Reading from the Book of Deuteronomy

Moses said to the people:
    “You shall fear the Lord your God.
Every day of your life,
you, and your son and your son's son,
you shall observe all his decrees and his commandments,
that I prescribe to you today,
and you will have long life.
    Israel, you will listen,
you will make sure to put into practice
which will bring you happiness and fertility,
in a land flowing with milk and honey,
as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has told you.
    Listen, Israel:
The Lord our God is One.
    You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul and with all your strength.

    These words that I give you today
will remain in your heart."

    – Word of the Lord.

Listen, Israel: The Radical Call to Total Love for God

The Shema reveals how to transform our entire existence into a loving response to the one God who has chosen us..

In the tumult of our fragmented era, where attention is scattered and loyalties are crumbling, a three-thousand-year-old word resonates, one that has lost none of its overwhelming power. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” These words from Deuteronomy, which Jesus would later designate as the greatest of the commandments, trace a path of total commitment that defies our lukewarmness and compromise. They are addressed today to every seeker of God, to every believer aspiring to authenticity, to every person who senses that human existence can find meaning only in a relationship of absolute love with its Creator.

We will first explore the historical and spiritual context of the Shema, this profession of faith at the heart of Judaism. We will then analyze the structure and profound meaning of this commandment of total love. We will then unfold its concrete implications in three dimensions: the oneness of God in the face of modern polytheism, the completeness of our human response, and the transmission of this living faith. Finally, we will discover how this text permeates the Christian and Jewish spiritual tradition, before proposing practical ways to embody this revolutionary call today.

At the Sources of the Shema: A Spiritual Testament on the Threshold of the Promised Land

The Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah, presents itself as Moses' spiritual testament to the people of Israel at a decisive moment in their history. After forty years of wandering in the desert, the Hebrews stood at the gates of the Promised Land, on the plains of Moab, facing the Jordan River. Moses, their prophetic guide, knew that he would not cross the river with them. He then delivered a series of solemn speeches that formed the core of Deuteronomy, literally the "second Law" or "repetition of the Law."

The context is charged with dramatic intensity. A new generation is preparing to conquer Canaan, the land of abundance promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Canaan is also a land populated by pagan nations, worshippers of multiple deities, practicing rites that the Torah vigorously condemns. The danger is immense: that the chosen people, once established in prosperity, will forget the God who freed them from Egypt and allow themselves to be seduced by the surrounding cults. It is precisely to prevent this drift that Moses pronounces his final teaching, of which the Shema constitutes the beating heart.

Deuteronomy chapter 6 opens with a general exhortation to observe God's commandments. Verse 4 then introduces the central proclamation, followed immediately by the commandment to love in verse 5. In Hebrew, these words resonate with untranslatable density: "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad." Literally: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Then comes the imperative: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."

The first word, "Shema," signifies much more than a simple invitation to listen. In the Hebrew mindset, listening implies obeying, putting into practice, and making an existential commitment. It is an action verb that demands a concrete response from the whole being. Jewish tradition has also noted a striking graphic detail in biblical manuscripts: the last two letters of the first and last words of this verse, the ayin of "Shema" and the daleth of "Echad," are written in enlarged characters. Together, these letters form the Hebrew word "ed," which means "witness." Through this proclamation, Israel becomes a witness to divine oneness in a polytheistic world.

This passage does not simply affirm the existence of God. It proclaims his absolute uniqueness, his radical singularity. In Near Eastern antiquity, where each city honored its tutelary deities, where the Egyptian, Babylonian, or Canaanite pantheons included dozens of gods with specialized functions, this declaration constituted an unprecedented theological revolution. The God of Israel is not one god among others, nor even the most powerful of the gods: he is the only divine reality, the creator of all things, the one who has neither rival nor partner.

The Shema is part of a daily liturgy and practice. Since the time of the Second Temple, Jews have recited this prayer morning and evening, in accordance with the prescriptions that immediately follow in the biblical text: "These words that I am giving you today shall be on your heart. You shall repeat them to your children and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you rise up." Thus, the Shema is not simply a theoretical creed, but a word to be lived, meditated on, and transmitted in all moments of existence.

