Title

Shema

Scripture
Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.
(Matthew 22:37-38)
Devotional
Jesus was quoting what is known in Hebrew as the Shema (Hear). There is a moving story about the noted Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl. When the Nazis in World War II arrested him, he was stripped of all his possessions, including his beloved manuscripts, which were sown in his clothing. Naked, he thought that life had no value, no purpose and that his life was over. He was given the worn filthy rags of a prisoner who had been sent to the gas chambers. In the pocket of that tattered uniform was a crumpled piece of paper and on it was the Shema. After his release from the concentration camps he would write in Man’s Search for Meaning; “There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life . . . He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”