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Immediately after restating the Ten Commandments, this section opens with the Shema, the most primary and significant commandment in the Jewish liturgy, proclaiming the Oneness of G-d . The people of Israel are told that they should love G-d, keep G-d’s words close to their hearts and teach them to their children. When they enter the Promised Land, the Israelites will be very prosperous and are forewarned not to forget G-d from whom emanated all of this goodness. They are further cautioned not to test G-d as they had done in the past for they will certainly reap the benefits. In future generations, when their children inquire about the meaning of these laws, they must respond by recounting their experience in Egypt and the wonders with which G-d removed them from slavery and presented them with His laws.
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| Thoughts to Consider and Discuss |
1. What does the text suggest might be the primary cause of the Israelites’ abandoning G-d?
2. Why is recounting the story of Egypt the recommended means of explaining the meaning of G-d’s laws?
3. In the light of its context in the Torah, why has the Shema become such a seminal prayer in contemporary Judaism?
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“Commandment and prohibition, reward and punishment, are only for actions, acts of commission and omission, which are subject to a man’s will and which are guided by ideas of good and evil and, therefore, also by hope and fear. Belief and doubt, assent and opposition, on the other hand, are not determined by our faculty of desire, by our wishes and longings, or by our fear and hope, but by our knowledge of truth and untruth. Hence, ancient Judaism has no symbolic books, no articles of faith. No one has to swear to subscribe, by oath, to certain articles of faith. Indeed, we have no...religious oaths; and according to the spirit of true Judaism, we must hold them to be inadmissible.”
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), Jerusalem,
or On Religious Power in Judaism
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Jewish philosophers, throughout the generations, have struggled to explain how one can be commanded to feel or even to believe something. How does Mendelssohn deal with the question?
Do you think it is possible to feel “on command”?
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