“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all they soul, and with all thy might.” (Deut. 6:4-5)
“…Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord:…And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-29, 31)
On page 24 of Science & Health, Mrs. Eddy writes, “Acquaintance with the original texts, and willingness to give up human beliefs…open the way for Christian Science to be understood…”. Shema Yisrael A-do-nai Elo-hay-nu A-do-nai Echad – The Hebrew word “Shema” can mean to “hear, listen, obey, heed, pay attention,” so Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is known as “the Shema.” According to Chris Nye, “The Jewish tradition and particularly the Old Testament culture, did not differentiate between ‘hearing’ and ‘doing’ or between ‘listening’ and ‘obeying.’…God wants a heart where the listening is inextricably linked to the obeying…..To Jesus, listening without obedience is foolish….Maybe…we are only truly listening to God when we are obeying Him. This seems to be what it means to Shema.”
Services in the synagogues during Jesus’ time always began with the Shema. One source says that it is the “equivalent of the Lord’s prayer in Christian tradition,” being “one of the most influential traditions in Jewish history, and functioned both as the Jewish pledge of allegiance and a hymn of praise” (Bible Project). The Benson Commentary points out that to the Jews the Shema was/is “one of their choicest portions of Scripture,” and they thought “not only obliged to repeat it twice every day, but very happy in being so obliged; having this saying among them, ‘Blessed are we who, every morning and evening, say, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord!’”
According to Thomas L. Leishman, “The training of a Jewish child would begin from infancy with verses from the Old Testament. At his mother’s knee he would learn the famous watchword of loyalty to the one God, called the Shema….As early as the age of five, he [Jesus] would join Joseph and Mary in the study of the Hebrew Bible.”
Story told of John, the Beloved Disciple, in Jerome’s Commentary: “John was very advanced in years and would stand up at every Agape feast and repeat the same testimony, ‘Little children, love one another.’ And then he would sit down. They held the Agape feasts at this time, nightly, so this same word was frustrating to the early listeners. Finally someone asked him, ‘John, why do you repeat the same instruction every single night, don’t you have something new to tell us?’ John remarked, ‘Little children, if you will love one another, that will fulfill it all, you will have done everything.’”
“‘Love one another’ (I John, iii.23), is the most simple and profound counsel of the inspired writer” (S & H, p. 572:6-8).