The Architecture of a Commandment: Divine Oneness and Integral Love

At the center of the Shema stands a theological affirmation of overwhelming audacity, followed by an ethical commandment of dizzying exigency. Let us analyze the profound structure of this founding word to grasp its full existential and spiritual significance.

The statement "the Lord our God, the Lord is One" can be understood on several levels. At first glance, it proclaims monotheism against all forms of polytheism. There is only one divine source, only one creative and redemptive will. This numerical unity is in direct opposition to surrounding religions that fragment the divine into multiple, often contradictory powers. But divine unity goes even further: it affirms the internal unity of God, his indivisibility, his absolute coherence. The God of Israel is not subject to the changing passions, contradictions, and internal conflicts that Greek or Near Eastern mythologies attribute to their divinities.

This divine unity directly establishes the possibility and the requirement of total love. If God were multiple, fragmented, contradictory, how could we love him with our whole being without tearing ourselves apart? It is precisely because he is One that we can and must love him in the unification of all our faculties. The love of God is not one option among others, an optional pious sentiment: it is a commandment, the first and greatest of all. This imperative dimension often surprises our contemporaries, accustomed to thinking of love as a spontaneous impulse, an emotion beyond the control of the will. How can one command to love?

The answer lies in the very nature of biblical love. The Hebrew term "ahavah" does not primarily designate a feeling, but a fundamental orientation of existence, a deliberate choice to devote one's life to the object of one's love. To love God is to decide to make him the absolute center of our existence, the ultimate reference for all our decisions, the goal toward which each of our actions converges. This love is concretely translated into obedience to divine commandments, not by external constraint, but as a natural expression of a covenant relationship.

The commandment then specifies the dimensions of this total love: "with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." This triple formulation is not a stylistic redundancy, but an invitation to engage the totality of our human being in the relationship with God. The heart, in biblical anthropology, designates the seat of decisions, of will, of intelligence. Loving God with all our heart means directing all our decisions according to his will, submitting our intelligence to his revelation, deliberately and constantly choosing to obey him. It is a rational and voluntary commitment, not a passing emotion.

The soul, or "nefesh" in Hebrew, represents the vital principle, that which makes us living beings. Loving God with all one's soul implies finding in him the very source of our life, our breath, our existential energy. It is recognizing that we do not live by ourselves, but that our entire existence depends on the one who created us and who maintains us in being at every moment. Some rabbinic interpretations go so far as to suggest that this formula calls us to be ready to offer our very lives for God, to love him to the point of martyrdom if necessary.

Strength, finally, evokes our capacities for action, our material resources, our power to intervene in the world. Loving God with all one's strength means putting all our concrete means at the service of his glory and his reign. This includes our material goods, our time, our talents, our physical energy. No dimension of our existence can remain neutral or external to this relationship of love. The Gospel according to Mark reports that Jesus, questioned about the greatest commandment, quotes the Shema while adding a fourth dimension: "with all your mind" or "with all your intelligence." This addition emphasizes that authentic faith also engages our faculty of reflection and understanding. Believing is not abdicating one's reason, but putting it at the service of knowing God.

The One Against Idols: The Permanent Battle of Monotheism

In our seemingly secularized postmodern world, one might think that the affirmation of divine oneness has lost its combative relevance. Statues of ancient gods no longer threaten the faith of believers. Yet polytheism has never truly disappeared: it has simply metamorphosed, adopting more subtle but no less alienating forms.

The Shema proclaims that the Lord is One, which radically implies that no other reality can claim to be absolute. Any absolutization of a created reality constitutes a form of idolatry. Yet, our contemporary societies excel in this fabrication of substitute absolutes. Money becomes a deity demanding sacrifice and total devotion. Professional success demands exclusive worship, devouring time, energy, and family relationships. The nation can become a bloody idol to which human lives are offered. Technology fascinates as a saving power promising to solve all our problems. Even authentic values like freedom or love, when they are absolutized and cut off from their divine source, transform into tyrannical idols.

