Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

The Uniqueness Of Judaism - Lecture II (1998)  

by Harold M. Schulweis

The Sh'ma must be recited so that it is audible to oneself –Lhashmiah ozno.  It is the one verse that must not be slurred but clearly enunciated, especially the last word. I recall my zayde with his hand covering his eyes, elongating the e-c-h-a-d. Echad serves as a magnet drawing together the iron filings of our value system.

Echad is the singular major attribute of God found in the Torah. It does not say, “Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is omnipotent,” or the Lord is omniscient or the Lord is Perfect, or the Lord is eternal, but only, "Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one." Echad not in the mathematical sense of one, as opposed to three, four or five. But Echad as oneness, as a Jewish belief in the great connection, the cosmic Nexus, the moral binding that links us. To believe in Echad is to sense that everything and everyone is connected, that we belong to each other, and that nothing or no one is isolated.

If Echad is the singular Hebrew word of the Torah, then one Hebrew letter appears more often in the Torah than any other letter, and begins every column in the Torah except for the first column which begins with beth.  That letter is vav, "and,” the great conjunction that holds together words, sentences, paragraphs and lives. Pay attention to the vav in your life, because if it is ignored, the world is filled with discordant notes, strident sounds, cacophonous voices that divide, fractionalize, split, and separate. "Vav" refers to that which seeks to overcome the jagged disjunctions of our lives.

“Echad” expresses our Jewish weltanschauung. It informs the Jewish way of “Believing, Belonging and Behaving.” Echad has an adversary, one that existed in ancient times and exists today. The threatening adversary of Echad is avodah zaarah – “idolatry.:  Idolatry is not what we learned about in Sunday School – the worship of stars or stones or mountains or trees. Idolatry has its own weltanschauung, and in opposition to echad understands the world differently. Idolatry is the worship of a part as if it was the whole. Idolatry is a pervasive way of thinking. Idolatry segregates. Here God, there man; here the sacred, there the profane; here ritual, there ethics; here believing, there behaving; here me, there you; here my people, there humanity; here the law, there the spirit; here this world, there the other world.

The classic case of idolatry in the Torah is the worship of the Golden Calf. But idolatry is not a matter of a calf. It doesn't have to be a calf and it doesn't have to be gold. Idolatry can be a stone, or a wall, even a holy wall. It can be a place, an idea, an ideology, a country, a guru. Everything can be made into an idol. The Kotzker rebbe said that even a mitzvah can be made into an idol, even the Torah can be made into an idol. Idolatry means to deify a part of the world, a part of a person, a part of a people, or part of myself as if this were the whole. Listen to the reiterated word "all" – love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your might.

Echad is the unifying thread that runs through Jewish relationships and warns against the splits, polarizations, bifurcations, and either/or hard disjunctives that we impose on our lives and on others.

Echad is central for understanding three relationships: the relationship between God and this world; the relationship to our people; and the relationship to ourselves. First, echad means that God is connected with the world, with this world, with the whole of humanity. How am I personally related to God? The correlative concept of echad is "tzelem elohim" – the image of God. No other religious tradition takes more seriously the belief that God and the human being enjoy a unique spiritual kinship and that kinship lies at the heart of our ethos and our halachah.

By way of illustration, examine the Jewish law that mandates that the deceased be buried as soon as possible after his death. The explanation is based upon the biblical verse in Deuteronomy which declares that, "If a man commit a sin worthy of death and is hanged on a tree, the body shall not remain all night on the tree but you shall bury him the same day. For he that is hanged is a reproach to God." (Deuteronomy 21:22) But why a reproach to God? The Midrash offers an audacious parable: "There were twin brothers who were identical in their appearance. One was appointed king while the other became a criminal and was hanged. When people passed by and saw the criminal hanging, they exclaimed 'The king is hanged.'"

The analogy is awesome. God and the human being are portrayed as twins. To do violence to man is to desecrate God. (Genesis Rabbah 24:8) That God and man may be considered as twins even as a metaphor expresses the spiritual twinship that is basic to our belief system. It expresses the covenantal oneness between God and me. But Jewish oneness does not mean that I am swallowed up by God. To believe in echad does not call for passivity or resignation as it does in so much of Indian philosophy, the identification of Atman and Brahman, Tat tvam asi  – that thou art. There is here an elimination of the Self that melts in the all, that extinguishes the "I" and is overcome by nirvana.

