Dear Friends,
This week, in parashat ve’etchanan, we read the words of the Sh’ma – what became the central declaration of Jewish belief. And we hang up this prayer in our homes and community spaces in the form of a mezuzah. Some months ago I shared a reflection on the mezuzah. For this week’s parasha, it makes sense to REMIX once more and bring it back, a bit expanded.
Enjoy and Good Shabbos!
Love, Meg
You can think of the mezuzah as ancient interior design, or as a life hack, or however you want in contemporary language. There is no question that it is one of the most brilliant inventions in spiritual life. It is a prayer made physical, and then made into your actual home. To hang up a mezuzah means to live within a prayer. I’ll explain.
Inside of a mezuzah are a few paragraphs of the sh’ma, which is to say, some sections of the Torah. The sections come from the book of Deuteronomy (6:4-9 and 11:13-21). You can see the entire text translated at Chabad.org, but this is my translation (today) of the first line of the sh’ma:
Listen, people of Israel, the Eternal Source of Life is our God, the Divine Organization Of The Universe is One.
The sh’ma is the central Jewish statement that there is one God. Creation is all connected. And then immediately after this, we are told in the next section, the v’ahavta, to love this source of creation with all our heart, soul, and might. Then, we must teach our children to love it, too, and remind ourselves through physical things like tefillin and the mezuzah. Mezuzah and tefillin are manifestations of the prayer – prayer is not made of words and feelings, alone but of action in the physical world.
The mezuzah reminds us that just as one room is connected to another inside of a house, all parts of life – people, plants, pollinators, weather, tides, the moon, all of it, flows one into the other. When we love creation and care for it – when we love our neighbor – it ripples out. An act of love can be infinite. And what better place to cultivate a sense of love and connection than in our homes?
Hanging a mezuzah shows the world you are Jewish. But what the heck does that mean? It means walking through every doorway with love and intention and responsibility to care for this world.
When we moved into our beautiful home last October, we hung a mezuzah and shared our hopes for our house. Colleen said she wanted the house to be a place of calm. I said I wanted it to be a place of laughter. We affixed the mezuzah, the ancient reminder to love, to our bedroom doorway. As we did that, our home became our prayer. We blessed it so it could bless us.
And finally, a little story about why the mezuzah is not hung up straight. The slanted affixment (should be a word) in the Ashkenazi tradition can represent compromise, an essential ingredient in a home. Let’s learn about this from Rabbi Ruth Adar, the Coffee Shop Rabbi. She writes:
It all goes back to a family debate and technical discussion. Rashi and his grandson Rabbeinu Tam disagreed about the proper way to hang a mezuzah. Rashi believed that the mezuzah should be upright, just as the Torah scroll is upright when it is properly stored in the Ark at the synagogue. Rabbenu Tam said, no! – the mezuzah should be horizontal, just as it is when it is laid on the table to read it.
We get this story from Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, the great Jewish legal writer. He writes in the Tur, his code of Jewish Law, that “careful people” will do their best to fulfill BOTH directions by placing the mezuzah on a slant. However, while that is the custom in the Ashkenazi world, Sephardim prefer to follow the ruling of Rashi and hang their mezuzot vertically.
So there you have it – a different kind of oneness. The oneness of creative problem solving and compromise. The oneness of living outside of either/or thinking. May we all be a little more slanted like the mezuzah.