Biblical monotheism is not simply a theological arithmetic asserting that there is one God rather than many. It is an existential revolution that frees human beings from all idolatrous bondage. By proclaiming that God alone is absolute, the Shema relativizes all earthly powers, all political systems, all human authorities. Nothing and no one in this world can demand unconditional devotion, for only God deserves such allegiance. This affirmation has explosive political consequences: it establishes the possibility of resisting tyrannies, disobeying unjust orders, and refusing to compromise with evil.

The history of the Jewish people bears witness to this liberating power of monotheism. Faced with empires that demanded the worship of their deified sovereigns, the Jews steadfastly refused, sometimes preferring death to compromise. The Maccabean martyrs, tortured for refusing to transgress the Law, sealed their fidelity to the one God with their blood. This spiritual resistance has continued through the centuries, confronting in turn Roman power, medieval Christian regimes, and modern totalitarianism. Each time, the Shema recited during the persecution affirmed that no earthly power can arrogate to itself the right to crush human conscience in relation to its Creator.

For the Christian, the oneness of God revealed in the Shema is mysteriously combined with the Trinitarian revelation. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not three gods, but three persons in a single divine essence. Christian monotheism is not abolished by Trinitarian dogma, but deepened and enriched. Jesus himself cites the Shema as the first of the commandments and never questioned the fundamental oneness of God. This creative tension between unity and trinity invites an ever richer understanding of the divine mystery, one that eludes any reductive simplification.

Monotheistic vigilance therefore remains more necessary than ever. How often, even among sincere believers, does God find himself relegated to one function among others, honored on Sunday but ignored in professional, financial, and relational choices? The Shema brutally reminds us that God is One and that he demands to be the sole center of our existence. Any fragmentation of our loyalty, any division of our allegiance constitutes a subtle form of practical polytheism. Authentic conversion consists precisely in bringing unity back into our lives by ordering all things to the one necessary: loving God and obeying him.

The entirety of human response: heart, soul and strength in action

If the Shema first proclaims the oneness of God, it then demands the unification of our whole being in the response of love. This demand for wholeness challenges our tendencies toward fragmentation, compartmentalization, and the schizophrenic division between faith and life.

Loving God with all one's heart means first of all directing our deepest desires toward him. The biblical heart is the place of aspirations, impulses, and fundamental attachments. What is the true measure of our love for God? It is not the momentary intensity of our religious emotions, but the stable direction of our deepest desires. What truly delights us? What authentically grieves us? What do we dream about? Toward what do our thoughts spontaneously gravitate in our free moments? Loving God with all one's heart means gradually reorienting all these interior movements toward him, learning to rejoice in what delights him, to grieve over what offends him, to desire what he desires for us and for the world.

This reorientation does not happen overnight. It requires patient asceticism, a constant spiritual struggle against the disordered attachments that dispute God's primacy in our hearts. The Desert Fathers developed a whole wisdom for the purification of the heart, identifying the destructive passions that encumber it and proposing spiritual remedies. But this work of interior unification is not primarily a voluntarist effort: it is a response to God's primary love that seizes us and transforms us. The more we contemplate the divine goodness manifested in Jesus Christ, the more our hearts naturally inflame with love for him.

Loving God with all our soul engages our deep vitality, our impulse to exist. It is about finding in God the very source of our joy of living, the origin of our desire to be. Too often, we seek this vitality in exhausting substitutes: frenetic entertainment, compulsive consumption, passionate relationships that take and disappoint. The Shema reminds us that only God can satisfy the existential thirst within us. “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God,” cries the psalmist. This thirst is not a negative lack, but the expression of our very nature, created for communion with the Infinite.

