Also, just in case any of you are interested in some of the Jewish learning/teaching I’ve been doing this year, here is a taste of it, in a piece I wrote for Kol India (our JCC community publication):
Giving and Receiving: The Time of Our Torah
By Ariel Schwartz, JSC Volunteer
Each year, with the end of Passover, we begin to count the Omer. We record the time between the festivals, marking each day with a blessing, as we track the passing of a season and the start of a new time of year. Like Sukkot and Passover, Shavuot – “the festival of weeks” – is a festival of agricultural origins. Since Shavuot commemorates the time of the harvest of the first fruits of the year, one of its names is Chag Ha-Bikkurim, the “festival of the first fruits.” Our counting the Omer checks off the days on the calendar, starting from when we plant our grains and ending when we can harvest them. As Leviticus 21:15-16 states: “You shall count for yourselves — from the day after the Shabbat, from the day when you bring the Omer of the waving — seven Shabbats, they shall be complete. Until the day after the seventh Shabbat, you shall count, fifty days…”
Though the Torah dictates that we should number the increasing weeks, counting up to seven Shabbatot, or fifty days, perhaps we should instead think of the passing days as a countdown, bringing us nearer and nearer to the anniversary of our receiving the Torah. Beyond its agricultural bases, Shavuot retains its renown for being the celebration of God’s gift of the Torah to the Jewish people. For commemorating this historical event, the festival is also called Chag Matan Torateinu, or “the festival of the giving of our Torah.”
The Omer in the historical context reminds us about the important religious connection between Passover and Shavuot. On Passover, we celebrate our physical release from bondage, but when we received the Torah on Shavuot, we were redeemed spiritually. God gave us the laws and precepts that govern our lives and give them meaning. With the exodus from Egypt, we solidified our unity as a people. With the gift of the Torah, we became bonded together as the chosen people, in our unique relationship with Hashem. It is for this reason that Shavuot is often celebrated as the marriage of the Jewish people with our God.
Every year on Shavuot, we stay up all night, reading and discussing the Torah. We mark the anniversary of our symbolic marriage with God, through the study of God’s text, and we use the night to connect with other members of our community even as we enhance our connection to God. We also eat a dairy meal at least once during Shavuot. The reasons for this custom vary from one community to the next. According to Talmud Bechorot 6b, we eat dairy to remember the time before we received the Torah, a time when we did not have the laws of kashrut, in which we did not eat meat at all, in order to avoid eating the forbidden. Another popular reason for eating dairy on Shavuot is derived from the quote from Song of Songs 4:11, which states, “Like honey and milk [the Torah] lies under your tongue.” Just as milk can wholly nourish the body physically, the Torah fully feeds our spiritual needs.
A final tradition on Shavuot requires us to read the Book of Ruth. This story tells of a Jewish woman, Naomi, whose husband and two sons die, leaving her alone in the world. However, her daughter-in-law Ruth elects to remain by her side, famously saying, “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). With this decisive action, Ruth earns the title of the book, and she eventually becomes the great grandmother of King David.
From this excerpt, we can see the critical link between the Book of Ruth and Shavuot. Ruth chooses to stay with Naomi, following her path and adopting her God. Similarly, Shavuot is Chag Matan Torateinu, “the festival of the giving of our Torah,” and implicit in that name is that God chose to give us the Torah, at the time that we chose to receive it. We acted of our own free will to enter into our reciprocal relationship with God, by accepting God’s Torah. Moreover, because the festival is known as “the time of the giving of our Torah,” we note that God’s gift of the Torah at Mount Sinai was not a single, isolated event. Though God gave the Torah to us only once, the Jewish people have studied it constantly throughout time, and we study it consistently throughout our lives. Then, every year on Shavuot, we reenact our history, and we remind ourselves that the process of receiving the Torah happens every day, as we learn and live the text that connects us to God.
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May 29, 2009 at 11:51 am
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