The hand over the eyes

One sentence long, and it is the smallest gesture in the room. At the opening line of the Shema the hand is placed over the eyes — Berakhot 13b records Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi passing his hand over his eyes as he said it — and lifted again at the end of the verse.

The verse says shema, hear. And the body's response to being told to hear is to switch off sight. Not to close the eyes, which is drowsy and ambiguous, but to put a hand over them, which is deliberate and takes an arm to do. It is the shortest possible statement of a position this tradition holds everywhere else at much greater length: that the encounter is aural, not visual — a Name that is heard and not seen, a God with no image, a world spoken rather than shown. Layer: Talmudic; the reasons offered above are the standard ones and are later than the practice.