Shalom to all students who will be joining us either live or by recording! (As I’ve written here in the past, we encourage you to join the live shiur, to enable your asking questions and raising points during the class..)
I am excited to be learning with you in this new series of shiurim, and discovering new ways of looking at the Shema and its surrounding blessings. Hopefully these sessions will help you deepen your own understanding and insights regarding these texts, which, together with Tefilat HaAmidah, form the central core of our daily prayers.
In this series of 8 sessions, we will concentrate primarily on the meanings in the text, and not so much on the halachot of their recitation. But we will indeed encounter a few of the many halachot and laws that govern the saying of the Shema and its berachot in the morning and in the evening, when these are related to our exploration of the text.
In this, the first of the 8 sessions, we will conduct an overview of the entirety of this body of material, both for Shaharit and Arvit, and pay attention to a few points: (1) The connection between Shema and the first two of the Ten Commandments; (2) The structure and format of the blessings before and after the Shema ,morning and evening (as part of this exploration we will learn a mishna and a passage from the Rambam – sources for this part are posted below); (3) The apparent, and, in my view, important difference between the way the blessings are ordered in the morning and the evening and, at the same time, how the content of them is parallel at the high level.