Shavuot
Family Edition

Adapted from “Shavuot Today,” an extract from the Introduction to the Koren Sacks Shavuot Machzor

Shavuot is the second of the three biblical foot festivals (the Shalosh Regalim), falling on the 6th of Sivan (and continuing on 7th of Sivan in the diaspora). Shavuot celebrates the moment when, fifty days after the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish People stood at Har Sinai for the Giving of the Torah. It also celebrates the wheat harvest in Eretz Yisrael.

Shavuot means “weeks”, as it falls seven weeks (a “week of weeks”) after Pesach, the culmination of the 49-day Omer period which began on the second night of Pesach. Because of this, Shavuot is also known as “Pentecost” which means fifty in Greek (it is the fiftieth day after the completion of the counting of 49 days).

Other names for Shavuot found in the Torah are Chag HaKatzir (the Festival of Reaping), and Yom HaBikkurim (Day of the First Fruits) and in the Talmud it is also known as Atzeret (refraining or holding back). This connects Shavuot to Pesach in a similar way that Shemini Atzeret is connected to Succot). We also refer to Shavuot in our prayers as Zeman Matan Torah (the Time of the Giving of the Torah).

While there are no rituals associated with Shavuot in the Torah, there are several beautiful and meaningful customs that have developed to help us celebrate Shavuot. These include Tikkun Leil Shavuot (staying up all night to learn Torah), eating dairy foods, decorating the shul with flowers and greenery, and the reading of Megillat Rut.

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Table of Contents

• Shavuot In a Nutshell
• From the Thought of Rabbi Sacks
• Deep Diving into Megillat Rut
• Shavuot for the Young (and Young at Heart!
  • It Once Happened...
  • A Double-Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe
  • Chidon on the Chag (A Quick Quiz)
• Educational Companion
  • Deep Diving into Megillat Rut
  • It Once Happened...
  • Chidon on the Chag (A Quick Quiz)

TORAH: OUR GREATEST GIFT

On the face of it, Shavuot is a brief festival with few distinctive practices and, at least as far as the Torah is concerned, no specific historical content. But Shavuot is the festival of Jewish identity. Judaism is supremely a religion of the land – the whole of Torah from Avraham to the death of Moshe is a journey toward it – and Shavuot was the supreme festival of the land.

There were agricultural elements on Pesach and Succot also, but Shavuot was the time of the grain harvest and of bringing first fruits to the Temple and declaring:

“My father was a wandering Aramean…. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt…. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

However, from the outset Shavuot was also the festival of the Giving of the Law, seen as the culmination of the seven-week journey that began with Pesach. But every nation had laws, and for much of the biblical era, other issues, political, military and cultural, held centre-stage. The Prophets tirelessly argued that without faithfulness to God and justice and compassion to their fellow humans, Israel would eventually suffer a momentous defeat, but all too few were listening, and the reforms of Kings like Chezekiah and Yoshiyahu proved too little too late.

Only with the experience of the Babylonian exile did people come to see that the law of Israel was unlike that of any other nation – not just because of its content but because of who gave it, when and where. It was given not at Mount Zion in Jerusalem but at Mount Sinai in the desert. The law came before the land. Therefore, though they had lost the land, they still had the law. Though they had lost the country, they still had the covenant. The law of Israel was not like the law of every other nation – the decree of kings or the edict of a legislative assembly. It came from God Himself, the Infinite Eternal. Therefore, it could never be lost or nullified.

This was when the full significance of Shavuot began to come clear. The real miracle was not the land but the law that preceded the land. Ezra and Nechemiah understood this after the Babylonian exile, as did Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai in the midst of the rebellion against Rome. Without them it is highly doubtful whether Jews or Judaism would have survived.

For the better part of two thousand years Jews lost their land, and once again – as it was for the exile in Babylon – it was Torah that sustained the people as a people, giving them the assurance that one day they would return. For in truth this always was our greatest gift: the Torah, our constitution of liberty under the sovereignty of God, our marriage contract with Heaven itself, written in letters of black fire on white fire, joining the infinity of God and the finitude of humankind in an unbreakable bond of law and love, the scroll Jews carried wherever they went, and that carried them. This is the Torah: the voice of heaven as it is heard on earth, the word that lights the world.

