Shema Yisrael – "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God(s), the Lord is One"

– is perhaps the most famous of all Jewish sayings.

The Shema is a declaration of faith, a pledge of allegiance to One God. It is

said upon arising in the morning and upon going to sleep at night. It is said
when praising God and when beseeching Him. It is the first prayer that a
Jewish child is taught to say. It is the last words a Jew says prior to death.

The Talmud says that when Jacob was about to reveal the end of days to
his children, he was concerned that one of them might be a non-believer.
His sons reassured him immediately and cried out, "Shema Yisrael."

The Torah records Moses including the Shema in his farewell address to
the Jewish people.

Further, as written in a Torah scroll, the letters "Ayin" and "Daled" of the
first verse are enlarged – encoded to spell out the Hebrew word Aid –
"witness." When we say the Shema, we are testifying to the Oneness of
God.
Why is "oneness" so central to Jewish belief? Does it really matter whether
God is one and not three?

The Shema is a declaration that all events are from the One, the only One.
The confusion stems from our limited perception of reality. One way of
understanding God's oneness is to imagine light shining through a prism.
Even though we see many colors of the spectrum, they really emanate from
one light. So too, even though it seems that certain events are not caused
by God, rather by some other force or bad luck, they in fact all come from
the One God. In the grand eternal plan, all is "good," for God knows best.

This runs contrary to the Zoroastrian doctrine of dualism, which propounds

the idea of two conflicting powers – good and evil.

Undoubtedly the oldest fixed daily prayer in Judaism is the Shema. This
consists of Deut. 6:4-9, Deut. 11:13-21, and Num. 15:37-41. Note that the
first paragraph commands us to speak of these matters "when you retire
and when you arise." From ancient times, this commandment was fulfilled by
reciting the Shema twice a day: morning and night.

So when Paul the Apostle had an epiphanic episode (A term in literary

criticism for a sudden realization--a flash of recognition in which someone
or something is seen in a new light). In Stephen Hero (1904), Irish author
James Joyce used the term epiphany to describe the moment when the
"soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant. The object achieves
it epiphany." Novelist Joseph Conrad described epiphany as "one of those
rare moments of awakening" in which "everything [occurs] in a flash."

It was described in this manner And as he journeyed, he came near

Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:
(Acts 9:3) and it took him three days to recover his sight (but was the sight
physical or indeed perhaps a description of a spiritual awakening?)

We know from History Paul was rejected by the Jews (for the most part)
because of his inclusion of the Gentiles . And of course there are some who
hold today that Jews were replaced by those Gentiles [which means they
either do not understand the Scripture or are woefully ignorant of the plan
of God-which I’ll not deal with in this wee study].

Paul saw something that for unknown reasons had never been seen before.
Those of the strict sect {Ebyons) called Paul a Liar! Because they thought
wrongly Paul had abandon his heritage and faith and thrown in with the Goy
of Israel. Which is one of the reasons that Paul was defending his call and
Apostleship virtually everywhere he went.

Here is just one example of that Do we begin again to commend ourselves?

Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or letters of
recommendation from you? (2 Corinthians 3:1)EMTV For it was a common
practice in antiquity to carry with one letters of recommendations as proof
of their legitimate right to carry forth his message.

What we have found is that certain passages such as Rom 15:4 and 1 Cor
10:11, where Paul explicitly states his conviction that Scripture is in fact a
word addressed to not only one Nation but an eschatological community.
But they didn’t address the theoretical problem of continuity and
discontinuity, a problem that later came to be known as a relational issue
between the old covenant and the new.

The heart of the matter lies exposed to us in 2 Cor 3:6 where Paul states
that God “ Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not
of the letter [gramma ], but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the
spirit giveth life”. It was this new covenant ministry that entailed a new
form of reader competence.. By gramma [letter) and pneuma (spirit) Paul is
thinking of two different authorities In Paul’s mind his brethren the “son of
Israel” as he states “have a veil” over their minds eye when Moses is read
But in Christ the veil has been removed.
So when Paul is attacked by opponents in 2 Corinthians as to why Paul in like
manner has not presented recommendations from other churches [ we might
call this the “papers please law”]. Paul turns the question around (epistole
systatike) that shifts attention from his qualifications to the Corinthian
community as proof of the Spirits work
You are our letter, having been written in our hearts, being known and
being read by all men; being made known that you are the letter of Christ,
which was ministered by us, having been written not with ink but by the
Spirit of the living God, not in tablets of stone but in tablets of flesh,
namely in hearts. (2 Corinthians 3:2-3) Paul proof of his call and apostleship
in the new covenant. Recalling Jer. 31:33. Paul mention of the Law and the
letter killing is not to mean that the Old Covenant was done away with but it
had no force upon a person. Whereas the Spirit was now within him written
on ones heart.