Shema

The Shema — the Hebrew confession of faith whose opening words, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One," are recited as the Jewish confession of faith — is the most persistent sacred utterance in Mary Antin's memoir The Promised Land. Named for its initial word, the verse recurs throughout the book as a marker of the deepest stratum of Jewish identity, the point at which religious devotion becomes indistinguishable from sheer survival. In the narrative it appears at three decisive moments: as the last remnant of prayer retained by the kidnapped boys of Nicholas I's reign, as the prayer that deserts the young Mary at the climax of her childhood experiment in impiety, and as the formal definition that closes the book's glossary. Together these appearances trace an arc from the unbreakable core of Jewish faith under persecution to the quiet dissolution of that faith in the freedom of America.

The Shema and the Soldiers of Nicholas

The Shema first appears in the memoir in the context of the Cantonists, the Jewish boys conscripted into the Russian army under Nicholas I. These children, some taken as young as seven or eight and snatched from their mothers' laps, were carried to distant villages, given false names, and turned over to brutal peasants who used them like slaves. When the lonely child was handed to the priests, he was flogged and starved and terrified, yet still he refused baptism. The priests promised him good things to eat, fine clothes, and freedom from labor, but the boy turned away and said his prayers secretly — the Hebrew prayers. As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him, and by this time he had forgotten his mother's face; of his prayers perhaps only the Shema remained in his memory. Yet even with only this single verse left to him, he was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. The Shema here is the irreducible minimum of Jewish identity, the one utterance that survives the erasure of family, name, language, and memory. One boy known to Mary's father never yielded under the most hideous tortures; when the priests baptized him in his sleep and brought him the crucifix to kiss upon waking, he threw it from him and spent the rest of his life between prison and hospital, clinging to his faith and saying the Hebrew prayers in defiance of his tormentors, paying for it with his flesh.

The Sabbath Handkerchief Experiment

The Shema's second appearance comes in a scene of childhood testing that inverts its first context entirely. The pious little girl, having been told by her grandmother that handling "blind flowers" would strike her blind and having found by test that the flowers were harmless, resolved to put God Himself to the proof. One Sabbath afternoon, when all the house was taking its after-dinner nap, she arose from her religious meditations, went out to the gate, and took out her pocket handkerchief. She knew the sacred admonition not to carry anything beyond the house-limits on the Sabbath day as she knew that she was alive. Yet with the handkerchief in her pocket, the audacious child stepped into the street. She stood a moment, her heart beating so that it pained. Nothing happened. She walked quite across the street, then ran as far as the corner, fearfully expectant of the punishment to come. She stood breathing painfully, waiting for the thunders of Jehovah, but no sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue — not even "Hear, O Israel." The absence of the Shema at this moment is the memoir's most precise measure of the child's spiritual state: she felt herself in direct communication with God, an awful thought, and He would read her mind and send His answer. The prayer that had sustained the Cantonist boys through torture fails the young Mary precisely because she is no longer praying; she is testing. The Shema, which in the earlier scene was the last thread connecting a tortured child to his people, here marks the point where the child's relationship to God shifts from devotion to experiment.

The Shema in the Glossary and the Shape of Loss

The Shema's final appearance is in the glossary that closes the book, where it is defined plainly as the verse recited as the Jewish confession of faith, so called from its initial word. This formal, almost clinical definition stands in stark contrast to the two narrative scenes in which the prayer appears. In the first, the Shema is the last surviving element of a boy's entire religious and cultural inheritance; in the second, it is the prayer that fails to rise to a child's lips at the moment of her greatest spiritual audacity. The glossary entry, stripped of all emotional context, marks the distance the narrator has traveled: the Shema has become an object of explanation rather than devotion, a term to be defined for readers who may never have heard it. This trajectory mirrors the larger arc of the memoir, in which the rituals and texts of the old world are gradually transformed from living practices into remembered artifacts. The Shema that once sustained a boy through torture and that once failed a girl in her moment of testing has become, by the book's end, a piece of cultural information — preserved, explained, and set at a distance.

The Shema and the Costs of Americanization

The Shema's appearances also illuminate the broader process of Americanization that the memoir documents. The boys of Nicholas I held to the Shema because it was all they had; the young Mary loses it because she has been given the freedom to question everything. This freedom is the gift of America, but it comes at a cost. The memoir describes how, in America, the family was suddenly let loose on the street because the father had renounced his faith and the mother was uncertain of hers, leaving no particular creed to hold the children to. The conception of a system of ethics independent of religion could not at once enter as an active principle in their life, so the parents could give a child no reason why to be truthful or kind. Chaos took the place of system; uncertainty and inconsistency undermined discipline. The Shema, which had been the bedrock of Jewish identity in the Pale, becomes in America one more element of the old order that the children must learn to do without. The memoir presents this loss not as a triumph or a tragedy but as part of the painful process of adjustment, the cross that the first and second generations must bear, an involuntary sacrifice for the sake of the future generations. The Shema thus stands at the center of the book's deepest tension: the same freedom that allows the child to test God is the freedom that allows her to lose the prayer that once sustained her people through their darkest hours.