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Rabbinic Tefilla Colloquium I

The Current Study Unit -- by R.Kimelman (Unit 9)

THE SHEMA' LITURGY

This is our third post on the Shema, the last of the summer. We will start again at the holidays. The topic is something worth reflecting on as we get into Elul and that is God's love for us. It always surprises me how many Jews fail to think of Judaism as the religion of love when its central liturgical affirmation is "With everlasting, or great love, have You loved us" and its central liturgical commandment is to love back wholeheartedly. It would be worth asking our congregants how many conceive of Judaism as a religion of love. Please tell us of your results.

Why is it that Judaism is called a religion of justice while Christianity that of love. Is it that love of God makes us too squeamish, or is it that modern Jewry prefers to define itself more in contrast to Christianity than in terms of its own sources. Perhaps the same sentiment explains why the traditional three blessings of self-definition in the morning define us by what we are not rather than by what we are.

In dealing with the second blessing, let us also ask:

1. Why is it so important for us to know that God loves us?

2. How effective is the pedagogical metaphor as opposed to a marital metaphor?

3. Is is really easier to love a god who loves us first?

4. How do you assess the argument that reciprocating divine love becomes a real possibility in the light of a life of Torah and mitsvot.

The second blessing makes the case for the election of Israel as an expression of God's love. The argument is contained in the first half and last part. As always the conclusion is encapsulated in the peroration:

1. With everlasting love have You loved us, O Lord our God

2. With great and exceeding compassion have You cared for us.

3. Our Father our King, for the sake of our ancestors who trusted in You

4. As You taught them the statutes of life

5. So grace us by teaching us.

6. Our Father, merciful Father, have mercy upon us

7. by making our hearts understand, discern, listen, learn, teach, appreciate, do, and fulfill all the words of your Torah in love.

8. Enlighten our eyes in Your Torah and make our hearts cleave to Your commandments.

9. Unite our heart to love and to revere Your name. ...........................

10. You have chosen us from among all peoples and tongues

11. You have granted us access to Your great name.

12. [To praise/acknowledge You and declare Your unity] out of love

13. Blessed are You, God, who chooses His People Israel out of love.

The version that opens with the declaration of the beloved, "With everlasting love have You loved us, O Lord our God" inverts God's profession of love in Jer. 31:3 -- "With everlasting love have I loved you" -- in order to serve as Israel's acknowledgement of divine love. The liturgy, following Jeremiah, grasps revelation as God falling in love forever with Israel. Such love is attested to by the gift of the Torah, pointedly called "the statutes of life," which God is entreated to grace Israel by teaching them as He taught their forefathers. By presenting the Torah and its teaching as gifts of love, the blessing promotes its conclusion that God "chooses His people Israel in love."

The addition of the love motif to that of the Torah distinguishes this blessing from the standard blessing on the Torah. The latter opens with blessing God for having "chosen us from among all the nations and given us His Torah," and closes with blessing God for "giving the Torah," without any mention of love. Moreover, in contrast to presenting the Torah and its commandments as obligatory concomitants of the covenant, they appear here as expressions of God's beneficence.

The parallel blessing of the evening service also stresses the link between love and teaching. Adhering to the syntax of the Hebrew, it translates as follows:

1. With everlasting love the house of Israel, Your people, have You loved.

2. Torah and commandments, statutes and laws, us have You taught.

3. Therefore, Lord our God, when we lie down and when we rise up,

4. we shall speak of Your statutes and rejoice in the words of Your Torah and in Your commandments forever,

5. for they are our life and the length of our days,

6. and we will recite them day and night.

7. May Your love never depart from us.

8. Blessed are You, O Lord, who loves His people Israel.

The parallel syntax and Hebrew rhyme scheme of lines 1 and 2 converge to make the point that God's election-love is expressed through teaching Torah and commandments. Lines 3 and 4 reinforce the idea that God's everlasting (`olam) love, as expressed through such teaching, is reciprocated by a commitment on Israel's part to rejoice and study the teaching and commandments forever (le`olam). As the morning version, so the evening version presents the loving God as a teaching God.

The appearance of a pedagogical relationship as a metaphor for love is quite remarkable. One would have thought that the appropriation of Jeremiah's use of "everlasting love" would have triggered off analogues of connubial or parental love to express the relationship of God to Israel, as does Jeremiah himself. The absence of other expressions suggestive of the connubial relationship found in Jeremiah, Hosea, or the Song of Songs is clear evidence that their love metaphors are not those of the blessing. Even those of Deuteronomy and Jeremiah which do provide much of the language of the blessing lack the pedagogical image. Whether or not the metaphor of God as a loving teacher is of liturgical coinage, it achieved its most prominent expression through the liturgy.

