For the week of August 17, 2019 / 16 Av 5779

Va’etchanan
Torah: D’varim/Deuteronomy 3:23 – 7:11
Haftarah: Isaiah 40:1-26

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Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (D’varim/Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

The past couple of weeks I have been mentioning the tendency among some to distance themselves from the foundation of Hebrew Scripture, the Books of Moses in particular. One of the ways that is done is by taking statements by Yeshua and others and making them sound as if they are undermining God’s prior revelation, when they are actually clarifying what he said. A case in point is the “Great Commandment” that appears in the Gospels of Matthew (22:35-40) and Mark (12:28-34).

The exact wording of these two accounts are similar for the most part, yet different enough to indicate that this sort of interchange may have been common. In each case, religious leaders ask him what is the “greatest” or “most important” commandment. Today’s readers may scoff at such questions, but Jewish people then and now who take God’s Word seriously want to know how to best prioritize or summarize God’s directives. Yeshua’s answer is two-pronged, giving more than what was likely expected. Not only are we to love God with everything we’ve got (as contained in this week’s parsha); we are also to love our neighbors as ourselves (from Vayikra/Leviticus 19:18). In that day, putting treatment of others on par with loving God, especially since Yeshua made it clear that we are to be neighbors even to those whom we don’t like, was quite radical (see Luke 10:25-37).

While we still need to take to heart God’s sense of priority as stated by Yeshua here, it is tragic that many readers of the New Testament assume that this in any way diminishes or discounts anything else God said through Moses, the prophets, or other writers of Hebrew Scripture. I am not saying that everything for ancient Israel has direct application to all people in the same way that it did for Israel under the Sinai Covenant. It’s that statements of priority or summary such as the great commandment are not in any way geared to reducing God’s inspired teaching to only two commands.

In fact, it doesn’t even take much careful investigation of these two commands to see that there is so much more contained within them than the vaguely defined “love God and love your neighbor” teachings you may have heard.

Perhaps we forget that when scriptures were quoted in first-century Israel it was automatically understood within its broader context. People had long passages memorized. So to hear one line was to hear the passage it was a part of. Check out “Love your neighbor as yourself” in its original context. You might be surprised to discover what love for neighbor actually means (I discuss this in an earlier TorahBytes message). Same with “Love God.” We rarely hear the Mark version of the Greatest Commandment, since it is more complex than the Matthew one, providing some of the wider context. In Mark, Yeshua begins his answer with the Shema (“Hear, O Israel…”) as in the Torah-quote I started with. In actuality it makes no difference, because, as I mentioned, the hearers would have automatically connected “And you shall love the Lord your God” with the Shema that introduces it. To speak about our need to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind without specific reference to the God of Israel’s exclusivity is to misrepresent Yeshua’s intent.

Note what follows “Love God” in its original context: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (D’varim/Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Besides our need to take God’s words to heart, embedded within the greatest commandment is God’s ordaining parents as the prime educators of their children.

We don’t have time in this brief message to explore how to accomplish this. However it is done, God made clear that the household under the supervision of parents is the prime venue for our children’s education. To claim to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind while neglecting our God-given responsibility to educate our children is to neglect to love God.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version