Parashat Vayetchanan 5772

“Hear, O Israel!  YHVH is our God, YHVH is One!”  The Shema, “watchword of our faith,” is Deuteronomy 6:4 and is found in Parashat V’Etchanan.  These six little words contain so much richness, so much complexity, and so much ambiguity.  No wonder they have resonated through the millennia.
Once, when I worked at a Jewish summer camp, I accompanied a group of youngsters on an evening hike.  We climbed onto a fire lookout, breathed in the fresh-born air, and listened to the silence.  I asked the students to look around them and tell me what they saw.  Predictably, they told me that they saw trees.  When I asked them to look further off, they suddenly saw the forest.  Notice the details, and see the trees.  Take in the big picture, and see the forest. 
The Shema reminds us of this fact.  Viewed separately, the pieces of this world are disconnected, separate.  The wall and the window and the ceiling are all disparate parts of my office.  Viewed holistically, they fuse together and form a single entity.  And so it is with everything that fills the Universe.
We can choose to see the world as a jumble of disparate pieces, each one separate from the others.  Or we can peel back the illusion within which we live to see the Unity behind it, the Oneness that transcends all division.