Shavuot (Archives)

Shavuot as Feast of Mystical Revelation

The most striking custom connected with Shavuot—a holiday that otherwise often pales compared with the drama and ceremony of the Passover Seder, the high solemnity of Rosh Hashanah, or the verdant freshness of Sukkot—is doubtless Tikkun Leil Shavuot: the all-night vigil of Torah study performed on this holiday. In recent years this custom has enjoyed a significant revival, with every center of Jewish study worth its salt (including such secular ones as the Meretz branch in Tel-Aviv!) holding its own late night study sessions. Indeed, in a place such as Jerusalem, one finds a panoply of Tikkunim, with each institution vying to provide a better and more interesting roster of speakers for the occasion.

What are the origins and inner meaning of this custom? The most frequently offered explanation is that on the very first Shavuot, while waiting for morning when God would give them the Torah, the children of Israel fell asleep. When dawn arrived, Moses had to go about waking them up, and they staggered out to the foot of Mount Sinai, embarrassingly late and bleary eyed. As a Tikkun—a correction for this mishap—Jews stay up all night on Shavuot, engaging in the study of Torah, and ready at daybreak to worship and listen to the reading from the Torah of the account of the Sinaitic epiphany.

But this vigil has a very different connotation in the Jewish mystical tradition: parallel to the celebration of the revelation to the entire nation, long ago, we find hints that Shavuot is regarded as a time uniquely suited for personal, mystical revelations for those who have attained a high level of spiritual purity and holiness. Thus, the Zohar (I: 8a) sees Shavuot as a kind of mystical wedding between Knesset Yisrael, the Congregation of Israel, as bride, and the Holy One blessed be He, as groom (hence the title Shabbat Kallah, “The Sabbath of the Bride,” sometimes given to the Sabbath preceding Shavuot). The members of the Holy Fraternity, the mystical adepts, rejoice her during the night before the wedding with the voice of their Torah, out of which they weave a kind of bridal garland; in the morning, they escort her to the Huppah, and God blesses them. (Earlier, we mentioned the mystical gathering described in the Zohar—the “Idra”— held shortly before Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai’s death. Although generally associated with Lag ba-Omer, there is strong support for the view of many academic Kabbblah scholars that this gathering is in fact identified with Shavuot).

The earliest historical record of a Tikkun Leil Shavuot appears in a letter from Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz to his cohorts in Salonica, printed in Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz’s mystical compendium, Shnei Luhot ha-Berit. Alkabetz describes there a Tikkun held in the home of Rabbi Joseph Caro, later author of the Shulhan Arukh, in the city of Nikopol, Bulgaria, sometime in the early 1530’s, before his aliyah to the Land of Israel. A small group of devotees gathered after the Shavuot night festive meal, first reading various passages from the Bible, and then proceeding to study Mishnah, learning the entire order of Zeraim (“Seeds”). In the midst of their studies, they heard a Divine Voice speaking to them, telling them how greatly the Shekhinah was pleased with their efforts, praising their devotion, albeit expressing disappointment that they had been unable to study with a minyan of ten. The following night (which was of course observed outside of Israel as a festival day) some of the other Sages joined them, a full minyan participated in the study vigil, and their joy knew no bounds.

Some thirty years ago, this author witnessed a dramatic, living embodiment of this aspect of Shavuot, when I had the opportunity to spend the holiday in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, within the community of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe. Following the Yom Tov meal, the Hasidim returned to the Study House and sat down to read the Tikkun—the special book containing a series of texts appropriate for study on this night—or to learn Torah. At precisely 3:15 AM, the Rebbe entered the hall to deliver a ma’amar—a discourse on Hasidic thought, distinguished from the more usual sihah (an informal table talk) by its deeper, more mystical content. Both before the Rebbe began his discourse, and at its conclusion, the entire assembly sang a niggun devekut—a slow, meditative melody, expressive of yearning for union with the Divine. Throughout the talk itself, which lasted about half an hour, the entire congregation—including the elderly men among them—remained standing on their feet. The Rebbe himself spoke with his eyes closed, in a special chant totally different from the discursive, almost conversational tone used in his regular table talks. Although my Yiddish was woefully inadequate to understanding the words said, there was a powerful sense of the sacred, of wondrous, deep secrets of Torah being revealed, as befitting this night of preparation for revelation.

We thus find that, throughout the generations, Shavuot is seen as a time set aside for reaching out for some sort of personal experience of God’s imminent presence, as a reliving of the great moment at Sinai.