Why did an educational metaphor gain pride of place over a nuptial one? The deployment of a pedagogical image instead of a marital one for the language of love is all the more perplexing in view of the fact that historically the transitional metaphor from ancient suzerainty pacts to the reciprocal love of the liturgy was the biblical marriage metaphor. Notwithstanding the availability of both metaphors for the Sinaitic revelation by amoraic times, it is clear that God becomes Israel's loving husband long before becoming their loving teacher.

The absence of the marriage metaphor may be attributed to its difficulty in serving effectively as an analogy for both love and sovereignty. Teachers more easily command fealty, exercise mastery, and elicit love. Moreover, the image of the beloved as student may be responding, proleptically, to the command that the love of God be reflected in the instructing of children/students as found in the first two biblical sections. If love is reciprocated by teaching, then, goes the argument, it might well have been initiated by teaching. To quote Wordsworth's Prelude: "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." Finally, the idea of portraying revelation as an act of teaching Torah confirms the rabbinic idea of teaching Torah as an extension of revelation.

Three biblical books are helpful in tracing the development of the liturgical image of God as a loving teacher. In Deuteronomy, Moses is the teacher, and God is the commander. In contrast, Isaiah and Psalms are studded with references to God as teacher. A midrashic treatment of the verse from Psalms (119:68) "You are good and beneficient, teach me Your laws," shows the type of thinking that led to the liturgical image:

David said to the Holy One, blessed be He: ..."You are good and beneficent to them [Israel] in every matter and You teach them Your Torah and Your commandments and Your laws, as it says, "I am the Lord your God, teaching you for your own good, guiding you in the way you should go. (If only you would heed My commands) (Isa. 48:17-18).

The statement of David from Ps. 119:68, "You are good and beneficent, teach me Your Torah;" along with the citation of Isaiah (48:17), "teaching you for your own good," epitomize the ideology of our blessing. By rereading the revelation as portrayed in Deuteronomy through the prisms of Psalms and Isaiah -- with their idea of a beneficent, teaching God -- the blessing opens the way to perceiving the teaching of Torah as an expression of divine love. After all, if God's beneficence entails teaching Torah, His love can do no less.

Having established that God's love entails teaching Torah, let us look at the terms for the Torah in the next line. Line 2 consists of four curricular subjects: Torah, commandments, statutes, and laws. These four appear as a unit four times in Scripture. Their order here matches that of 2 Chron. 19:10. Their context of revelation, however, matches that of the other three, namely, 2 Kings 17:34, 37, and Neh. 9:13b all of which refer to the revelation of divine law. Indeed, Neh. 9:13b is preceded by the telling phrase, "You came down on Mt. Sinai and spoke to them from heaven" (9:13a), which is exactly the backdrop of the blessing. Similarly, a Genizah version of the festival liturgy, which could easily double for the second blessing of the Shema`, cites the same verse from Nehemiah after stating, "You chose Israel... and brought them close in love around Mt. Sinai."

The order of the four also points to the practice of linking Torah with commandments, and statutes with laws, a practice that turns out to be an inversion of the way they are paired in 2 Kings 17. The inclusion of all four terms reinforces the Sinaitic setting of the blessing, wherein the giving of Torah was first grasped as an expression of love, as well as the position of Deuteronomy (4:14) that other statutes and laws were promulgated along with the Decalogue.

The other innovation of the blessing consists in orientating line 5 -- "for they are our life and the length of our days" -- to the study of Torah as well as to the commandments. In Deut. 6 and 30, this phrase refers to observance of the commandments alone without any mention of the study of Torah. Moreover, Deut. 30:20 predicates residence on the land with the keeping of the commandments: "By loving the Lord your God, heeding His commands, and holding fast to Him, you shall have life and length of days upon the land ...." In contrast, the blessing omits any reference to the land while underscoring the significance of Torah study by affirming that "we will recite them day and night." The idea of reciting the Torah day and night alludes to Joshua's admonition to keep the Torah constantly in mind -- "Let not this book of Torah cease from your lips, recite it day and night" (1:8) -- and the description of Ps. 1:2 of the man who delights in the Torah by reciting it day and night.

