Listen!

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is 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 strength.

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away,

When you lie down and when you rise.

Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead,

And write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

-Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

If you know a little bit about the Bible, you might have expected me to move from the Covenant with Abraham to the Law of Moses, but I'm actually going to skip the Law for now.  The Law is important, but this thing, which comes right on the heels of the Law, is more important.  This is the Hebrew prayer called Shema (Shema means hear or listen in Hebrew), this tells you a lot about what it means to be Jewish, and it tells you a lot about the people who wrote most of the Bible.  It tells you a lot about the kind of worldview that Jesus of Nazareth had, in fact, when he is asked to sum up the Law of Moses he does not quote the First Commandment: "Have no other God's before me," he quotes the Shema, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." (Matthew 22: 37) (And yes that last word is different, but the essence is the same)  When he did that, he actually shut down a somewhat hostile inquisition, because his answer was, for all practical purposes, above reproach.

If he had given them a complicated answer, or a parable, as was his general custom, they would have have had some things to argue with, but you can't, if you're a Jew, argue with Shema.  It would be like a Christian arguing with the theology of Jesus Loves Me and the Lord's Prayer.  See, the people of Israel had actually taken the words of this little reminder and done what it says, at least the practical part, as in talking about them and putting them on the doorposts, the part about loving God and having the commandments written on their hearts were always a work in progress. But the concrete steps, they followed those, and they taught this to their children from the time they were very young, it was the most basic form of indoctrination, before you ever got to the Law, you learned Shema.

Shema says some pretty radical things, the first of which is that there is one God, not many, and moreover that the One God is in fact "one," not multifarious.  The One God is reliable and trustworthy, the One God does not quickly change the mind based on a whim (something pagan deities tended to do rather quickly and often). The One God offers the Law upon this foundation of trust; the Covenant will be upheld, not because we always do right but because God is always faithful.  If we stand a chance of living a "righteous" life, we need to hear that over and over and over, and have it written on our hearts.

The Law says, "have no other gods," the prayer says, "Love God." There is something in our human nature that finds that a difficult challenge.  Fear God? No problem, if you have even an inkling of the power of a Creator you will do that. Believe in God? We almost can't avoid that, if you really pay attention to the intellectual/spiritual gyrations of someone trying to be an honest Atheist, you will probably see what I mean.  Shema, says something that Jesus of Nazareth will eventually put into physical form: God loves you, and you can love God back.

We are, in fact, made for such a relationship, and when we deny that we fall into a pit and we do not have any firm place to stand. Jesus, in his capacity as a spiritual teacher, understood the difficulty we might have in trusting this connection.  After all, God is One, how do we actually relate to that?  So Jesus adds to his summation of the Law, and says, "Love your neighbor as yourself," knowing that we would probably need some concrete practice in loving, if we were ever to be able to connect with God in Love.  And of course it goes even deeper than that, because Jesus also challenges us to define our "neighbor" very broadly, and even to include our enemy in that category of people whom we ought to love.

It is the great tragedy of most religions that they tend to emphasize the lists and lists of rules, rather than the connection of those rules to an ineffable and inexorable love.  It is why we need to hear, again and again that we should love God.