“And All the People Stood Against the Mountain” vs. “The Prophecy of Moses our Teacher”

Maimonides perception of Ma’amad Har Sinai (the Sinai epiphany), in Guide for the Perplexed II.33, is rather interesting—and very different from that which seems to be conveyed by the main thrust of the Jewish tradition. Consistent with his general emphasis on the intellect as the gate to the Divine, Maimonides contends that Moses alone experienced the full force of the Divine revelation, clearly hearing the Ten Commandments; the rest of the people only heard “the voice” or “sound” (kol) of the first two commandments, and even that not as clearly articulated words. Hence, there was a profound gap between Moses’ experience of revelation and that of the people.

Was the experience of the people then only a vague, indistinct sense of something overwhelming, uncanny, with lots of noise and impressive sights? Was this the sum total of the great Sinai experience that we are constantly told to remember, to pass on to future generations (see Deut 4:9-10), that is constantly invoked as the incontrovertible proof for our Torah, etc., etc.? (Kuzari, Book I, and elsewhere in polemic literature, medieval and modern) Indeed, the people, did not have the spiritual fortitude to hear the Divine voice for more than a few moments, telling Moses: “You speak with God and we will listen, and let not God speak with us lest we die” (Exod 20:16). The Midrash says that this already happened after the first two commandments; inferring that 611 of the 613 commandments were conveyed through the intermediacy of Moses, and not heard directly from God (Makkot 23b-24a).

Elsewhere, too, Rambam consistently refers to nevuato shel Moshe Rabbenu, “the prophecy of Moses our Teacher” as the source of the Torah, enumerating the various dimensions in which there was a qualitative difference between him and all the other prophets. In his Mishnah Commentary, (Hakdamah le-Perek Helek), where he lists Moses’ prophecy as the seventh of the thirteen basic principles of the faith, he states that Moses completely transcended his limitations as a human being, and achieved the level of the angels, which he equates with pure intellect. Why, then, was the epiphany before the entire people necessary at all? To give testimony to the truth of Moses’ prophecy, and by extension to the binding authority of the Torah (thus Rambam in Hilkhot Yesodei Hatorah, Ch. 8).

Maimonides was forced to this view by his particular philosophical approach, which equates the highest religious experience, that of prophecy, with a cognitive apprehension of the “Active Intellect,” and thus of necessity confined to a small elite, after long and rigorous training. This seems to contradict another powerful motif in Jewish thought, which insists that the entire people experienced the Sinai epiphany. Indeed, one of these legends focuses specifically upon Moses as representative of human beings in all their weakness. It is related that, when Moses ascended on high to receive the Torah, the angels challenged him with the words, “What business has one born of woman, among us?” He answered that, precisely because human beings are mortal, and have bodily needs and human passions and emotions, they need the Torah, which is specifically oriented towards the human condition (b. Shabbat 88b-89a).

Perhaps we can suggest the following synthesis: Whether or not the people of Israel clearly heard the words “Anokhi” and “lo yihyeh lekha” (“I am the Lord…” and “you shall not have…”) does not really matter: the overwhelming experience of the numinous, of the divine presence, in and of itself, WAS the “Anokhi” experience; the source of the strongest, surest and most certain knowledge that “I am the Lord your God.” Likewise, the concomitant fear of God, verging on sheer terror and panic in the face of His overwhelming Presence, WAS, existentially, the source of “you shall have no other gods before me”: they felt the quintessential fear of Him that is the root of all the negative commandments, and first and foremost the prohibition of idolatry.

I would like to quote in this context an idea propounded by the Christian theologian Jacques Maritain. In one of his books, Maritain explains that the philosophical proofs of God’s existence—he speaks particularly of the epistemological and the argument from design—are not only for philosophers, but have their counterpart on another level for ordinary people. The same arguments established by philosophers with rigorous, closely reasoned, step-by-step argumentation, correspond to basic truths intuitively grasped by ordinary people. The philosopher may demonstrate logically why every existing thing must have a prior cause, working back logically until he reaches the First Cause; the simple man looks up at the starry sky, or at the brooding beauty of a deep forest, or at a stark desert landscape, and bursts into praise of the Creator: “How great are your works, O Lord!” The philosopher presents the epistemological argument: the fact that we can conceive of God at all proves at He must exist; the simple man feels faith in his heart, directly. And so on. The same holds true for Sinai. The people tangibly felt the Presence and Glory of God, giving birth to a kind of intuitive, inferential faith, which led to “Anokhi,” the acceptance of His sovereignty—and from there to the acceptance of all the mitzvot they were taught by Moses their teacher.

