Shema means hear in a way that includes obeying, because in Hebrew the two were never separate acts.
Shema covers everything English splits into different verbs: to hear a sound, to listen with attention, to understand what's said, and to obey it. A mother hears her child's footsteps. A judge hears a case and rules on it. A servant hears an order and does it. All of these use the same Hebrew word, because Hebrew doesn't distinguish sharply between taking in a sound and acting on its meaning. Hearing that stops short of response was, for the biblical writers, barely hearing at all.
This is why the word carries moral weight English hearing doesn't. To 'not hear' someone in the Old Testament usually means to disobey them, not to be deaf. The famous line in Deuteronomy 6:4, 'Hear, O Israel', isn't asking for auditory attention. It's calling the nation to a total, obedient response to the one God, in the way a soldier hears a command.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.
The Shema itself, a call to Israel that means far more than listening.
Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people, who replied, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”
The people say 'we will do and hear', pairing action and hearing as one response.
Therefore give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people and to discern between good and evil. For who is able to govern this great people of Yours?”
Solomon asks for a 'hearing heart', meaning discernment, not sharper ears.
And He replied: “Go and tell this people, ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
God tells Isaiah the people will hear without understanding, exposing hearing's failure mode.
English translators reach for 'hear', 'listen', 'obey', and sometimes 'heed' or 'give attention to', depending on context, because no single word does the job. Choosing 'hear' can make a verse sound passive when the original is demanding action. Choosing 'obey' can make it sound like blind compliance when the original includes real understanding. Either way, something is lost, and readers need the surrounding sentence to tell them which sense is in play.
People sometimes treat 'hear' in verses like Deuteronomy 6:4 as a simple call to pay attention, missing that it's a summons to obedience and loyalty. There's also a popular but shaky word-study claim that shema secretly means 'to hear and do' as two hidden components packed into one root. It doesn't work that way structurally; the word is simply broad enough to mean both, depending on context, not a compound of two separate ideas.
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