On the Shema: What a Display of Do and Dare!

What do and dare the Rabbis displayed, back in the first century BCE – or was it some time between the first and second centuries CE?

By the second century CE the Shema in its entirety – Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the same: Deuteronomy 11:13-21; followed by Numbers 15:37-41 – had become liturgy.

What chutzpah it was, on the Rabbis’ part to add, Blessed be He, the Name, for ever and ever!

Were the Rabbis collectively having second thoughts about God’s willingness to bless Himself?

How could a human being – or collectively a human being, with his brothers and sisters – bless the Lord our God!

What use would this blessing be? To whom would it be of use? Would it be the crutch that non-believers accuse believers of making themselves to see them through hard times?

Who or what empowered human beings to bless God!

The cognoscenti, and the non-cognoscenti, would perhaps forgive all the other clauses, main and subsidiary, on the grounds that Moses, if it was he who wrote the Torah, wrote what God would have had him write.

So no wonder this subsidiary clause is recited quietly when the person reciting is alone.

Furthermore, if one blesses God, one assumes that God is bless-able: that He is within what is known; within the category of the knowable, and therefore what one can bless.

In other words, one can go ahead and say any God-damn thing about God, all the while legitimizing one’s definition of who, what, when or where He is.

What is more, one is attributing anthropormorhic characteristics where such characteristics do not necessarily belong.

Yet the Torah, in fact the Tanach itself, could not have been written had God not been anthropormorphized, at first by Moses.

Even so, is it not wiser to bless Him, or non-Him; to express one’s wonder at what one sees here and elsewhere by using the decisive-indecisive statements set out by the writer’s antecedent blogs?