Some Jewish commentators have interpreted the phrase "with all your soul" radically: to love God even if it costs your life. Martyrdom thus becomes the ultimate expression of this integral love, the supreme demonstration that no earthly good, not even biological existence, can rival attachment to the living God. Few believers are called to bloody martyrdom, but all are invited to daily martyrdom: to die to oneself, to renounce one's own will, to crucify the old man to make room for the living Christ within us.

Loving God with all one's strength ultimately involves our concrete action in the world. This love cannot remain purely interior, a contemplation detached from earthly realities. It demands that it be translated into works, into concrete actions that manifest divine sovereignty over all aspects of our existence. Our physical strength, our time, our talents, our financial resources: everything must be mobilized in the service of the Kingdom. This does not necessarily mean leaving the world for the cloister, but transforming all secular activity into a spiritual liturgy, carrying out the most ordinary tasks with an intention of love and offering.

Saint Paul will magnificently develop this spirituality of the sanctified ordinary: "Whether you eat or drink, and whatever you do, do all for the glory of God." The authentic Christian no longer knows a radical distinction between sacred and profane: everything becomes an opportunity to bear witness to his love of God and to serve his brothers. Professional work is no longer simply a means of earning a living, but a vocation to participate in the divine creative work. Family life becomes a place of mutual sanctification. Social and political commitments are rooted in the love of one's neighbor commanded by God.

This completeness of human response presupposes a true coherence of life, a unification of all aspects of our existence under the lordship of Christ. It combats the hypocrisy of honoring God with our lips while our hearts remain distant from him, of attending liturgical assemblies while leading a life contrary to the demands of the Gospel. The Shema is a call to radicalism, not in the sense of legalistic rigor, but in the etymological sense: to go to the roots, to let God's love penetrate to the foundations of our being to transform our entire existence.

Living transmission: from generation to generation

The text of Deuteronomy that immediately follows the Shema strongly emphasizes the need to transmit these words to future generations: "You shall repeat them to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk along the road, and when you lie down, and when you rise up." This insistence reveals an essential dimension of biblical faith: it is not lived in individualistic isolation, but in a living tradition that is transmitted from parents to children, from masters to disciples.

Faith in a single God and the commitment of total love toward him are not natural facts. They must be taught, explained, embodied, and lived communally in order to be received and appropriated by new generations. Judaism has developed a remarkable religious pedagogy, making the family home the primary place of spiritual education. The ritual of the Passover Seder, for example, organizes the entire celebration around the questions that children ask their parents, thus provoking the recounting of God's great deeds in the history of Israel. The Shema must be recited morning and evening, creating a daily rhythm that structures existence and engraves these founding words in memories.

For Christians, this responsibility of transmission remains fully relevant. In a society where faith is no longer supported by dominant cultural structures, where religious ignorance is growing even among the baptized, the urgency of transmission is becoming more pressing. But how can we transmit effectively in a context of pluralism and secularization? Deuteronomy offers us some valuable insights.

First, transmission must be constant and natural, integrated into the flow of daily life. Not only during formal catechism classes, but in ordinary conversations, shared meals, walks, bedtimes and waking hours. Children learn less through solemn speeches than through gradual absorption, by observing how their parents pray, how they react to trials, how they make decisions, how they speak spontaneously about God. Consistency between what is taught and what is experienced is the sine qua non of successful transmission.

Then, this transmission must be dialogical, not authoritarian. The biblical text invites us to speak, to exchange, to answer questions. The younger generations need to understand, not just to obey blindly. They must be able to question their faith, express their doubts, and confront objections, in order to achieve a personal and mature appropriation. A faith imposed without intelligence is fragile and risks collapsing at the first test. A faith sought, questioned, and deepened in dialogue becomes a solid conviction capable of resisting headwinds.

The Jewish tradition developed the concept of "midrash," a method of interpretation that involves questioning the biblical text, exploring its ambiguities, and proposing multiple readings. Far from weakening faith, this questioning approach enlivens it, showing that the Word of God is inexhaustible, ever new, and capable of speaking to each generation in its particular context. Christian communities would benefit from developing spaces for open questioning, where young people can express their difficulties without being judged, where adults accept that they do not have answers to everything, and where everyone together seeks to better understand the concrete implications of faith.