In the Jewish tradition, man is not absorbed by God. Both man and God are interdependent. Echad demands of us a life of activism. It yields the radical rabbinic notion of shutafim –  that we are partners with God in the creation of the world. This human-divine metaphor of partnership carries with it significant implications for social action. In the Torah, two letters in the Sh'ma are written larger than the others. The ayin at the end of the first word and the dalet, the last letter of the last word, spells out the word "ayd," which means "witness.”  Here lies the marrow of Jewish faith. You know your moral identity, who you are, what your task is in this world, what you are born to do. The Jewish answer is, "witness of God.”  As Isaiah 43 puts it, "You are My witnesses and I am the Lord your God" to which a rabbinic commentary adds: "God declares: 'If you are My witnesses then I am God but if you are not My witnesses it is as if I am not God.”  This remarkable piece of biblical theology elevates us. God depends on our testimony, God depends on the testimony of our behavior. Remember the reflexive question. In good Jewish practice, the Jewish response to the question "Does God exist?" prompts in turn another question: "Do you exist?" To the question "Is God good?" the counter question is "Are you good?" To the question "Is God compassionate?" the counter question is "Are you merciful?" To the question "Does God intervene?" we ask "Do you intervene?" To the question "Does God really care?" we ask "Do you really care?" How did Heschel put it: "Man's question about God is God's question about man."

How do you prove God? with logical syllogism or inductive reason?

The reality of God is proven behaviorally not theoretically. It is not proven by the teleological, ontological or cosmological arguments. God is authenticated not with our lips but with our limbs. God is verified not by rhetoric but by righteous living. Verification is an apt word, derived from two Latin words veri which means "truth," and facere which means “to make.” We make truth. We "truth" God. We authenticate God. We offer personal testimony to His goodness, and when we lie in our lives we shame God. This is called kiddush hashem and chilul hashem.  This strong human divine interdependence in Judaism is a consequence of our belief in the wholeness of God and in our awareness that we are created in His image.

Behind our personal ethical behavior is the belief in the imago dei  because we are created in God's image we can imitate God. "Imago dei" is basic to  imitatio dei.   How in the world do you imitate God who is described as a devouring fire? Here we find the linchpin of Jewish belief and ethical practice. Listen to the Talmud Sotah 14a: "As God makes coats of skin to clothe Adam and Eve, so you who are imaged in God's form clothe the naked. You see to it that those who shiver in the cold are warm. As God visits Abraham when he is sick, so you are created in God's image to visit the sick, to remove from the sick one sixtieth of his illness. As God buries Moses so you attend to the dead. And whom do you visit, whom do you comfort, and whom do you feed?"

The tradition tell us unequivocally to support the poor of the non-Jew together with the poor of the Jew. You visit the sick of the Gentile together with the sick of the Jews. You comfort the mourners of the Gentile together with the mourners of the Jews. This vision of echad informs me of my spiritual life career. I need God and God needs me. By what right do I, mere dust, flesh and blood, consider myself partners with God, capable of imitating God? It is because of Echad – because my Jewish faith insists that there is no ineradicable split between us. No original sin shatters the mirror of my divinely imaged soul. No original sin and no primordial demon destroys my Echad relationship.

Who am I and how do I offer witness? We are God's best proof. We offer testimony to God when we lift up the fallen, heal the sick, defend the innocent, comfort the frightened, and thereby affirm the divine image in me.

Real belief in echad entails real consequences. “Echad Belief” is the mother of behavior and the father of belonging. If you believe that God is echad you cannot look at His creation or His creatures as if they were outcasts or pariahs. If God is echad you cannot treat the poor, the foreigner, the stranger, the immigrant, with laws different from those of the native born. If God is echad, you speak differently. If God is echad, who dares label His creation, the work of His hands, with the insult of shiksa, shaygetz, schvartze, faggot, spic or goy…?  We are the divinely imaged language of God's world.

Closer to home among my own people, if God is echad, how dare I delegitimize those who think, pray or interpret the Bible or the Talmud differently.   How can I denigrate them or their rabbis? How can I threaten them with excommunication or curse them with anathema? How dare I point to my own denomination and my own movement and my own shul as if those alone were exclusively authentic and all the rest heresies? To raise any one denomination above the other is a sign of idolatry; idolatry as the worship of a part as if it were the whole. Echad instructs me how I deal with the other denominations, including my own. And I pause to tell you that we are embarking on a pluralistic outreach to unchurched Gentiles and to unaffiliated Jews but with a faculty that is drawn from the four religious movements of Judaism and with a recognition that those who wish to embrace Judaism have the freedom and are encouraged to choose their own Beth Din and live their own Jewish lives. It is echad that teaches me that God did not create denominations. Echad informs my approach as a Jew to other faiths and other religions. Listen to oneness in the prophetic tradition. Here is the prophet Malachi (2:15): "Have we not all one father? Did not One create us all? Why do we break faith with one another profaning the covenant of our Father?"

