Vaethanan (Midrash)

Father Jacob Reads Shema

Perhaps the best known part of this week’s Torah portion is the Shema, the “credo” of the Jew, one of the two central elements of daily prayers, recited every morning and evening. As expected, there is a whole series of midrashim on this verse. Two rather brief midrashim, brought adjacent to one another, discuss an interesting detail: the phrase recited immediately after Shema, in an undertone, Barukh shem kevod malkhuto le’olam va’ed—“Blessed be the name of His glorious Kingdom forever and ever.” As this phrase does not actually appear in the Torah passage (Deut 4:6-11), its recitation in such a central place, interrupting the biblical reading, seem rather puzzling. Deuteronomy Rabbah 2.35 discusses it as follows:

Another thing: “Hear O Israel” [Deut 6:4]. From whence did Israel merit to recite Shema? At the time that Jacob was dying, he called all the tribes together and said to them: Perhaps once I depart this world you shall bow to another god? From whence? From what is written: “Gather together and hear, O sons of Jacob” [Gen 49:2]. What is meant by “and hearken to Israel your father” [ibid.]? He said to them: He is the God of Israel your father. They said to him: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” And he said in a whisper: “Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.” R. Levi said: And what do Israel say now? “Hear, our father Israel”—that same thing which you commanded us, we perform now: “the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

We are shown a poignant domestic scene. The dying Jacob/Israel, concerned about what is referred to today as “continuity,” calls his sons together; Maimonides, ever the theologian, depicts him as “exhorting them concerning God’s unity and the way of the Lord that was followed by Abraham and Isaac his fathers, and he asked them, ‘Perhaps there is one among you who is unfit, who is not at one with me in the belief in the unity of God’” (Hil. Keri’at Shema 1.4). We see him filled with anxiety about the future of his faith, about whether the central message he sought to realize and to teach throughout his life, will in fact be carried on by his family after his death. When his sons do in fact affirm their ongoing commitment to God’s unity, he whispers in gratitude, “Blessed be the Name…” I read this as a statement about God’s manifestation in world: the fact of His being acknowledged as God. God’s Name (or, for that matter, the name of a human being), and His Glory, are not part of His essence, but refer to His manifestations, those facets of His being which can be perceived in the public arena, the ways through which He is known and perceived by others or, put more simply, what is said and told about him.

This insight may help us to understand Rashi’s rather unexpected comment on the first verse of Shema. Rather than elaborating upon the theological implications of God’s Unity, His uniqueness, and other aspects of His being (as does Rambam, for example, in parallel places), he comments on the tension between the present and the future. “God, who is now our God alone and not the God of the idolaters, will in the future be One”—that is, known and accepted as the One True God throughout the world. Rashi then cites verses from the prophets Zechariah (14:9) and Zephaniah (3:9) to reinforce this idea, painting an eschatological vision of religious knowledge spreading throughout world. This, even more so than peace, even more so than the return to a Golden Age of Edenic plentitude and ease of living (“one will be able to pluck luscious cakes off the trees”), is the central hope for the End of Time.

Whatever may have been the original reason for Jacob’s whispering (interestingly, Rashi seems to advance this scene to the reunion of Jacob and Joseph in Egypt; see his comment on Gen 46:29), the tension between the two—between the statement of faith in the One God, and the realization of its incomplete fulfillment in this world—is symbolized by its being recited in a whisper by Jacob’s progeny. Various halakhic sources take this midrash as exemplary for future generations: Jews are to say Shema at moments of high religious moment, as well as every day, in the same way as did Jacob. As I read this idea, the Shema is the exemplary occasion for declaring God’s sovereignty, and as such requires a response that concretizes this concept: to wit, “Barukh Shem kevod malkhuto…” Yaakov was the first one to do so, but the core idea is universal and eternal.

The Kabbalistic tradition also speaks of a tension between these two verses, each one of which consists of six Hebrew words, in terms of what it calls Yihud ha-’Elyon and Yihud ha-Tahton—the “Higher Unification” and the ”Lower Unification.” Even though the subject contents there refer to rather different concerns than those mentioned above—the former referring to the unification of God as He is in Himself, within the Sefirotic world; the latter to His unification within the realm of physical space—the tension between the two seems analogous or parallel to that mentioned above.

But let us turn to the other midrash on this subject, Deut. Rab. 2.36:

Another thing. “Hear O Israel.” Our Rabbis said: at the moment that Moses ascended on high, he heard the ministering angels saying to the Holy One blessed be He: “Blessed be the name of His Glorious kingdom forever and ever.” And he brought it down to Israel.

And why do not Israel recite it publicly? R. Yossi said: To what is this comparable? To one who stole a jewel from the palace of the king. He gave it to his wife and said: Do not adorn yourself with it in public, but only inside your house. But on the Day of Atonement, when they are pure like the ministering angels, they say it publicly: “Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.”

The idea that one is somehow allowed to retain stolen property if one doesn’t flaunt it publicly strikes us as rather strange, but it may perhaps be understood if we look at it in a slightly different fashion. The point being made by the midrash is not that this verse was the private property of the angels, but that it was uniquely appropriate to them because of their great purity. Ministering angels are conceived by Hazal as celestial beings whose sole purpose in existence is to praise and exalt the Holy One blessed be He, who are without the bodily needs and desires of human beings, and hence also without the constant inner struggles between the claims of the spirit and those of the body which characterize human life.

Incidentally, the motif of Moses’ encounters with the angels appears in a series of midrashim describing what happened when he ascended on high to receive the Torah. In one of these midrashim, the motif of the angelic “superiority” is turned on its head: when the angels challenge the right of a mortal human being to receive the Torah, the preexistent Word, the supernal Wisdom or Logos, the very embodiment of the Divine, they are told that, precisely because human beings do have an “Evil Urge,” they need the guidance of the Torah in such practical, carnal matters to which the Torah addresses itself (Shabbat 89a).

Another puzzling thing here is the attribution of the phrase “Barukh shem kevod…” to Moses, whereas in Pesahim 56a the Talmud specifically emphasizes that Moses did not say it (i.e., that the text of Shema given in the Torah goes straight from Shema to “you shall love the Lord your God…”). Its recitation in an undertone is seen there as a kind of compromise “between Jacob and Moses,” between saying it and not saying it, thereby paying due respect to the practice of both these great figures. But our midrash’s association of saying it aloud with Yom Kippur, the day of purity and transcendence of human limitations, is perhaps another way of saying much the same thing. (Interestingly, the Shulhan Arukh invokes the former midrash as the source for this phrase in its discussion of the laws of daily recitation of Shema in Orah Hayyim §61, but cites the latter in the laws of Yom Kippur, §619).