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“Hear, O Israel Shema yisra’el The Lord is our God Adonai eloheinu The Lord is one! Adonai ehad! The context for this verse in Deuteronomy reveals that it is uttered in a dramatic, interactive situation. The first phrase (“Hear, O Israel”) is spoken by God to Israel; it carries no message, only the fact of being addressed by God, the experience of divine attention. Israel responds to being addressed by proclaiming that “the Lord is our God.” In English this sounds like a redundancy; Hebrew differentiates between Adonai, which is the particular and proper name of God in the Bible (itself already an avoidance of the unpronounceable sacred name), and Eloheinu, which is the generic term for gods or divine beings. So Israel’s response has the force of declaring that God, alone of all the claimants to divinity, is He Whom we choose. The last phrase, Adonai ehad, is understood by some interpreters to stress the exclusivity of the choosing of God (reading ehad as “alone”; “The Lord our God, the Lord alone”) and by others to introduce a further concept: the oneness of God. Exclusive fidelity to God and God”
― Barry W. Holtz, Back to the Sources