Listen to the appeal to oneness in the prophet Amos (9:3): "Are you not unto Me as the Ethiopian, O children of Israel?" On the pleadings of Job (31:15) "Did not He who made me in my mother's belly not make him? Did not One form us both in the womb?"

Listen to the rabbinic text (Tanya debe Elijah) "I call heaven and earth to witness that the Holy Spirit rests upon each person, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, master or slave, in accordance with his deeds."

God is one. But unity does not mean uniformity. There is a magnificent analogy (Pesikta Kahanah 109b-110a) in which God says to Israel: "Because you have seen Me in many likenesses, then are not therefore many Gods. But it is ever the same God. Rabbi Levi said: 'God appeared to them like a mirror in which many faces can be reflected; a thousand people look at it; it looks at all of them.'"

Everyone is convinced that God addresses him personally.  Nor need you marvel at this.  For the manna tasted differently to each; to the children, to the young, to the old, according to their power. If the manna tasted differently according to their power, how much more the word."

So each tradition sees through its reflection but the Mirror is one. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists pray in different languages, but the tears are the same. What we have in common are fears and poverty and suffering.

Lastly, a word about echad in myself. If idolatry is the worship of a part as if it were the whole, this refers to my own oneness. Whenever I take a part of myself and say "This is who I am and no more," whenever I neglect the multiple frames of my worthiness, my talents, dispositions and temperaments and isolate one of them and say "This is who I am,” that is the stigmatizing role of idolatry. Whenever I interpret my stumblings and my errors and label myself as a loser or a sinner, I violate awareness of my oneness that reflects the echad of my faith. Shall I dwell upon my mistakes and call myself "stupid,” that self-denigration is idolatrous. Or shall I point to my successes and call myself a genius? That megalomania is equally idolatrous. Whenever I feel small in my eyes, I recite echad.

Echad means that I am more than my wallet, more than the shape of my body. Echad enlarges me. Have we not seen repeatedly the tragic consequences of idolatrous thinking? Have we not read it in the biographies of beautiful women who see themselves only as a beauty; this starlet who believes that her entire value is in her looks and how others see her, and who then experiences age - wrinkles, graying hair, thickening of her waistline, sagging of her skin, feels that life has betrayed her and turns suicidal. Idolatry of the self is dangerous. This man who sold his entire life to his career, to his job, whose entire being is designed to prove that he has "made it" now ages, his energies lessened, his situation altered, his memory less sharp finds his morale collapsed and the meaning of his life ruined. He has worshipped a small part of his self as the whole of his meaning. And looking back over his obsessions sadly writes his epitaph in a body of water.

Idolatry speaks the language of either/or. It insinuates itself in the way we value our spouse, our children, and our selves. She or he or I are either saint or sinner, either genius or dolt, either beautiful or ugly, either loyal or treasonous, either chosen or rejected. That split thinking applies to individuals and to ideas, to denominations and to ideology. I have wrestled with these false options all my life and I now know its signs. If it is presented in an either/or way, a red flag is raised. Either you love your people or you love humanity, either you have fidelity to God or to human beings, either obedience or apostasy, either glatt kosher or glatt treif, either 613 mitzvoth or nothing at all, either a zealot or a hypocrite.

Either/or split thinking is taunting. It reminds me of the teasing of my aunt who would ask, "And who do you like more, your father or your mother?" She insisted either/or – either Papa or Mama. Only once did I mutter under my breath: "Not you, Tante."

In opposition to either/or thinking is the both/and conjunctive of the echad. Echad is our life's goal, it is a struggle to find the both/and, the vav in our lives. And it is a struggle that is sacred. Each time we recite the "Aleynu," we end with the words of the prophet Zechariah who says,"On that day the name of the Lord shall be one." Shall be one? Is the echad not yet? For the prophet, God is not yet one as long as there is bifurcation, violence, anger, exclusion. Echad is our inspiration and our goal. Echad is our struggle to overcome the idolatry that disunites our lives. Echad is the telos of our prayer as individuals and as a community.

Before we recite the Sh'ma, we gather together the four fringes of the tallit, the fragmented character of our own lives and the condition of our world and our people. We hold them together and we remind ourselves of the oneness of God. We understand our sacred task of yichud – unification. As God is one, be thou one. As God is one, may I become one.

Believing, Behaving, Belonging must become one. That yichud is indispensable for our people and for the world.

The tallit prayer shawl has four fringes which I hold together in one hand. The fringes have windings that are separated by knots; 7, 8, 11, 13.
7 and 8 comprise Y A H
11 comprises V H
13 comprises E C H A D

Struggle against fragmentation, bind together the four corners of your lives and of the world.

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