Weekly Torah Reading: Shavu‘ot, June 12, 2024

Half the Story

 

The festival of Shavu‘ot, which starts tonight, commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. It is marked nowadays with special celebrations and readings in synagogue, and many Jews stay up all night to devote themselves to studying the Torah.

Surprisingly, however, the Torah’s own description of Shavu‘ot presented it as an agricultural festival, the “Day of the First Fruits” (Num 28:26) It marked the beginning of the wheat harvest, which occurred seven weeks (Heb. shavuot) after the beginning of the barley harvest (Leviticus 23:15-16).

 

Why should the Torah have stressed the agricultural side of this festival and not the giving of the Torah? That event was indeed connected to this festivalbut you had to be a careful reader to notice why. The Torah recounts (Exod 19:1) that “on the third new moon after the Israelites’ departure from Egypt, on that very day, they entered the wilderness of Sinai.” Six days later, they arrived at Mount Sinai and began to receive the Torah. Indeed, the fact that Shavu‘ot falls on the sixth day of that month—whereas Passover and Sukkot fall in the middle of the month, on the fifteenth day—suggested that the dating of Shavu‘ot was designed deliberately to match the day of the giving of the Torah.

 

But beyond this connection is a greater lesson about the Torah itself. Rabbinic Judaism consistently presents the Torah as consisting of two parts. The first part—called the “Written Torah”—consists of the words themselves as written on the Torah’s pages. The second part consists of the traditions and interpretations which accompanied those written words and which were ultimately preserved in the Talmud and midrash.

Those traditional interpretations contained in Talmud and midrash are known collectively as the Torah she-be’al peh, the “Oral Torah,” because they were designed to be passed on orally, alongside the Written Torah by word of mouth. To think otherwise would be, from a Jewish standpoint, a form of literalism—one might say fundamentalism— that is quite alien to Judaism.

 

Indeed, the special prayers of Shavu‘ot repeatedly describe it not as an agricultural festival, but as “the time of the giving of the Torah,” and if you think about it, you’ll realize that this description contains a hidden message. At its heart is the idea that the words of the Written Torah tell only half the story.

 

Mo‘adim leSimhah (Happy Festival!)