Sefer Devarim

Parshat Va’etchanan: On the Unity of God

By Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz

In Parshat Va’etchanan, Moses gives the Israelites the essential rules for how they are to live when they cross over into the Promised Land. As such, Moshe’s speech contains many Jewish principles we still know well today.  

For example, we’re told to pass on the story of the Exodus from Egypt, 1 and the Ten Commandments are restated in full. 2 

We’re also given the two other most foundational statements of Judaism: Shema and Ve’ahavta (You shall love God). Moshe tells us: 

Shema Yisrael! Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem echad (Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one).

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 3

Ve’ahavta goes on to give the commandments of tefillin (“And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes”) 4  and mezuzah (“And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.”) 5—all so that we can remind ourselves in our daily lives to love the one God.

So what really does it mean to have one God? In the Jewish tradition, we can identify a couple of different dimensions to “echad,” God’s oneness. 

Most simply, there is one God and no other god. We can translate the Shema as saying, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” 6 This makes ethical monotheism one of Judaism’s main contributions to the world. On one level, monotheism is what Judaism is all about. “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one” is the tweet-size summary of the religion. 

And monotheism demands ethics, as it bounds us to an absolute truth. In a worldview with multiple gods, people can have competing truths and competing principles of morality. Having one God demands that we seek the one truth. We can have multiple viewpoints of how we get there, but monotheism obligates us to seek the one objective source of all morality. 

To be clear, polytheists are not necessarily immoral. Monotheism shouldn’t lead us to be fundamentalists. One might think that when, in the classic midrash, Abraham smashes his father’s idols, he is being a fervent fundamentalist. But an alternate reading suggests that he is actually smashing the notion that our life success is measured through tchotchkes. Rather, as monotheists, we measure our success through our inner dignity, our inner Godliness, by staying attuned with our purpose. 

The moral failing of idolatry is not understanding that the job of God is taken. Monotheism can keep us humble to remember that we are not God. Additionally, it inspires the courage to experience God’s image within us. 

Another dimension of “echad,” and this is the one that can really help our understanding of God grow and mature, is that God’s oneness can mean that there is nothing outside of the oneness of God. Earlier in this parshah, Moses teaches us:

Know this day and keep in mind that the Lord alone is God in heaven above and on earth below; there is no other. 7

Hasidic leaders such as the Alter Rebbe 8  and the Slonimer Rebbe 9 take this to mean that there is nothing but God. Everything that exists is part of the same unity. 

With this in mind, we can recognize the immediacy of our duties to one another. Once we realize that there is no difference between us, as we are all part of the same oneness, we can better internalize how important it is to fight back against all injustice. Monotheism helps us see all injustice as a personal attack on ourselves (because everything is interconnected in oneness and in unity). 

It helps us to see that we are in the image of that one God, and that theological position puts human rights at the forefront. Because there’s only oneness, part of the illusion of self and other falls away, and we then have an increased responsibility to one another. 

As individuals, we’re complicated. We live in paradox. We ourselves have multiple dimensions and identities. But this multiplicity is housed within our oneness; we’re still a singular individual. So too, God holds multiplicity within oneness. 

That is why we need both the unique Torah and the representation of each different person or type of person, because it brings out the fullness of God’s presence. 

And so, while it is obvious that there is a oneness of being, there is paradoxically and simultaneously a brokenness and division. This complication comes to the forefront in the book of Zechariah, where it says of a perfected future: 

And the Lord shall be King over all the earth; On that day the Lord shall be one, and God’s name [shall be] one. 10

The Talmud points out this apparent contradiction, saying in Tractate Pesachim: “Is that to say that, now, God is not[already] one?” 11

And yet, the Torah teaches us nothing more clearly: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” So the tradition comes to the conclusion that, now, the one God exists in a divided world, one that contains good and bad. But the future world, the one we must strive to create, is one in which all creation will be unified in goodness. And then the vision of “Hashem echad” (of God’s unity) will be brought to fullness and will be realized, leading a global ethical transformation. 

Sources:

  1. Deuteronomy 6:21
  2.  Deuteronomy 5:6-18, While the Ten Commandments are repeated in this parshah, there are several differences between the first recording (Exodus 20:2-14) and this one. Perhaps the most well-known difference is that the first recording opens the mitzvah to keep Shabbat with the word “Zachor” (“Remember”), whereas here the opening word is “Shamor” (“Observe”). This difference is the source for the famous line in the Talmud, “Zachor and Shamor” were spoken as one (literally “in one statement”), which in turn became immortalized in the first verse of Lecha Dodi, “Shamor v’zachor b’dibbur echad.”
  3.  Deuteronomy 6:4-5
  4.  Deuteronomy 6:8
  5. Deuteronomy 6:9, It is interesting to note that the word mezuzah actually means doorpost. Eventually the term morphed into the very item we place on the doorpost. 
  6.  Deuteronomy 6:4
  7.  Deuteronomy 4:39
  8.  Chabad.org: https://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/tanya_cdo/aid/460077/jewish/Chapter-6.htm 
  9.  I heard this from Rabbi Or Rose at a VBM lecture, “Ein od milvado.” https://www.valleybeitmidrash.org/learning-library/radical-compassion-the-mystical-teaching-of-rabbi-levi-yizhak-of-berditchev/
  10.  Zechariah 14:9
  11.  Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 50a
  12.  Ibid.