Finally, authentic transmission requires credible witnesses. We only truly transmit what we ourselves live with conviction. The younger generations have an infallible detector of hypocrisy and lukewarmness. They are ready to commit themselves totally if we offer them a demanding ideal, but embodied by adults who themselves pay the price. The Shema calls for a radical love of God: our lives must bear concrete witness to this so that this call resonates as a liberating invitation and not as an unbearable burden.

Spiritual tradition

The Shema has permeated the entire Jewish and Christian spiritual tradition, becoming an inexhaustible source of meditation, interpretation, and practice. The Fathers of the Church saw in it the perfect expression of the first and greatest commandment, the foundation of all moral and spiritual life.

Saint Augustine, in his commentaries on the Gospel of John, develops a theology of God's love that is directly rooted in the Shema. For him, loving God with all one's heart means directing the entire weight of our being toward him, making him the center of gravity of our existence. This centrality of divine love does not exclude other legitimate loves, but orders and purifies them. We love our loved ones, our activities, creation itself, but with reference to God and for God, thus preventing these created loves from becoming idolatrous absolutes.

Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, discusses at length the commandment of God's love. He emphasizes that this love is both natural and supernatural. Natural, because every creature spontaneously tends toward the supreme good that is God, even when it does not explicitly recognize it. Supernatural, because the love of charity that unites us to God infinitely exceeds our natural capacities and is possible only through the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out in our hearts. This dual dimension preserves both the continuity between nature and grace, and the absolute gratuitousness of the divine gift.

Christian mystics have explored the heights and depths of this total love of God. John of the Cross describes the path of purification that leads the soul to total union with God, renouncing all disordered attachments to reach that dark night where only pure love remains. Teresa of Avila recounts the stages of contemplative prayer, where the soul gradually passes from ascetic effort to trusting abandonment in the arms of God. These great spiritual witnesses concretely lived what the Shema commands: a relationship of absolute love with the one God that transforms all existence.

In Jewish tradition, the Shema occupies a central liturgical place. It is recited twice a day, morning and evening, in daily prayer. It is also pronounced at the moment of death, constituting the dying person's final confession of faith. Jewish martyrs throughout history have sealed their testimony by reciting the Shema in the flames of pyres or in front of firing squads. This prayer is also the first one taught to children, etching in their hearts from an early age the oneness of God and the call to love him totally.

Rabbinic commentaries have explored every nuance of this foundational text. The Mishnah and the Talmud discuss the intentions required to validly recite the Shema, the precise moment to say it, and the appropriate bodily posture. These seemingly legalistic details actually express a profound concern: how can we worthily honor this supreme word? How can we avoid the mechanical routine that would empty this proclamation of faith of its meaning?

Meditations

How can we embody the Shema's call to a total love of God in our lives today? Here are some practical ideas, adaptable to each person's personal situation.

Begin by establishing a double daily appointment with the Word of God, in the morning upon waking and in the evening before going to sleep. These two moments frame the day, placing it under God's gaze. In the morning, recite the Shema as an offering for the day that is beginning, a commitment to seek divine glory in all things. In the evening, return to these same words as an evaluation: How have I loved God today with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my strength? Where have I fallen short? Where has God's love been concretely manifested in my choices and actions?

Practice the particular examination by focusing specifically on one of the three dimensions of God's love. One week, examine your heart's desires: what do your thoughts spontaneously gravitate toward? What disordered attachments prevent your heart from being all for God? The following week, question your spiritual vitality: where do you truly draw your joy in life? From God or from disappointing substitutes? The third week, evaluate your concrete action: how do you use your resources, your time, your talents? Are they in the service of the Kingdom or monopolized by selfishness?

