Shema Yisrael

Judaism has no creed in the Christian sense, no text drawn up by an assembly to settle a dispute and imposed as a test. What it has instead is a verse of Torah that liturgy raised into that role. Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, is what a Jew says twice a day, teaches to a child first, and says last.

The liturgical Shema is longer than the one famous line. It joins three passages: Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9, which commands that these words be taught, bound and written; Deuteronomy 11:13 to 21, on the consequences of keeping or abandoning the commandments; and Numbers 15:37 to 41, on the fringes worn as a reminder. Read together they are not a statement of belief but an acceptance of obligation, which the rabbis call taking on the yoke of the kingdom of heaven.

Its antiquity in this role is well evidenced. The Mishnah opens its very first tractate not by asking whether the Shema should be recited but from what hour in the evening it may be, which is the grammar of a practice already old. The Nash Papyrus, an Egyptian fragment from the Second Temple period, carries the Ten Commandments and the opening of the Shema together, which suggests a devotional use of the text well before the rabbinic prayer book existed.

The Shema is unusual among confessions because it commands its own storage. The passage that contains it tells the hearer to teach these words, to speak of them at home and on the road, at lying down and rising up, to bind them as a sign on the hand and between the eyes, and to write them on the doorposts of the house. Judaism took the instruction literally, and the result is a confession that lives in objects as much as in speech.

The mezuzah on the doorpost holds a small parchment with the first two paragraphs, hand written by a trained scribe. The tefillin worn at weekday morning prayer hold the same passages in small boxes bound to the arm and the head. A householder touching the mezuzah on the way out is handling the text of the creed. No other tradition surveyed in this atlas physically fastens its confession to the building and the body in this way.

The recitation at death completes the pattern. It is customary to say the Shema as life ends, and the Talmud tells that Rabbi Akiva, executed by the Romans, died drawing out the last word, one. That story has shaped Jewish martyrology ever since, and it is why the same sentence a child learns first is the sentence associated with the hardest moments of Jewish history. A creed recited at the beginning and the end of a life is doing something a doctrinal test does not do.