The Shema

 

In 1945, Rabbi Eliezer Silver headed up the search for thousands of displaced Jewish children across Europe. They had been hidden from the Nazis on farms, in convents, and monasteries.

He had a promising lead, a monastery in southern France had reportedly taken in Jewish children. The priest in charge, insisted that to his knowledge, all of their children were Christians. Rabbi Silver had no records.

He asked if he could visit the wards. In front of the children, he began singing in Hebrew, “Shema Israel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad.” A handful of faces lit up, and tiny voices joined in. They recognized these words from their bedtime prayers, and from their earliest memories of their mothers and fathers reciting them, during their own prayers.

These six words begin the Shema (pronounced “shmah”), which is one of two prayers specifically commanded in Torah (the other is grace after meals). It’s the oldest fixed daily prayer in Judaism, recited each evening and morning since antiquity. It consists of three biblical passages, two of which specifically say to speak these things "when you lie down and when you rise up." The English translation of the prayer reads as follows:

Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever. (This line is usually recited in an undertone.)

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the LORD your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil— I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall eat your fill. Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the LORD’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the LORD is assigning to you. Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, and teach them to your children—reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates— to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.

The LORD said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the LORD and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. Thus you shall be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. I the LORD am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I, the LORD your God.