SHAVUOT FOR OUR TIME

(Extract from a shiur given by Rabbi Sacks on 24th May 2020 entitled: “A Life of Vertical & Horizontal Responsibility: Shavuot During the Coronavirus Pandemic”)

At Mount Sinai, the Israelites made a covenant with God. He would be their God and they would be His people. But at key moments in Tanach we find another phrase altogether:

At Mount Sinai, the Israelites made a covenant with God. He would be their God and they would be His people.

Moshe says in the Book of Devarim (7:9) “You shall know that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God, who keeps habrit ve’hachessed, (the covenant and the loving-kindness)”; When Shlomo Hamelech dedicates the Bet HaMikdash (I Kings 8:23), he utters the following prayer: “There is no one like You, God, in the heavens above or the earth below shomer habrit ve’hachessed, (keeping the covenant and the loving-kindness)”; And likewise, Nechemiah, when he renews the covenant as the people come back from Babylon (Nechemiah 9:32), says, “The great, mighty, and awesome God, shomer habrit ve’hachessed, (He who keeps the covenant and the loving-kindness).”

That’s a really puzzling phrase, shomer habrit ve’hachessed, the covenant and the loving-kindness. Look, for instance, at the Jewish Publication Society translation, who just translate ‘covenant’. Because the chessed is included in the covenant. If you look at the New International version (which is a very good non-Jewish translation), habrit ve’hachessed is translated as, “the covenant of love.” But of course it doesn’t mean that, it means “covenant and love.” Everyone had a problem in understanding what God does for the Jewish people other than making a covenant with them on Shavuot, at Har Sinai. But if you think about it, the answer’s really quite simple. A covenant is what sociologists and anthropologists call reciprocal altruism. You do this for me, I will do this for you. “You serve Me,” says God, “and I will protect you.” Covenant is always reciprocal and neutral. But that is terribly vulnerable, because what happens if we don’t keep the covenant? The covenant is then rendered null and void.

Just as in Megillat Rut, tragedy and loneliness and isolation are healed by acts of loving-kindness, so have the isolation of so many of us been healed by acts of loving-kindness.

The covenant is not enough. And that is what Moshe was saying, that is what Shlomo Hamelech was saying, that is what Nechemiah was saying. God does not just make a covenant with us. He has a relationship of chessed with us. An unconditional love, which is translated into deeds of kindness to us. The covenant is conditional, but chessed is unconditional.

Maybe ultimately this is why we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot. The Book of Ruth is the book of chessed. We received a covenant at Mount Sinai, but we also received something much more long-lasting and profound, which is God’s unconditional love. And that’s what the book is telling us, that God has love for us, the way Ruth had love for Naomi and Boaz had love for Ruth. Acts of loving-kindness all define our relationship with God. And as the Book of Ruth shows, they should be what define our relationship with one another.

This message resonates for us this year. Just as in Megillat Rut, tragedy and loneliness and isolation are healed by acts of loving-kindness, so have the isolation of so many of us been healed by acts of loving-kindness, acts of neighbourliness, people being in touch, helping us, getting things for us, phoning us up, connecting us by Zoom, showing that they care about us. Those acts of kindness have humanised and lightened our world. Chessed has a redemptive quality. It transforms tragedy into some form of celebration and despair into some powerful form of hope. Let what Ruth did for Naomi and Boaz did for Ruth be with us, as we try to reconnect with family and friends, and those who have been so terribly isolated during recent times. And may we remember that, as well as giving us a covenant at Har Sinai, God gave us a bond of love that is unbreakable. He will never abandon us, let us never abandon Him.

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Adapted from “Ruth: the Book of Loyalty and Love,” an extract from the Introduction to the Koren Sacks Shavuot Machzor

BACKGROUND

The story of Ruth is one of the most beautiful in the Bible. It begins in dislocation and grief. Famine leads Elimelech, together with his wife Naomi and their two sons, to leave their home in Bet Lechem, to go to Moav to find food. There, the sons marry Moavite women, but all three men die, leaving Naomi and her two daughters-in-law childless widows. Naomi decides to return home, and Rut, who had married her son Machlon, insists on going with her. There, in Bet Lechem, in a field at harvest time, Rut meets a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz, who acts kindly toward her. Later at Naomi’s suggestion, Rut asks him to act the part of a kinsman-redeemer. Boaz does so, and he and Rut marry and have a child. The book that begins with death ends in new life. It is a story about the power of human kindness to redeem life from tragedy, and its message is that out of suffering, if transformed by love, can come new life and hope.

