“Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad”

These words begin a prayer that every good Jew prays at least twice daily.  It means “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One.”  This simple phrase, found in Deuteronomy 6:4, and even just the first word, “Shema”, represents the entirety of the prayer.  The prayer goes on to command Israel to write these words on their doors and gates, and to even wear this written word on their hands and on their foreheads.

Even I decided a few months ago to have it permanently written on my arm.  Now, my tattoo is a gross misrepresentation of a literal translation of this passage; but I still did it for reasons explained later in the passage.  This prayer begins with a call to worship, and the remainder of the prayer explains why for two broad reasons: for the work God has already done for us, and for the work He has yet to do.

Deuteronomy 6:5 states “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”  This should be easily recognized as Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees when they asked Him which command was the greatest.  The Pharisees were among the good Jews quoting this passage three times daily and wearing the scrolls on the foreheads and hands.  They had this passage written on their doors and gates.  Yet, they failed to understand it’s meaning, or they would have known just great it was.

Something you might notice is a difference to the passage in Mark 12:30, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”  This word wasn’t simply added out of the blue.  It was added while translating the Hebrew to the Greek (see comments for more information).  When we say “I love you with all of my heart”, we meant it “I love you with every fiber of my being.”  The Greeks used a similar translation to what we have now, but in the Hebrew language, heart meant more “I love you with everything I believe” working in both “fiber of my being” and “knowledge and understanding”.

With this understanding, we should take Deuteronomy 6:5 to mean “Love the LORD your God with every fiber of your being, with everything that you think, with everything that you do, and with everything that you feel.”  The prayer does not end there, though.  It gives examples of how we can love Him, by obeying the Scriptures with our hands and our heads, and by using the Scriptures to guard our homes and our families.  By using Scripture to faithfully equip the next generation to faithfully equip the next generation.

But the prayer does not end there either.  It goes on to explain why we should worship Him.  We worship Him because he saved us from the bonds of Egypt and the bonds of sin and death.  He sent His Son as our Passover lamb so that our sins would be fully atoned for.  Not only that, we worship Him for the land he is about to give to us, filled with houses we didn’t build and cisterns we didn’t dig; a life of fulfillment we do not deserve but have been given nonetheless.  So we worship Him, not just in private with our hearts and our minds, but we physically take the bread and cup with one another.

The prayer also says that we do these physical things so that one day when our children ask us why--when my daughters ask me why we take communion, why we get baptized, why I got this tattoo--we can share the Gospel with them, so that one day they might share in this worship with us.