SHAVU-WHAT?
Shavu’ot is the question mark of major Jewish holidays. Most of us know it’s a holiday, but exactly what we are supposed to do seems vague. There’s no Seder, no Sukkah, no Shofar. You’d have to ask a lot of Jews “what’s your favorite holiday” before getting “Shavu’ot” as an answer. Shavu’ot is even the brunt of jokes. At the end of the film, “The Boys in the Band,” after a birthday party turns into a complete fiasco, the host says, “Let’s do this again real soon,” to which Harold, the birthday boy responds, “Yeah. How about a year from Shavu’os?”- meaning never.
At Temple Sinai, however, Shavu’ot has an important legacy. It is the day the synagogue was started and the reason it is named Sinai, so I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on Shavu’ot and its meaning.
Shavu’ot is one of the three big pilgrimage holidays in the Torah. The other two are Passover and Sukkot. Unlike it’s weeklong sibling holidays, Shavu’ot is celebrated for one day. Shavu’ot means “weeks” and is called the Festival of Weeks because its date is determined by counting seven weeks from Passover. This counting is called “Counting the Omer,” and in kabbalistic traditions is a time of meditation and reflection.
In the Torah, Shavu’ot is also called the “Holiday of Harvesting” because it marks the harvest of wheat, the last of the grain harvests in Israel. In ancient Israel, people would bring the first fruits of their produce to the Temple on Shavu’ot as special offerings.
It is the rabbis in the first centuries of the common era that begin to associate Shavu’ot with the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. As they did for Passover and Sukkot, the rabbis took an agricultural holiday that was strongly centered on the Temple sacrificial system and transformed it into a holiday whose meaning was centered in the history of the Jewish journey from slavery to freedom, and no event was bigger than the giving of Torah at Mount Sinai.
In rabbinic thinking, escaping slavery in Egypt did not make us free. It gave us the potential to become free. Freedom of any lasting sort could only be found in a community willing to take upon itself the obligation to create a fair just society with a court system that was the same for rich and poor alike. Outcomes should be based on mutually accepted laws, not the whims of a Pharoah or ruler. To the rabbinic mind, freedom to do whatever one wants with no sense of mutual obligation was a form of idolatry of the self. It might feel liberating and freeing, like the Golden Calf, but ultimately it is not sustainable and can quickly devolve into social dissolution and danger. Today we see radical individualism can also lead to high levels of anger and alienation, thus providing fertile soil for conspiracy theories and movements that are authoritarian in their impulse.
The Torah is far from a democracy, but it is an early form of constitutional governing document in which the law limits the power of rulers and gives basic rights to all members of the community, whether powerful and rich or poor and marginalized. As we learned in last week’s portion, it also gives rights to the land itself and to the immigrant. It commands us to treat the stranger with dignity and basic rights, to treat those with disabilities respectfully, to be fair in our courts and our business dealings, and to have limits on what debt can do to a person. We should be profoundly proud to be part of a people and tradition that realized thousands of years ago that rule of law was central to creating a sacred society, and what we might call a civilized society, though that word is fraught. Shavu’ot is the holiday that celebrates that profound aspect of Judaism, symbolized by the public chanting of Aseret haDibrot, the Ten Commandments.
Shavu’ot doesn’t just celebrate law, but the revelation of law by God. For many of us, the idea that God gave the Torah to Moses as at once is not believable, especially in light of a century of scholarship that shows clearly the Torah was written over centuries by several authors and edited extensively. As Reform Jews we are not asked to believe what we know is intellectually false, so what do we do with Shavu’ot and the giving of Torah, especially since so many of the law in the Torah are problematic or downright offensive to us (as they were to the rabbis who, in what we might call today an ‘activist court,’ created legal ways to prevent carrying out the most brutal of the laws.)
As Reform Jews, we believe in continuing revelation, that each generation through its experiences and struggles learns and progresses, and that our laws must reflect this learning. Reform tradition is rooted in the graduate schools of Europe, and an embrace of critical historical understandings of Torah and Jewish culture. To the early Reform rabbis as to us, it is a good thing that Judaism has always changed and adapted and was not plunked down whole at Sinai. We celebrate that the Jewish people have been partners in creating what we call Judaism, from the Ultra-Orthodox to the Workman’s Circle. Indeed, what I find inspiring in studying Torah is to see what the Jewish people have done with our “constitution,” our Torah so that is lives and breathes in each new generation, l’dor vador. That is why I think it is so fitting that Temple Sinai was founded on Shavuot. It is not one revelation long ago, but a revelation of understanding and wisdom that continues as we wrestle with Torah and with what it means to be Jewish.
It is a tradition on Shavu’ot to stay up all night studying Torah, a custom that is called Tikkun Leil Shavu’ot. While we don’t stay up all night, Temple Sinai will be partnering with Ohavi Zedek again this year to offer an evening of study on Saturday, June 4th from 7 – 10:30 pm. There will be sessions on poetry, Jewish music, and Cantor Steve Zeidenberg and I will be sharing how our movements came to embrace LGBT clergy, to see us also as “standing at Sinai.”
That being said, I also believe that Shavu’ot offers us a challenge as Reform Jews: to stand spiritually at Sinai and to receive the Torah ourselves. At Pesach, we understand the obligation at Pesach to see ourselves as if we ourselves left Egypt. It’s not enough to see the Exodus as history; we must strive to place ourselves in that moment. The same is true of Shavu’ot. When we stand in temple to hear the Ten Commandments, we are to see ourselves as standing at Sinai. What does it mean for us as Reform Jews to stand at Sinai, open to accepting the Torah? What is it mean for us as modern skeptical people to be open to accepting a law that might reduce our privilege or obligate us to do things we don’t much like doing?
I want to ask you what it be like for you this Shavu’ot to consider taking on a new Jewish obligation for the coming year, such as lighting candles each week, or attending a service each Shabbat, or turning off your screens for several hours each Shabbat, or volunteering at a food shelf? Maybe you want to try being kosher, or putting on tefillin, or wrapping yourself in a tallit each morning. I am not suggesting one or the other, but rather that you take the time this Shavu’ot to stand spiritually at Sinai and see what that still small voice within whispers to you. What commandment might you take on in order to deepen your connection to Judaism and your Jewish practice this Shavu’ot? What does standing at Sinai mean to you this year?
And when you are done standing at Sinai, sit down, have some coffee and a blintz or maybe New York Cheesecake to celebrate the creamy sweetness of being Jewish.