In rabbinic parlance, the term "recite" became the technical term for the articulation of the Shema`. By associating "they are our life and the length of our days" with the twice daily recitation of the Shema`, line 5 confirms the rabbinic position of fulfilling the biblical mandate of constant involvement in Torah study through reciting the Shema` by day and by night, while parrying the position that only around the clock engagement will do. By excluding any reference to the land and by introducing both the study of Torah and the love of God as expressed through the teaching of Torah, a unit is formulated to sound fully biblical while accommodating the Torah-centered agenda of the Rabbis.

This rewriting of Scripture with Scripture typifies the midrashic technique that, as we have seen repeatedly, pervades the liturgical reformulation of scriptural themes. It consists of the notion that Scripture provides the vocabulary, through which midrashic discourse constructs and explores its own world, a lexicon within which Rabbinic writers articulate new worlds of scriptural meaning.

Both morning and evening versions of the blessing advocate the study of Torah and the heeding of its commandments as the means of disclosing divine love. The juxtaposition of the request for enlightenment in the Torah and for help in cleaving to the commandments with the request for the unification of the heart in the love of God is not without significance. By so linking the two, the morning version presents both study and observance of the Torah as paths leading to the love of God. The Torah and the commandments serve the dual function of expressing divine love and of providing the means for its reciprocation. Indeed, it is through sensing divine love that its human counterpart is sparked. God gave us Torah and commandments out of love. By complying with them we can come to requite that love. The seven-fold repetition of "love" in the morning blessing, fairly evenly distributed among beginning, middle, and end, weaves its way through the whole passage. Indeed the first and last word is "love". These ubiquitous glimmerings of love are also refracted in what appears in some versions as a nuancing of Ps. 86:6 -- "Unite our heart to revere Your name" -- to "Unite our heart to love and to revere Your name" (line 9). The interpolation of love underscores the love of God in contrast to the oft-mentioned love by God.

The blessing holds that experiencing the grace of guidance provided by the commandments leads to the conclusion that they were given in love. In contrast to the position that compliance with the commandments expresses love for God, the blessing maintains that compliance with the commandments engenders such love. Nonetheless, the blessing goes beyond noting the typical reciprocal love between God and Israel as found in the following midrash: "Israel says: 'You shall love the Lord your God,' and God says to them 'With everlasting love have I loved you.'" The priority of God's unconditional love is thrown into relief when contrasted with an example of God's conditional love such the following midrashic statement: "Whoever loves God and complies with His commandments and teachings, God also loves him." By positioning this blessing about God's love before the Shema`'s demand to love God, the point is made that we are to love the god who loved us first. As love is best aroused by the awareness of being loved, the commandment to love God becomes liturgically an act of reciprocity -- "the love of the lover," to use Rosenzweig's expression. Indeed, it is God's love of Israel that produces a God-loving Israel. Thus the blessing goes on to entreat God to render one capable of returning the love. Clearly, the experience of being loved nourishes the capacity to love. In fact, "God's love bestows the power to unify man's heart so that one can 'cleave to the commandments' and offer back to God the love one has perceived."

The second section of the Shema` and the second blessing both seek to bring about compliance with the commandments. Their approaches, however are distinct. What the former achieves through threats of punishment, the latter achieves through assurances of love. The punishment motif, in fact, is entirely absent from the blessing framework. Positive reinforcement alone serves as its motivation. Through such motif conversion, a pact of loyalty became a covenant of love, thereby transforming a biblical affirmation of fealty into a liturgical expression of ardor.

By way of conclusion, let us note how different the perspective of blessing two is from blessing one. In moving from the motif of creation to that of revelation the blessings shift from the universal to the particular, from creation to history, from God as creator and monarch to that of teacher and lover, from a world in which God is the sole actor to one in which Israel and God interact, from a world in which God is spoken of to one in which God is spoken to, and from a blessing in which God and His creation are primarily adored to one in which God is primarily petitioned. In the first, contemplation about the meaning of the structure of the universe leads to awareness of God's sovereignty. In the second, contemplation about the meaning of the teachings of the Torah leads to awareness of God's love. All these observations make explicit what is implicit in the reading experience of the liturgical narrative. The difference in perspective needs to be brought to the level of consciousness as it frames the meaning. Since perspective is to narrative what sequence of action is to plot, the fluctuating play of perspective must be brought to conciousness in order to appreciate the experiential depth and conceptual complexity that results from the juxtaposition of blessings so disparate in their form and content.

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