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Shavuot is a brief festival with few distinctive practices and, at least as far as the Torah is concerned, no specific historical content.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 towards it – and Shavuot was the supreme festival of the land. There were agricultural elements on Pesaḥ and Sukkot 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 Pesaḥ. 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 for their fellow humans, Israel would eventually suffer a momentous defeat, but all too few were listening, and the reforms of kings like Ḥizkiyahu and Yeshayahu 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 Neḥemiah understood this after the Babylonian exile, as did Rabban Yoḥanan 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 the 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.
☛ REFLECT
How did the Torah help the survival of the Jewish people after they were exiled from the land?