Memorize the Shema in Hebrew if possible, or at least in your native language. Memorization allows you to constantly carry this living word within you, to ruminate on it while traveling, in queues, or during sleepless moments. This inner presence of the Word gradually transforms our way of perceiving reality.

Share the Shema with your family or community. Establish a simple ritual where each member can express how they experienced God's love during the past week, where they saw it at work in their lives or around them. This sharing creates a shared memory, forges deep spiritual bonds, and educates everyone to recognize God's presence in the ordinary of existence.

Practice fasting from modern idols. Identify the realities in your life that tend to take the place of God: the compulsively checked cell phone, social media devouring your attention, work invading all your mental space, television series consumed indiscriminately. Choose to fast from these realities periodically to check that they have not taken on an idolatrous character in your life, and to free up time and inner space for God.

Finally, commit yourself concretely to a form of service where you put your strength at the service of the Kingdom: visiting the sick, charitable commitment, catechesis, accompanying people in difficulty. The love of God cannot remain abstract: it must be translated into effective love of neighbor, a concrete place where we encounter Christ himself.

An existential revolution for today

At the end of this journey, the Shema appears not as a venerable relic of a bygone past, but as a burning word of current relevance, capable of radically upsetting our way of living and believing. In an era characterized by identity fragmentation, the multiplication of demands, the dispersion of attention and the erasure of all absolutes, the call to love the one God with all our being resonates as a liberation.

This word first frees us from the tyranny of false absolutes. By proclaiming that God alone deserves our total commitment, the Shema relativizes all the modern idols that demand our sacrifices: money, success, consumption, social image, immediate pleasure. We can use these realities without enslaving ourselves to them, appreciate them without absolutizing them, enjoy them without making them our reason for being. This inner freedom transforms our relationship with the world, allowing us to inhabit modernity without losing our souls.

The Shema then frees us from the existential schizophrenia that artificially separates faith and life, spirituality and everyday life, prayer and action. By demanding that we love God with all our heart, soul, and strength, this commandment calls us to inner unification, to coherence between what we believe and what we live. No more double life, no more hypocritical compromise: our entire existence, in its most ordinary as well as its most solemn dimensions, must become the place of a lived and incarnate love of God.

This existential revolution begins with a conversion of outlook. Learning to see all reality in reference to God, to discern his presence in everyday events, to recognize his providence even in trials. Christian mystics spoke of the practice of God's presence: this patient training to constantly remind ourselves that we are under the loving gaze of the Father, that every moment is an opportunity to please him, that every human encounter is a possibility to serve him.

It continues with a transformation of the heart. Our deepest desires, shaped by consumer culture and social pressures, must be gradually reoriented toward God. This work of reeducating desire is long and difficult. It requires the purification of our disordered attachments, the renunciation of deceptive securities, and trusting abandonment to divine providence. But this asceticism releases a profound joy, that of finally desiring what can truly fulfill us, of hoping for what will never disappoint.

It is fulfilled in concrete action. A love that is not translated into actions is a sentimental illusion. Loving God with all one's strength means mobilizing all our resources for the coming of his Kingdom. This can take a thousand forms depending on the particular vocation: family commitment lived as a priesthood, professional work transfigured by righteous intention, charitable service to the poorest, the fight for social justice, missionary witness, consecrated life, ecological activism rooted in the theology of creation. The important thing is not so much the particular form of commitment as its deep motivation: to do everything for the glory of God and the salvation of the world.

The Shema invites us to an evangelical radicalism that rejects lukewarmness, compromise, and half-measures. Jesus will take up this call in terrible words: "No one can serve two masters." "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." "If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out." These extreme demands are not spiritual masochism, but the logical expression of the first commandment: if God is truly one, if loving him must mobilize our whole being, then no competition can be tolerated, no sharing of our allegiance is acceptable.

Yet this radicality is not a crushing burden, but a light yoke. For God's love is not primarily our effort toward him, but his grace in us. "It was not we who loved God, but he who loved us," writes St. John. The total love that the Shema commands becomes possible because God himself gives himself to us in Christ, pouring into our hearts through the Holy Spirit the very capacity to love him. Our response of love is but the grateful echo of his first love.

