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Shavuoth Is Coming: Come to Mincha Shabbat and Tikun Leil Shavuoth on June 4th
Very soon, we will be celebrating the festival of Shavuoth, the holiday of matan ve Kaballat HaTorah, the giving and the receiving of the Torah. Our sages ask why the name of “Shavuoth”– “Holiday of Weeks,” and “Yom Bikurim”– “the holiday of first fruits,” are the only names given for it in the Torah itself. Why does it not mention that it’s the “Holiday of the giving of the Torah,” as does the Talmud? Because, they answer, the Torah is teaching us a lesson in humility. Humility is needed to absorb Torah, and therefore it loses no time in teaching it. And because, says another sage, God gives the Torah from the beginning of creation. It was always given from the beginning of time. It is simply that there were no people willing to receive it…that is, until Israel stood willing at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
The festival of Shavuoth has fewer concrete mitzvoth than its companion festivals Pesach and Sukkoth. Still, it is a holiday that seeks to recreate, in a visceral way, the experience of receiving the Torah. Just like at Passover, we must consider that we were the slaves that exited Egypt and there are observances at Shavuoth that seek to place us at Sinai. A midrash tells us that God addresses the Israelites as “you who are standing here today and you who are not standing here today” to teach us that every Jewish soul, past, present and future, stood at Sinai when the Torah was received. We eat a dairy meal to remember how we refrained from meat at the time of the reception of the Torah. The word milk, halav, equals in number value 40, reminding us of the forty days in which Moses spent day and night receiving Torah. And we also consume it, says a sage, to remind us of the argument that Moses gave it the angels when they would not surrender it from their guardianship “You angels, don’t you remember how you were eating milk along with meat when Abraham served it to you. You obviously were not taking this Torah seriously! You don’t deserve it!” Midrashic humor there is very evident, along with the argument for the Jewish people’s receptiveness and selection to receive it.
At Shavuoth we seek to become vehicles of Torah learning, just as the Jews that stood at Sinai had minds and souls fully probed with Torah insights and knowledge, so too we, their childrens’ children, seek to study the Bible in a macroscopic way. The effect of such intense learning is to feel an even deeper kinship with the first Israelites who were infused with the spiritual and the intellectual content of Judaism at Mt. Sinai.
Your presence and your attendance at this year’s Siyum is most coveted. We will begin our short Maariv service at 9:15 pm on Saturday night June 4th. We must wait this long to see the end of the 49th day out in its entirety. This year we will study and discuss excerpts from the Tikkun Leyl Shavuoth beforehand, directly after Mincha Shabbat, which will begin at 7:30pm sharp. Our study session completes with ice cream sundaes, coffee and cake, ending prior to Maariv at 9:15pm. Anyone wishing to study with me after this service is welcome. Or you might set up your computers to join with the USCJ RA Tikkun Leil Shavuoth which goes beyond midnight.
The Berdichever Rebbi once asked why is it that when Moshe counts the people in the book of numbers, it says “as God commanded Moses he counted them at Mt. Sinai” (Numbers 1:19). Usually the phrase is reversed: “Moses did … as God commanded.” He claims it teaches us something additional: that which God commanded (the Torah) is numbered like the Israelites. That is, there are 600,000 letters in the Torah just as there are 600,000 Israelites. That which God instructed is the number of the Jewish people. From this idea our rabbis said that every Jew is like a letter in the Torah scroll. If he or she is vibrant, the letter is clear. If he or she is muted in their faith and practice, the letter can become faded, thus making the entire scroll and the entire Jewish people unfit. All of us must be counted and all of us must play our parts clearly and energetically. Summer beckons but so does your heritage to your Jewish religion. And when we stand up and be counted as we did all of us at Sinai, fantastic things can happen.
Hag Sameach in advance and I hope very much to see you at our Siyyum! You’ll like the sundaes, and you’ll like the lessons learned… I guarantee it!