Some Short Thoughts on Shavuot

The “sixth,” non-canonical chapter of Pirqei Avot, is specially added on the Shabbat preceding Shavuot to round off the series of Shabbat afternoon readings during the Counting of the Omer with one appropriate to the receiving of the Torah. This chapter, known as Kinyan Torah, contains a beraita enumerating the 48 ways in which the Torah is acquired. This is a vast subject; a noted Jerusalem rabbis, Rav Noah Weinberg, has written an entire book for neophytes to Judaism in which he elucidates in detail each of these ways. But what is most striking about this is that which is also most obvious: that the study of Torah demands complete devotion, giving ones all. Before even beginning to enumerate the ethical and social virtues that must be acquired, the 48 ways lists a series of disciplines: studying, listening, repeating with ones lips, understanding with ones heart, clarifying and sharpening the precise meaning of what one has learned with ones cohorts, serving the Sages, etc. ; but also the demand to reduce to a bare minimum all those other aspects of life that ordinary people take for granted—sleep, ordinary conversation, business, pleasure, laughter, [presumably, lawful marital] sex, etc.

Why such a strict, puritanical regimen? one may ask. Is not the Torah a Torah of life? Surely, none of these things are bad per se. At one time in my life, I would have found such passages oppressive and off-putting, reading it as heavy yeshiva mussar (moralistic preaching). But on further reflection, it seems to me that this must be read as simply stating a fact of life, almost a law of nature: in order to become a true scholar, one whose personality, whose very being is shaped by Torah, one must make it the center of ones existence. Indeed, so as to accomplish anything in life in a serious way, certainly in the field of intellectual endeavors, one cannot do things in a half-hearted way. An hour lost can never be regained. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons why Shavuot is the Festival of Time, the only holiday whose very name is a unit of time, one which comes after 49 days of counting the most basic unit of time. Ultimately, learning Torah is, inter alia, about learning to use time properly, and understanding its true value. For that reason, Reb Zalman used to write on his Sefirat Haomer calendar the verse “Teach us to number our days, that we may have a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12).

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The Sefat Emet (Yitro, 5652, s.v. be’inyan ma’amad har sinai) reflects on the use of idioms relating to standing in connection with the Sinaitic revelation: Ma’amad Har Sinai (“the standing of Mount Sinai”), and the verse “the day that you stood before the Lord your God on Horeb” (Deut 4:10). The concept of standing is of being like angels, of having reached a certain state of completion. By contrast, the normal human state is described as walking: a process of constant growth, of constantly moving from one level to another. (And I would add that the word for Jewish law, halakhah, is likewise derived from “halikhah,” walking -- a dynamic, ongoing process). Nevertheless, the moment of receiving the Torah is one of “amidah”—of stasis, of a momentary sense of having achieved, or having been graced with, a certain completeness.

Perhaps this is the symbolism of standing on a whole group of ritual occasions: first and foremost, during the Amidah, the Prayer par excellence, which is described in the halakhah as “standing before God”; during Kabbalat Shabbat, which is also a time of “receiving the Shekhinah,” as explained by Rab Soloveitchik (whose own practice was to stand throughout Kabbalat Shabbat); and, according to the ancient Ashkenazi custom originating with Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, during the reading of the Torah, which is a kind of reenactment of the Sinai moment.

Ten Commandments or 613?

There is a certain ambivalence in Judaism toward the Ten Commandments. On the one hand, of course, they are of great importance, the very quintessence of God’s Law, the concrete contents of the Revelation at Sinai (at least according to a straightforward reading of Exodus 19-20). On the other hand, they do not encompass all of God’s Torah, but are more like an outline, a set of chapter headings or perhaps a condensed version, given to the masses of the people at Mt. Sinai, for what He was later to teach to Moses in detail.

This problematic was reinforced by the polemic with Christianity. At the time of the Temple, the Ten Commandments formed a central element of the daily liturgy; they were recited by the priests, alongside the Shema, as part of the daily verbal worship service which they conducted in the Chamber of Hewn Stone prior to offering the morning sacrifice. Later, when early Christianity began to emphasize the exclusivity of the Ten Commandments, the Rabbis removed it from the daily liturgy, lest it be thought that the other mitzvot were not an equally integral part of the Divinely revealed Torah (Berakhot 12a). It is printed in some Siddurim, but only at the very tail end of the service, to be recited privately by individuals. In Maimonides’ time, this controversy again flared up over the question as to whether the congregation was to stand up for the reading of the Ten Commandments. The Rambam lambasted this custom in passionate terms, making it clear that he saw it as a matter of principle; all the Torah, and not only the Ten Commandments, was given at Sinai; hence, it bordered on the heretical to stand for this chapter and not for the others.

On the other hand, some Medieval poets saw all 613 commandments as embodied in the Ten, in a midrashic or metaphorical sense. In olden times, one of the most popular genres of piyyutim (liturgical poetry) for the holiday of Shavuot was the Azharot, poems enumerating the 613 commandments. Many of these were based upon a scheme in which all of the commandments were subsumed under the basic Ten: thus, commandments relating to civil law and torts were subsumed under “thou shalt not steal”; all laws of holidays and special times under the Sabbath; those concerned with the active service of God in general under “I am the Lord your God”; those prohibitions rooted directly or indirectly in the rejection of a pagan way of life under “thou shalt have no other gods..”—and so forth.

