THE TWIN THEMES OF SHAVUOT

Rabbi Neil Gillman, Professor of Jewish Philosophy at JTS

(Originally published in Jewish Week, 6/2005)

 

What does the Shavuot festival celebrate?  The offering of the first fruits of the soil in gratitude to God?   A harvest festival?  The revelation of the Torah at Sinai?  A festival "of weeks" that occurs seven weeks after Passover?  One of the three pilgrimage festivals?  All of the above?

 

The Shavuot liturgy (as in the Amidah and the Kiddush) identifies it as "the season of the giving of our Torah."  Echoing this theme, the Torah reading for the first day is Exodus 19-20, the canonical narrative of the revelation of the Torah at Sinai.  Also, both of the haftarot describe theophanies, God's appearance to a prophet: on the first day of Shavuot, Ezekiel's vision of God's mysterious chariot; on the second day, Habakkuk's terrifying vision of God's presence on the wings of a storm.

 

But the Torah reading for the second day is Deuteronomy 15-16, which describes the yearly round of festivals, including a reference to "the Feast of Weeks," an agricultural festival that is to be celebrated at the Temple in Jerusalem seven weeks after the early harvest (note well "harvest," not seven weeks after Passover).

 

On both festival days, the Maftir reading is from Numbers 28, which echoes the reference to "the Feast of Weeks," and further specifies that on this day we bring an offering of new grain to the Lord.  Exodus 23:16 also refers to a "Feast of the Harvest of the first fruits of your work."

 

Elsewhere, Leviticus 23:10-16 refers to a festival that we are to celebrate by counting seven complete weeks after bringing "the first sheaf of the harvest," or from "the day after the shabbat" -- with a lower case "s", as this refers to something other than our weekly Shabbat – by bringing "first fruits to the Lord."

 

So other than Exodus 19-20, these four references to our festival do not suggest any association whatsoever with the giving of the Torah.  In these passages it is purely a nature festival that acknowledges God's gift of the fruits of the earth, a festival that occurs seven weeks after the early harvest.  Hence its name "Shavuot" (literally, "weeks").

 

So how did we get from this nature festival to the giving of the Torah?  In two stages.  First, the rabbinic interpretation of the phrase "after the shabbat" (in Leviticus 23) understands shabbat to be Passover.  This is why we begin counting the 49 days of the Omer on the night following the first day of  Passover (at the second Seder in the Diaspora).  Shavuot then occurs seven weeks after that, or on the 50th day after the first day of Passover.

 

Second, there is one further calculation.  In Exodus 19-1, we are told "on the third month after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on that very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai."  By simple calculation, since the Exodus occurred on the 14th day of the first month, the Israelites reached the Sinai wilderness six weeks after the Exodus.  This enables the rabbis to claim that the Ten Commandments were revealed six days later.  Exodus 19:15-16 accounts for three of those days, the third being Shavuot.

 

What happened here is that the post-biblical tradition superimposed a momentous historical event on the biblical agricultural festival.  Our liturgy continues to reflect the interweaving of these two themes, but there is no question that in the popular imagination, history triumphed over nature.  To us, Shavuot is simply "the season of the giving of our Torah."  Thus the Torah reading for the first day of Shavuot (and on the single day of Shavuot in Israel) has none of the agricultural passages but rather Exodus 19-20, the narrative of the Sinai revelation.

 

That tension between Shavuot as a celebration of history or of nature is reflected, however ironically, in one further passage.  Deuteronomy 26:5-10 was the liturgical passage recited by our ancestors when they presented the first fruits of the land to the priest at the Jerusalem Temple.  It is a simple recitation of the history of the Israelite community from the Patriarchs up to the entry into the Promised Land, and it is familiar to us because we recite it every year as the heart of the Passover Haggadah.

 

But read this text and you will see that notably absent from this historical narrative is any reference whatsoever to one major historical event – the giving of the Torah at Sinai.  The first fruits theme is there, appropriately, but not a word about Sinai.

 

What is there, and what connects the two major themes of our festival -- the offering of the first fruits and the giving of the Torah -- is gratitude to God who is the Lord both of nature and of history, and whose manifold gifts, both of the land and of Torah, we must celebrate daily.