The commentators make two primary connections between Rut and Shavuot. The first is seasonal. The key events in the book are set during the barley and wheat harvests, the time of the counting of the Omer and Shavuot itself. The second is substantive. Rut became the paradigm case of a convert to Judaism, and to become a convert you have to enter the covenant of Sinai with its life of the commands: what the Israelites did when they accepted the Torah on the first Shavuot.

THE BOOK OF LOYALTY AND LOVE

All three megillot read on the pilgrimage festivals are about love: the stages of love as we experience it in our growth from youth to maturity to old age. The Song of Songs, read on Pesach, the festival of spring, is about love in the spring: the passion between two lovers that has nothing in it of yesterday or tomorrow but lives in the overwhelming intensity of today. The book is structured as a series of duets between beloved and lover, their voices loaded with desire. There is nothing in it about courtship, marriage, home-building and having children: the world of adult responsibilities. The lovers long simply to be together, to elope.

Kohelet, read on Succot, the festival of autumn, is about love in the autumn of life, as the heat cools, light fades, the leaves fall, and clouds begin to hide the sun. “Live well, with the woman you love,” says Kohelet (9:9). This is love as companionship, and it is rich in irony.

Kohelet is written as the autobiography of Shlomo Hamelech, the King who married seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (I Kings 11:3), and in the end concluded, “And this is what I found: woman is more bitter than death, for she is all traps, with nets laid in her heart; her arms are a prison” (Kohelet 7:26). A thousand wives will not bring you happiness. Faithfulness to one will.

Ruth is about the love at the heart of Judaism, the love of summer, when the passion of youth has been tamed and the clouds of age do not yet cover the sky.

Ruth is about the love at the heart of Judaism, the love of summer, when the passion of youth has been tamed and the clouds of age do not yet cover the sky. Ruth is about love as loyalty, faithfulness, committing yourself to another in a bond of responsibility and grace. It is about caring for the other more than you care about yourself. It is about Ruth setting her own aspirations aside to care for her mother-in-law Naomi, bereaved as she is of her husband and two sons. It is what Boaz does for Ruth. The root a-h-v, “love,” which appears eighteen times in the Song of Songs, appears in Ruth only once. By contrast, the words chessed, loving-kindness, and the verb g-a-l, “to redeem,” do not appear at all in the Song of Songs, but figure in Ruth respectively three and twenty-four times.

The megillot are framing devices that force us into seeing the festivals themselves in a new light. When we read the Song of Songs on Pesach it transforms our understanding of the Exodus from a political event, the liberation of slaves. Kohelet turns Succot into a philosophical reflection on the succah as a symbol of mortality, the body as a temporary dwelling.

It is the sobering story of how Shlomo, wisest of men, sought to deny death by taking refuge in possessions, wives, servants and worldly wisdom, yet at every step he found himself face to face with the brevity and vulnerability of life.

Only at the end did he discover that joy is to be found in simple things: life itself, dignified by work and beautified by love.

Ruth likewise invites us to reframe Shavuot, seeing the making of the covenant at Sinai not simply as a religious or political act, but as an act of love – a mutual pledge between two parties, committing themselves to one another in a bond of responsibility, dedication and loyalty.

The covenant at Sinai was a marriage between God and the Children of Israel. The covenant at Sinai was a bond of love whose closest analogue in Tanach is the relationship between Boaz and Ruth.

One of the most sustained libels in religious history was Christianity’s claim that Judaism was a religion not of love but of law; not of compassion but of justice; not of forgiveness but of retribution. The book of Ruth, read on Shavuot, is the refutation. Judaism is a religion of love, three loves: loving God with all our heart, our soul, and our might (Devarim 6:5); loving our neighbour as ourselves (Vayikra 19:18); and loving the stranger because we know what it feels like to be a stranger (Devarim 10:19).

Judaism is, from beginning to end, the story of a love: God’s love for a small, powerless and much afflicted people, and a people’s love – tempestuous at times to be sure – for God. That is the story of Ruth: love as faithfulness, loyalty and responsibility, and as a marriage that brings new life into the world. That is the love that was consecrated at Sinai on the first Shavuot of all.

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