Shema is aspirational Through this covenant, through understanding that every being is connected through oneness and mystery. Through our particularity, we access a portal to the universal and then bring ourselves closer to a more just and meaningful world. We are in a constant battle to resist the parochial cycle of caring only about our own. That's why Lipson's read on the Shema is so radical asking us to hold both things is true care for our own, and we belong to each other. it matters that we take seriously what we each mean by the Shama prayer because our belief about the foundational assertion of Judaism leads us to very different calls to action. Calling us out of a tribal instinct that keeps us alive and also beyond it being able to say, this isn't about us. It's about everything. when we are called into Shema to listen, when we rise up, when we lie down, when we walk through doorways, when we bind the sign on our foreheads and on our arms, mapping it on our doorposts. It is a sign. It's a sign. Just as the biblical text describe both of where we come from and where we are going.
[Portion of Shema Veahavta]
Lex: for the first time. In this series, I'm gonna express some soft disagreement with Miriam. This idea of Shema as a watch word, I'm out on watch word for Shema. It doesn't help us watch, it helps us hear. I don't think Miriam would actually disagree with that, but I do want to talk about the power of audio for a second. It seems a bit like selfish naval gazing in a podcast format that is itself audio a lot of the time. I'm somebody who speaks words into the world that people receive orally, but here I am talking about how powerful that is. Hopefully not too egotistically. We don't always name the ways in which the best known prayer of Jewish tradition, the Shma is itself a meditation on the power of hearing. It's all about listening. It's all about audio. Take a second wherever you are, and listen to the sounds of the space that you're in. Maybe you're at home, maybe you're in a car or on the subway or taking a Shabbat bike. Ride with us in your ears, but press pause right now and if you are wearing earbuds, take them out for a few seconds and then press play again.
[Portion of Shema Veahavta]
Lex: Okay, welcome back. It's a bit hokey, but every space that every one of you is listening to us in right now is one. They're not separate. They feel separate, but they're not a road in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a road in Asheville, North Carolina, and a road in New London, Connecticut. They feel like separate roads, but if you plug in directions on Google Maps. You'll learn that you can get from one to the other in one fell swoop. We call these roads and these highways different names, we give them numbers, but at the end of the day, it's one interconnected planet and you can get from one point to the other while driving on it, you might say. But Lex, there are some off the beaten path roads that you actually can't get to through Google Maps. Well played listener. But you can get to those roads through water, through grass, which seem fundamentally different or separate from roads, but are ultimately part of the same planet and the same oneness. Why'd I go on this tangent? Well, as Miriam brought to us, we hear in each SMA the oneness of all creation. We hear that two theoretically separate names of God. Yah. And Elohim or Adonai and Nu are actually not separate. So today I'd ask you to play with me a little bit with Jewish word play. The word audio could be heard if you were speaking it in Hebrew as aia. Aia Odd means until or toward in Hebrew. And Yaah is a name of God. So when we say odd ya, when we engage with audio for a sacred purpose, we walk aah towards sanctity. We listen in so many ways with our ears, with our bodies, but when we listen, we attune to the world. We build a connection to that which surrounds us to that, which is one. A lot of folks argue that we need less screen time, but very rarely do they focus their eye on sound time. That seems right. That seems correct. may we know each time we recite Shama and each time, more importantly, we hear Shama that we become more interconnected, more one, as a society through the knowledge that we can truly hear one another in whatever ways that listening manifests with our ears, with our bodies, in all manners and mechanisms of listening. May we know that we can hear one another and that that one another is less about, and other than it is about the one. I like it.
[Shema]
Miriam: When Jewish people gather in prayer, there's always room for grief, and so that's true here too. Even though we're not physically together, we are in this together. So wherever you are, pause. Hold still in a communal setting. When we recite the mourners, Kaddish the Ka, usually our mourners rise. So here we're going to rise with our body and our breath to raise up a little bit taller, to find a little more room in our bodies for that breath. This prayer though, associated with death, has no mention of it. In fact, it's line after line, affirming life, saying that even in the world that we're living in right now, I still choose to live in it. And an essential part of this prayer is the word, amen. That the griever, the mourner, will say the line. And together in community, we say Amen. And amen just means I agree this life is worth living. Amen. This life is scary, but I'm still in it. Amen. I'll find my way back from this grief. Amen. so that everyone part of this is connected, if you'd like to call in someone's name, who you're remembering, especially right now, or to connect into that grief, feel free to say their names out loud. And we rise in body and in breath as we continue with the words of K Ika.
Miriam: This next melody comes straight from Psalm 23, a psalm that is typically used to comfort the bereaved, to remind us in our grief, to stay in the world, and that we are not alone in it. It takes just five words from Psalm 23 I shall not fear for you are with me And this tune is a little different than what we might be used to, it has a driving beat, intentionally because comfort does not have to sound like a sigh. Comfort can sound like a resounding YES to life. Lo Ira Ra Do not be afraid. Not because the world is easy. Not because the grief isn’t still there. But because Ki Ata Imadhi, You are with me. You can be the Divine Or the You could be the oneness of all things reminding you that in this world and in your grief You are not alone.
[Ki Ata]
Miriam: Did you feel that? "Ki ata imadi, lo ira ra." You are with me, and I shall not fear”. Five words from Psalm 23, and somehow they come out dancing. That's not an accident. Fear and comfort aren't opposites here, they're neighbors. The promise isn't that the hard thing won't happen, it's that we're not facing it alone, and sometimes the truest way to say that out loud is with a melody that moves with your feet. That's oneness too, not choosing between the ache and the joy, but holding both, the way we held both the particular and the universal a few minutes ago. And where we return now to love, to V'ahavta, we're not leaving that fear behind. We're answering it. Loving with all our heart, all our soul, all our oomph, even, especially, the parts of us that are still afraid. So let's go back to that melody one more time, and let it carry us home.
[Shema Veahavta]
Miriam: and that's Shama Haveta, the whisper that it's all one, that every thread of creation is woven together and love is the hand that does the weaving. thank you for being with us today. For holding the mystery that somehow oneness and love are the same thing, and that the divine breeze through us. In every act of kindness we offer this beautiful and sometimes broken world. In our next episode, we're calling in osce Shalom. We're calling in peace and wholeness in a world that desperately needs both. until then. May you catch glimpses of the oneness beneath everything and the love that holds it all together. Shabbat shalom.
[Podcast Theme Music]
Miriam: Huge gratitude to Lipman Kanfer foundation for Living Torah, for making the Shabbat Unbound podcast possible. Shabbat Unbound is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future, and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound, created by Miriam Turin Amp and Lex Rosberg, directed by Joey Taylor, produced at Monastery Studios Sound engineering by Justin Newton. original podcast Theme Music and Arrangements by Rich Hoki and Art by Katie Kaner. Special thanks to our musicians Rich Hoki on guitar, Andrea Summer and vocals. Matt Wiles on Bass. and Josh Seurecamp on drums. special thanks to our feature composers of and You Shall Love Jalyn Levine and Annie Via real belford. Check the show notes for bonus material. Lex did an incredible job, so there are so many resources for you to check in. And if you love this podcast, that's wonderful. Join us for our monthly live Shabbat events. You can find the next one on our website at www.judaismunbound.com/shabbat unbound. And always we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at hello@judaismunbound.com.