In this sense, the Shema finds its full fulfillment in the Paschal Mystery. Jesus loved the Father with all his heart, obedient to the point of death on the cross. He loved with all his soul, offering his life in sacrifice for the salvation of the world. He loved with all his strength, mobilizing every moment of his earthly existence to reveal the Father and fulfill his will. In him, humanity has finally responded perfectly to the call of the Shema. And because he unites us to him through faith and the sacraments, his perfect response becomes ours. We can love God completely not by our own strength, but by allowing ourselves to be inhabited by Christ who lives within us.

May the Shema therefore resonate as a joyful call to the unification of our dispersed being, to coherence between faith and life, to radical commitment to the one God who loved us first. May this age-old word traverse our disoriented modernity like a compass indicating the only direction that leads to true life: the love of God, the source and end of all human existence.

Practice: Seven guidelines for living the Shema every day

• Morning and Evening Ritual : Recite the Shema upon waking to dedicate the day to God, and before sleeping to offer it to Him in thanksgiving, thus creating a daily spiritual rhythm that structures your relationship with God.
• Focused examination of conscience : Each evening, ask yourself specifically about one of the three dimensions of God's love (heart, soul, strength) by identifying a moment when you experienced it concretely and a moment when you failed.
• Meditative memorization : Learn the Shema by heart in Hebrew and in your language, then ruminate on it slowly in the downtime of the day, letting each word penetrate your consciousness and transform your outlook.
• Fasting of Modern Idols : Identify a reality that tends to take the place of God in your life (screen, work, social recognition) and periodically practice a fast from this idol to check your inner freedom.
• Weekly concrete service : Engage in regular charitable, catechetical or community work where you concretely put your strength at the service of the Kingdom, translating the love of God into effective love of neighbor.
• Family or community sharing : Establish a regular time where you share with family or friends how you experienced God's love during the week, thus creating a shared memory of His active presence.
• Decisions with reference to God : Before any important decision (professional, financial, relational), ask yourself explicitly: does this choice manifest my love for God with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my strength, or does it serve other idolatrous priorities?

References and sources for further study

Fundamental biblical texts : Deuteronomy 6:1-9 (immediate context of the Shema); Deuteronomy 5 (the Decalogue preceding the Shema); Mark 12:28-34 (Jesus cites the Shema as the first commandment); Matthew 22:34-40 and Luke 10:25-28 (synoptic parallels); John 14:15-24 (God's love manifested in obedience to the commandments).

Patristic tradition : Saint Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of John, especially the treatises on the commandment of love; Saint Augustine, The Trinity, for the theology of divine love; Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, where the love of God is explored as a spousal relationship.

Medieval Theology : Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, questions 23-27 on charity; Bernard of Clairvaux, Treatise on the Love of God, describing the degrees of love; William of Saint-Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, on the unification of being in the love of God.

Christian mysticism : John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, on purification leading to union with God; Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, describing the dwellings of the soul in its progression towards God; Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God, for the spirituality of the sanctified ordinary.

Rabbinic Jewish tradition : The Mishnah, tractate Berakhot, on the prescriptions concerning the recitation of the Shema; The Babylonian Talmud, discussions on the intention required to fulfill the commandment; Rashi's commentaries on Deuteronomy, offering the classical rabbinic interpretation.

Contemporary studies : André Neher, The Essence of Prophecy, to understand biblical monotheism in its context; Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Reading in Outbursts, on the Jewish hermeneutics of the Shema; André Wénin, The Torah Told, for a narrative and theological reading of Deuteronomy; Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Jesus of Nazareth, volume I, chapter on the double commandment of love.

Practical spirituality : Jacques Philippe, Inner Freedom, on the purification of the heart and abandonment to God; Timothy Keller, Reason is for God, to respond to contemporary objections against faith; Charles de Foucauld, Spiritual Writings, testimony of a life totally given to God out of love.