Is God One or Many? The Orthodox Jewish Answer

The halakhic framework for understanding divine unity begins with the Shema itself. Recitation of the Shema is a Torah-level obligation, derived from Deuteronomy 6:4 Deuteronomy 6:4, and the Talmud Bavli (Berakhot 13b) rules that one must concentrate specifically on the word echad — drawing out its final letter, dalet — to affirm God's sovereignty over all directions of existence. This is not a meditative suggestion; it is a legal ruling about the minimum valid performance of the commandment. The act of declaring divine unity is itself a mitzvah.

Maimonides (Rambam, 1138–1204) gave the most philosophically rigorous formulation in his Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 1:7: God's unity is unlike any other unity. A human being is one, but composed of limbs and attributes; a day is one, but divisible into hours. God's oneness, Maimonides argues, is a unity that admits no composition, no multiplicity of attributes that are separate from His essence, and no comparison to any created thing. This is the second of his Thirteen Principles of Faith — that God is yachid, uniquely one — and Maimonides regarded denial of it as placing a person outside the community of Israel. He was not speaking loosely. In his view, a Jew who believed in two divine powers had committed the same theological error as one who worshipped idols.

Rashi (1040–1105), writing a century before Maimonides, approached the Shema's echad from a more exegetical angle. In his commentary on Deuteronomy 6:4, Rashi reads the verse as a two-stage declaration: the LORD, who is currently "our God" (acknowledged by Israel alone), will one day be recognized as one by all nations. The eschatological dimension matters — Rashi is not merely asserting a present metaphysical fact but a future universal acknowledgment. Yet the underlying claim is identical: there is only one God, and the world has not yet caught up to that reality Deuteronomy 6:4.

Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575), in the Shulchan Arukh (Orach Chayyim 61:6), rules on the practical halakhic details of Shema recitation in ways that presuppose Maimonides' theological framework — the prolonged dalet, the mental intention, the prohibition against rushing past the word echad. The law encodes the theology. As of 2026, no mainstream Orthodox posek has reopened the question of divine unity as a contested ruling; it is treated as among the most settled foundations of Jewish law and belief, not a matter of ongoing responsa literature.