It is perhaps significant that, in the aggadah which serves as the source for the 613 commandments, reducing them to ever more basic principles—“David based them on eleven... Isaiah on six… Micah on three… again, Isaiah based them on two… Amos… and Habakkuk based them on one” (Makkot 24a)—the Ten are not even mentioned.

Esther and Ruth

In three of the Five Scrolls a woman serves as a central figure: Ruth, Esther, and the Song of Songs. (As in the latter the female protagonist is painted in rather vague terms in terms of her personality, and indeed it is not clear whether the book even has a plot in the usual sense, we may discount it). Of these, Ruth and Esther make an interesting study in contrasts. The Book of Esther is set in the sumptuous royal palace city of the Persian empire. One can almost feel and touch the highly polished floors of marble and precious stones, the sumptuous banquet of who-knows-how-many courses served in gold and silver vessels, with the company reclining upon soft linen and crimson cushions. Yet all this pomp and circumstance is set against an atmosphere of corruption and decadence: a foolish king who spends his days partying with his princes and viziers, determines the fates of entire provinces and ethnic groups on the basis of a whim or at the advice of an intriguing courtier, and spends each night in the arms of a different beautiful young virgin, who has been prepared for this moment after being soaked for six months in myrrh and six months in various spices (a procedure that always seemed to me more appropriate to a cucumber than to a human being). Esther, too, gained her pivotal and fateful position of influence through her own beauty and feminine charms; or is it possible that Ahasuerus may have been captivated by the contrast between a certain modesty and bashfulness on her part, which we may presume to have been part of her Jewish heritage, and the blatant, unsubtle sexuality of the Indian or Persian girls, who were raised on the models of Indian erotic sculpture and the Kama Sutra?

In any event, the Book of Ruth, set in time perhaps 700 or 800 years earlier, provides a striking contrast to Esther. Boaz is a wealthy man (ish hayil), but only in comparison with his fellow townspeople. We do not so much as glimpse the inside of his home; he lives a simple, unadorned, rustic life. He sleeps outside during the harvest season, together with his workers, on the hard ground among the haystacks. He eats simple bread dipped in vinegar; a kerchief filled with six measures of barley constitutes a special gift for him. But the contrast with the Persian palace life is just as great in the moral dimension, and in the opposite direction: here, there is not the smallest hint of corruption or unseemliness in the behavior of any of the protagonists.

Two crucial moments in Ruth’s life pique our curiosity. What was the inner processes that went through her soul, that led to these decisions? First and foremost, the decision to go with her mother-in-law, Naomi. The two young widows accompany their mother-in-law—an old, broken vessel, with bitterness written on her very face— towards the Land of Israel. “Go away, my daughters, return!” (1:8-14) she exhorts them repeatedly. But while Orpah returns to her own family, Ruth persists, saying “Wherever you go, there I shall go; wherever you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people; your God, my God; wherever you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried” (vv. 16-17). We are accustomed to reading this little speech as the essence of an act of conversion to Judaism; but it is equally an expression of intense personal attachment to her mother-in-law. What motivated this: a sense of responsibility? Devotion? Love? Pity? Contemporary feminists would (and doubtless do) celebrate this book as an expression of female bonding, of inter-generational friendship between women; or, perhaps, as an idyll of mother-in-law—daughter-in-law relations, so often marked by acrimony. In any event, we are left pondering the question: From whence did Ruth draw this strength and these spiritual resources. Ultimately, there is a certain mystery to conversion: what causes one human being make the incredible jump from one culture to another, and particularly from one that is pagan to a deeply spiritual culture?

The second central scene is that of Ruth’s night-time visit to Boaz at the threshing floor (3:6-15). Here she was risking both her virtue and her reputation. What sort of woman goes to visit a strange man late at night, in a deserted spot in the field? What would others think of her, and what would he think? Here, we need to read between the lines: she must have sized up his character as an honest, decent man; that his fatherly, protective demeanor (warning her of the young men who would be only too ready to take advantage of her weakness, and ordering them not to molest her; allowing her to glean after the harvesters; sending her home with a bundle of barley; etc.) was authentic, and not a cynical maneuver to gain her trust. At this stage, she must have made up her mind to trust him completely, and to risk losing all. When she lay down next to him in the field, he could easily have taken his pleasure with her; or he could have priggishly pushed her away with words of rebuke: “Get thee away, you brazen hussy!” That he did neither—that he listened to her, and agreed to go to the gate and arrange things properly and legally with the elders of the town—could not be taken for granted. What stands out here, more than anything, is Ruth’s intuitive, instinctive judging of people. Where did this Moabite girl get this clear, true sense of others character?