Shavuot and the role of The Jewish People
Question: When trying to understand the meaning of the Jewish Holidays, Pentecost is the most difficult to grasp. What is the essential teaching of the holiday of Pentecost?
- Samuel Robbins, North Dakota
Shavuot: G-d’s covenant with Israel
From the genesis of the universe to the end of time, a Jew can point to one moment as the crux of all creation – the revelation of the Torah to the Jewish People on Mount Sinai. Shavuot, known in English as Pentecost, is one of the three main Holidays during which the Jewish people would converge upon Jerusalem at the Holy Temple and worship as a nation. Every Jewish holiday is clearly defined in the Torah as a specific date on the Jewish calendar other than this mysterious and awe inspiring festival. Shavuot is not assigned as a specific date but rather is defined as being fifty days after the second day of Passover. Our rabbis explain that Shavuot is dated solely in relation to Passover because the essences of these two holidays are intrinsically dependent upon one another.
Many view the Holiday of Shavuot as the climax of Jewish History. Our sages say that the entirety of the Jewish People agreed in unison to receive G-d’s Torah, marking Shavuot as the first and last time that all Jews have agreed on anything. On a deeper level, the moment the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai they were forever differentiated from all other nations in the world, officially chosen for their divine task, and given the purpose for their existence.
In Exodus 19:5-6, G-d instructs Moses “Now therefore, if you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then you shall be my own treasure among all peoples; for all the earth is mine; And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests (Kohanim), and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the people of Israel”. To understand this divine designation, one must understand the role that the Priest, or Kohen, plays in Judaism. In the Jewish Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily in our days, Jews would come from throughout the Land to offer the prescribed sacrifices at the instructed times. The sacrificial work was as exalted as it was dangerous and could only be performed by the Kohen, with purity of thought and intent, in the Temple courtyard. Jews from any of the other eleven tribes could only approach G-d in this way through the Kohen who effectively served as the conduit between G-d and the Jewish People. As G-d explains to Moses in the above passage, all of the Jewish People serve as Kohanim, priests, to the entire world. When Isaiah extols the Jewish People as “A Light unto the Nations”, the source of that light is the G-d of Israel, who is using the Nation of Israel as his vehicle through which he is revealed to the world.
The task at hand is a formidable one and no less applicable to a Jew alive today as one who personally witnessed the revelation. The Torah is the instruction manual given to the Jewish people teaching us how to be proper vessels for this divine light to enter the world. There are 613 commandments to which the Jews must adhere, guard, study, and seek to understand. The volumes of depth and detail associated with each commandment take a lifetime to begin understanding, hence our nickname as “People of the book”. Between keeping the laws and studying them, Torah comprehensively permeates the life of every observant Jew leaving no detail untouched and no act unsanctified.
One could understand the resistance to such a proposal. At first glance it may seem that after leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah at Sinai, the Jewish people have merely traded one slavery for another. Why would one voluntarily accept these oppressive laws from an invisible G-d whose existence can not be quantitatively proven? And so is born the atheist movement under the banner of freedom and self-determination.
One should not be fooled into the accepted assumption that those who believe in G-d are old fashioned and superstitious while those who do not are the rational and enlightened who have emancipated themselves from such supernatural drivel. The truth is that there are those who believe in G-d and those who believe there is no G-d. Both are beliefs and both are based on faith. It is not difficult to determine the agenda of those who believe the latter. The vehement argument espousing a G-dless evolution is not abstract or academic, but has tangible ramifications that drastically affect the world as we know it. The agenda of evolutionary advocates is very simple – we are descended from monkeys and hence no more is demanded of us than our primate parents or their paramecium ancestors. The assertion made in the holy text of “Ethics of our Fathers” that there is an “eye that watches, an ear that hears, and all deeds are recorded in a book” is reviled by those who want no G-d. For them, there is no absolute truth - each person decides his truth for himself, essentially declaring himself his own G-d.
The shame is that the freedom that the atheists seek is a fleeting illusion. By relegating the world solely to physicality one is a enslaving himself to that paradigm. There is no reward and punishment, no justice, no creator, and no soul. All man has is his body and his life should be dedicated to amassing as much power, wealth, and earthly pleasures as possible. The laws of nature and the element of chance reign supreme in such a reality, and a lifetime dedicated to acquiring these elements will inevitably be exposed as futile when the desperately pursued happiness, if achieved at all, proves as ephemeral as the object which provided it.
True freedom is transcending the limitations of materialism and physicality. By understanding that the body is a garment and the soul is eternal one can lift the veil from our world and see the artwork of G-d. On Passover the Jewish people mark our redemption from physical slavery. However, the epidemic of family-neglecting workaholics in the Western world shows us that we often trade externally imposed shackles for voluntary ones. Shavuot grants purpose to our physical freedom. Through the Torah, the Jewish people remove the shroud of physicality and eliminate the yoke of “nature”. For a smoker enslaved to his addiction the Sabbath is a day of freedom and to a family separated by the alluring distractions of our world the Sabbath is a day of reunion. The Torah elevates our bodies to be worthy of divine dialogue with the laws of Kashrut and our language worthy of divine praise with the laws of guarding our speech. Without the Torah, the initial liberation of Passover would have no purpose and the Nation of Israel would have no function. For the Jewish people, Shavuot is the celebration of our very existence.
This is an excellent article. As you know, G-d told Moses to tell Pharoah, “Let My people go, that they may worship(serve) Me.” The liberation from Egypt was for a purpose; the fulfillment of G-d’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to make their descendents a great nation and bless all the world.