Torah Study Blog

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot was celebrated this past week at Temple Israel with an informative discussion led by our scholar-in-residence, Professor David Sperling. The holiday is celebrated on the 6th day of the Hebrew month of Sivan, and it marks the anniversary of when God gave the Torah to the Israelites. Some traditional Jews may choose to mark the holiday by eating dairy foods and staying up all night long to study the Torah. Although we in attendance at Professor Sperling’s lecture learned a great deal, we are grateful that he did not foist an all-nighter upon us.

Today in Torah Study, Rabbi Jaech pointed out to us that how we celebrate the holiday of Shavuot is a useful illustration of how religion evolves over time.

In biblical times, Shavuot was a harvest festival. The celebration started when the harvest began and ended when the harvest was over. This is unlike other holidays in the Bible, which are set at fixed dates. But the climate for the biblical Israelites was not the same all over, so the ideal time for the harvest would not have been the same for all the peoples. Additionally, different grains would ripen at different times. For example, barley could ripen a full month before wheat.

Another interesting observation about Shavuot, as compared to other holidays, is that other holidays instruct specific offering guidelines, but for Shavuot the people are supposed to make offerings to God as a “your freewill contribution according [to what] the Lord your God has blessed you” (Deuteronomy 16:10).

The harvest could, literally, represent life and death for the biblical Israelites. If rain or hail came during the harvest it could mean disaster for the people. In trying to find an answer for the bad things that happened, it would have been human nature for the Israelites to wonder if God was punishing them for something. Or, a very successful harvest might be because God was blessing them for something.

The urbanization of the Israelite people necessitated a move away from relying on agricultural cycles. It was at this point that the Rabbis made a decision to assign Shavuot to a fixed date. Their knowledge of the Bible was extensive, and they noted that the Torah claims the Israelites received the Torah on the 3rd new moon (Exodus 19:1). So, they selected that date to celebrate Shavuot.

Exodus describes when the Israelites received the Torah. And the book of Deuteronomy, which is a retelling of the story of the Israelite people, also describes this important moment. The chapters in both Exodus and Deuteronomy have a lot of drama and imagery – so they provide the perfect scenario to base a holiday upon. Some of the more dramatic passages are in Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 5 and are as follows:

• On the third day, a morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled. (Exodus 19:16)

• The Lord spoke those words – those and no more – to your whole congregation at the mountain, with a mighty voice out of the fire and the dense clouds. (Deuteronomy 5:19)

The passages in Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 5 are a sacred story, not a history of the Israelite people. Listed in the Torah, after reading these dramatic passages, come what we refer to today as The Ten Commandments. However, they are not called commandments in the Torah. The Torah refers to them as “utterances” and does not number them. This has led to different religions divided these “utterances” in different ways.

Jews understand the first utterance to be a statement, not a commandment. In both Exodus and Deuteronomy, the first utterance is: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2 and Deuteronomy 5:6). This is the foundational statement of our religious tradition. Be loyal to Yahweh. Yahweh brought you out of Egypt – Yahweh made you! Therefore, you should keep your part of the agreement and worship Yahweh properly.

Many modern Jews may be aware that our Rabbis taught us that there are not just Ten Commandments. Jewish tradition states that there are 613 commandments.

This led our group into a discussion of where the 613 commandments came from. There are many theories for why this number came about. But, Rabbi Jaech believes that no one actually sat down and counted out potential commandments in the Torah. In fact, when trying to account for all 613, it seems that some of our sages may have really been reaching – and this includes the great sage, Maimonides.

Rabbi Jaech believes the number 613 was arrived at in order to provide a good sermon. Over the centuries, sages have used all sorts of ways to count in order to make meaning of the statement. Humans want to be able to peak behind the curtain and find out the mysterious and significant meaning of things. Even if it is just a number, we, as humans, have a natural inclination to try to attach significance to that number.

A commonly accepted reasoning is that there are 365 negative commandments, which correspond with the number of days in a year, identifying things that we should not do (murder, adultery, etc). Rabbi Jaech might deliver a sermon about that by saying, “every day of the year there are temptations that you must resist.”

Then, to get to the number 613, you add 248 positive commandments (serve God, honor your mother and father, etc.) that correspond with the number of parts of the human body. Rabbi Jaech might deliver a sermon about that by saying, “God gave us our bodies, and these are the things we are supposed to do to with our bodies to serve God properly.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter