Shavuot

TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS

 SEASON THREE    EPISODE TWENTY

SHAVUOT

          Cheesecake, blintzes, and Torah. What could be better! I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and we are celebrating Shavuot on this episode of Torah for Christians.

          MUSIC

          Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.

          Three times in the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to gather at a place that God determines to offer sacrifices and celebrate God’s beneficence. These three Pilgrimage Festivals, as they came to be called, are Sukkot, our fall harvest holiday, Pesach, when we celebrate our liberation from Egyptian bondage, and Shavuot, which in the Torah is the festival when we are commanded to bring our “first fruits” to be offered before God.

          In time, the Temple in Jerusalem came to be the place that God chose for the Pilgrimage Festivals, as well as the other major holidays on the Jewish calendar. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, these celebrations continued but out of necessity, the sacrifices fell away, leaving other aspects of these holidays for Jews to celebrate. For Sukkot, we still dwelt in a Sukkah, waved the lulav and etrog, and remembered our obligations to God at the time of the fall harvest. At Pesach, we of course remembered the Exodus by eating matzah for seven days and eventually celebrating the Seder, the most observed ritual of the entire calendar year. 

          But what about Shavuot? What was it and what happened to it? 

          Just asking these questions shows how much Shavuot has fallen from the Jewish consciousness, and certainly from the larger world. Even though it is a Yom Tov, a day when no work is to be done, many Jews don’t even know when it occurs. By the way, it falls on the 50th day after the 2nd night of Passover, usually in late May or early June.

          In the Torah, we are commanded to mark off seven weeks of seven days after Pesach begins. Then, on the 50th day, is an Atzeret, a stop. In other words, Atzeret was the end of the Pesach season. Think of it as Lent in reverse. Instead of a smaller holiday, like Ash Wednesday leading to a major holiday, Easter, we have a major holiday, Pesach, leading to another major holiday, Shavuot.

          Another name for Shavuot is Chag HaBikkurim, the Festival of the First Fruits. During Biblical times – and especially during the days of the 2nd Temple – Jews would ascend to Jerusalem bearing the 7 fruits of Israel – wheat, barley, pomegranates, figs, dates, grapes, and honey. They would place these fruits in a basket to re-enact the Biblical commandment found in Deut. 26.1-11. I’ll read it here in its entirety as each verse is germane to this discussion.

When you enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where the LORD your God will choose to establish His name. You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, “I acknowledge this day before the LORD your God that I have entered the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to assign us.” 

The priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down in front of the altar of the LORD your God. You shall then recite as follows before the LORD your God:

 “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The LORD freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 

Wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which You, O LORD, have given me.”
 You shall leave it before the LORD your God and bow low before the LORD your God. And you shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that the LORD your God has bestowed upon you and your household.

          Once the Priest sets the basket down in front of the altar, the Israelite recites the famous formula, “My father was a wandering Aramean.” In a nutshell, it encapsulates Israelite history until that point: the descent into Egypt, the enslavement, the Exodus, and the settling in Israel. In gratitude, the Israelites bring their first fruits before Adonai. Once consecrated, the supplicant shares his first fruits with the Priests, Levites and non-Jews amongst the people.

          If you think this is fanciful, there is a 3rd Century CE mosaic of such a basket, found on the floor of the synagogue in Sepphoris, a Roman city built in the center of what is now modern Israel. The basket contains the sheva minim, these seven species of foodstuffs found in Israel, with birds hanging from the sides of the basket, to be given to the Priests for a sacrifice.

          My friend and classmate, Rabbi Judith Abrams, z”l, looked at the Jerusalem Talmud and discovered that this festival, now called Shavuot, named after the Hebrew word for Weeks, was much more than a line of Israelites carrying baskets up to the Temple. It was, to use another modern Catholic example, the Jewish Mardi Gras. During Shavuot, Jerusalem was awash in pilgrims; there was singing and dancing – and even fireworks! In her reading of the Jerusalem Talmud, written in part by eyewitnesses to this party who lived before the Temple was destroyed, Rabbi Abrams states that this was the biggest festival of the year in Jerusalem.

          So, what happened to Shavuot? Without a Temple, Jews could not bring their baskets to the altar. Nor could they offer their birds as sacrifices. And just as important, they could not fulfill the Biblical commandment to recite Arami oved avi, My father was a fugitive – or wandering – Aramean. While the sacrifices could no longer be offered, the formula had to be recited.

          The Babylonian rabbis, who rose to dominance after the destruction of the Temple, moved the recitation of this Deuteronomy passage to the Passover Seder. it makes sense; these verses are perfectly appropriate for Passover; they tell the story in just a few lines.

          But there was a cost to this change. Now, there was no purpose to Shavuot other than the Torah said to observe it; the reason for the Festival had disappeared. And so, Shavuot began its slow decline.

          But two things saved the Festival in the early centuries of the Christian era. The first saving grace was the insertion of the Book of Ruth into the Shavuot liturgy. Ruth was the Megillah assigned to Shavuot. It made sense, since at its essence, Shavuot is a harvest festival – and the central theme of Ruth is that she met and married Boaz at the time of the barley harvest. This popular fable proved attractive to Jews everywhere; many of us look forward to its reading. And of course, since Ruth and Boaz are the ancestors of King David, this story takes on added importance.

          The second saving reason for Shavuot was the Torah portion assigned to it. Nobody knows exactly when the tradition began but over time, the rabbis came to believe that God gave Moses the Torah, both oral and written, on Shavuot. The timing is right; it would have taken the Israelites about 7 weeks to travel from the shores of the Sea of Reeds to Mount Sinai, wherever it was located. With this tradition, we read the Exodus version of the 10 Commandments during the Morning Service. This proved attractive as well.

          In the medieval era, this Midrash took a darker turn. The legend, as it goes, is that on the night before the giving of the Torah, when the Israelites should have been awake all night, waiting in anticipation of this awe-inspiring event, the men went to sleep! They almost missed the giving of the Torah the next morning. As an act of atonement, many Kabbalists, Jewish mystics, spend the entire night of Erev Shavuot, from dusk to dawn, in study. Today, Jews of all stripes have adopted this custom, called a Tikkun Leil Shavuot, literally a repairing of the night of Shavuot. We might not study all night long but virtually every synagogue offers an entire night of prayer and study on Erev Shavuot. It has become quite a popular event, even to the point where I participate in a ZOOM Tikkun, when I and dozens of other rabbis across the four North American time zones offer a plethora of classes that run through the night and into the next morning. The east coast rabbis usually offer the early classes and then the teachers spread across the country as the night progresses. If you are interested in this Tikkun Leil Shavuot, please message me in Facebook and I’ll send you the schedule once it is published.

          In a moment, we will look at one more way that Jews have tried to rescue Shavuot. And then, we’ll learn why cheesecake and blintzes are so important on this Festival.

          I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.

BREAK

Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. Before we return to our discussion of Shavuot, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Please remember to review and rate this episode on Apple, Spotify, or whatever service you are using. Also, please go back and listen to previous episodes if you have not done so already. A transcript is also available on our Buzzsprout feed. And now, this and many previous episodes are available on our brand-new YouTube channel. And if you would like to read my weekly Torah Study, please go to Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, available for free on www.Substack.com. I have also started another Substack page called Wednesday Torah, where I share random thoughts on the Jewish experience. Please subscribe to both.

As I intimated a minute ago, there is one other way that Jews, especially Reform Jews, tried to rescue Shavuot. This was through a ceremony called Confirmation. As the 20th Century began, Reform rabbis in the United States began to do away with many traditional practices, including Bar Mitzvah. In its place, they created a group ceremony for both boys and girls, which they called Confirmation. Often held in the 9th or 10th Grade, this ceremony was blatantly modeled on Catholic Confirmation ceremonies of the time. 

This Confirmation ceremony, which became tremendously important in 20th Century Reform Judaism, was held on Shavuot, pegged to the date when tradition said that Moses received the Torah. Often, the kids would wear white robes, the 10 Commandments were read, and the kids often performed a scripted cantata to affirm their dedication to Judaism.

Today, Confirmation still exists but frankly, it is a ceremony in search of a meaning, especially because nearly every Jewish boy and girl involved in synagogue life has a Bar or Bat Mitzvah at age 13. So, the main purpose of Confirmation, a group affirmation of Judaism, has disappeared. Also, this ceremony has often been moved away from Erev Shavuot to allow for the Tikkun Leil Shavuot. Often, the ceremony is held on a Sunday morning in May, before the end of the school year. Shavuot today stands on its own, with its emphasis on Ruth, on the giving of the Torah, on all-night studying – and on dairy foods.

Every Jewish holiday. like holidays of any faith, has specific foods attached to it: challah for Shabbat, matzah for Pesach, apples and honey for Rosh HaShanah, etc. On Shavuot, we eat dairy foods, especially cheese blintzes – cheese crepes – and cheesecake. Blintzes reflect the Ashkenazic origins of many North American Jews; these crepes are really Ukrainian or Polish in origin. Sephardic Jews may eat bourekas, a potato or cheese-filled phyllo dough turnover. As for cheesecake, well, that’s just delicious.

But why dairy at all? There are dozens of explanations; let’s look at just a few.

The first reason is that God brought the Israelites to a land flowing with milk and honey. Honey is, if you recall, one of the seven species brought to the Temple. Before modern refrigeration came around, most milk was made into cheese so that it would be preserved. Hence, we eat cheese products on Shavuot.

That’s pretty good. Another reason given is that at Sinai, the Israelites were as pure as a newborn baby, whose nourishment was, of course, milk.

The final reason I’ll give you, and I promise there are many others, is that after the Revelation at Sinai, the Israelites realized that the meat they had prepared was not kosher. Since it would take too long to slaughter and prepare meat according to the laws of kashrut, the tired and hungry Israelites ate the readily available cheese, which also symbolized a certain humility upon receiving the Torah.

There is, as you can tell, is no one reason for dairy on Shavuot. Unlike the Biblical commandment to eat matzah on Pesach, Jewish food customs developed over time and place. But on Shavuot, we get to celebrate with simple, organic foods. It’s quite a welcome change from the meat-heavy meals the rest of the year. So, the next time that you order a piece of cheesecake, think of the Torah. And remember, on Shavuot, eating cheesecake is a mitzvah, one which many of us observe scrupulously.

I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please remember to rate and review this, and previous episodes on Apple, Spotify, or other streaming services. You can also like us on Facebook and now, you can subscribe to the podcast on Youtube and read a transcript on Buzzsprout.

On the next episode, we are going to take a closer look at the Book of Ruth. It’s a beautiful pastoral tale, female-oriented, and one with deeper meanings regarding conversion, love and Messianism. It’s a favorite story of mine. Please tune in.

Finally, I have begun to publish a weekly Torah Study, called Bible Stories They Never Taught You in Religious School. It’s available for free on www.substack.com. You can also sign up on Substack for the newsletter to appear every Friday in your Inbox. You can also find my new column, Wednesday Torah there, where I offer weekly musings about life, the universe and everything.

          Have a wonderful week and remember; Hinei Mah Tov … L’hitra’ot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.