And I Pleaded: The Shema and the Commandments

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vaetchanan ('And I Pleaded', Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11) records Moses' plea to enter the land, a restatement of the Ten Commandments, and the Shema (6:4-9), Israel's central declaration of God's oneness and the command to love God. It is read on Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of consolation after Tisha b'Av.

The two biblical versions of the Ten Commandments differ in detail: Vaetchanan grounds the Sabbath in the memory of slavery in Egypt (5:15), while Exodus 20:11 grounds it in the six days of creation, a divergence classical commentators read as complementary rather than contradictory. The Dead Sea Scroll known as 4Q41 (4QDeutn), copied in the first century BCE and preserving the oldest surviving copy of the Decalogue, actually blends the two versions, importing the Exodus rationale into its text of Deuteronomy 5, and its unusual excerpted contents suggest it served a liturgical rather than a standard Torah-scroll purpose.