My dearest sisters and brothers,
This coming Sunday is when Talmidis, Karaites and Samaritans all celebrate Shavuot. So in the run-up to Shavuot, why have we been remembering the 7 parts of God’s Covenant over the last few weeks?
When I was going through my ‘Conversion to Judaism’ course about 30 years ago, one memorable thing that the rabbis who were teaching us told us about Shavuot was, “Before the Temple was destroyed, Shavuot was not about the giving of the Torah; it was only given this meaning by the ancient rabbis after that time.”
Having the curious mind that I have, I asked them, “So what did it mean during Temple times?”
They told me, “No one knows. It probably didn’t have any meaning.”
Although I didn’t say it, my thoughts were, “What?!? Surely God doesn’t tell us to do things for no reason!”
That’s what began my quest to find out what Shavuot meant to Jews during the time of the Prophet Yeshua – because it was an important question to me, as a follower of the teachings of Yeshua. I told myself, ‘If I am to live a life as a Jewish follower of Yeshua, as someone who observes Torah, then I need to know why I am celebrating something. I need to know what God intended for Shavuot, not what human beings made it into. I wanted to know the TRUTH!’
The clues in Scripture
One cultural difference between Talmidis and Rabbinic Jews, is that we read Torah in a 3-year cycle, and Rabbanites read it in a 1-year cycle. Thanks to an early 20th-century edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia, we know exactly how the Torah-portions were divided up in the 3-year cycle.
The three-year cycle was the original cycle that Torah was meant to be read in. In the 6th century BCE, when the final version of Torah was being put together, the chapters were so arranged, that the editor ensured that there was a thematic correspondence between each festival and the portion that was allotted for the Sabbath nearest to it.
This logically means that, if Shavuot had any meaning 2,500 years ago, when the final edition of Torah was being fixed, then we should find clues in the passages that are read at Shavuot during each of the 3 years of the cycle.
And indeed we do! Here are the three Torah-portions:
Genesis 12:1-13:18 – God swears a Covenant with Abraham
Exodus 24:1-18 – the Covenant with Israel is ratified; the festival of Shavuot is also mentioned previously in Ex 23:16
Numbers 17:16 – 18:24 – The offerings of First-fruits and the gifts to the Levites
The common theme is the Covenant. Furthermore, the haftarah readings chosen in ancient times to accompany these Torah portions – the readings from the books of the Prophets – all concentrate on the history of Israel’s relationship with God, and on the blessings that God has promised for Israel as part of the Covenant, rather than on the giving of Torah (Joshua 24:3-18, Isaiah 60:17-61:9, Ezekiel 44:15-16).
After listening to a podcast given by the famous Karaite theologian, Nehemiah Gordon, about the connection of the Covenant to Shavuot, his views confirmed my own – that the festival of Shavuot is a celebration of our Covenant with Yahveh, not about the giving of the Torah. The ancient Pharisees were sadly unable to see the link, because they were using a 1-year cycle, not the 3-year cycle that the Torah was specifically designed to be read by.
So when was the Torah given?
You would think that such a huge deal like the giving of the Torah, and like the manifestation of the Glory of Yahveh on Mt Horeb (which is actually the central salvation-event of the Israelite faith), would be given more prominence in the commandments of the Torah.
You would be right – and it actually does. It even gives us the exact date – the exact day of the year – on which Torah was given. Again, the ancient rabbis couldn’t see it, because they believed themselves to be infallibly correct in their interpretation of Shavuot as the date of the giving of Torah.
Rabbinic Jewish translations of Ex 19:1 therefore read as, “In the third month after the Israelites left Egypt – on that very day – they came to the desert of Sinai.”
The niggling words, ‘on that very day’ are strangely out of place, and have been interpreted to be referring to ‘the day the Israelites left Egypt’. But this interpretation causes textual problems (which I won’t go into here).
The Hebrew word for ‘month’ is the same for ‘New Moon Day’ – chodesh. If you therefore translate the verse as, “On the third New Moon day after the Israelites left Egypt – on that very day – they came to the desert of Sinai”, then the phrase ‘on that very day’ can be understood as being there to make us realise that chodesh means ‘New Moon day’, and not ‘month’.
This would make the month in which the Israelites arrived in the Sinai as the Fourth-month (Tammuz), not the Third-month (Sivan, the month in which Shavuot always falls). The Theophany took place on the 3rd day of the Fourth-month (see Ex 19:11).
Are there any commandments telling us to observe the date of the Theophany (the Manifestation of the Glory of God)?
Yes, there are! The most important words in the commandment below are in bold:
Dt 4:9-10a says, “Only take the utmost care, and watch yourselves diligently all the days of your life, in case you forget the things which you have seen with your own eyes, and they fade away from your memory; rather, make them known to your children and to your grandchildren – the day when you stood before Yahveh your God at Horeb …” It then goes on to describe the entire experience of the Theophany.
The Hebrew verb used here for ‘make known’ – hoda` – is a verb which has the linguistic nuance of ‘to teach by way of experience’. This means that all the things that happened during the Theophany – the gathering of the people, the hearing of God’s words, seeing the fire and cloud, the relating of the Ten Commandments, and so on – these are not just things we happen to incidentally read about, when we stumble upon this passage at some point once every three years; they are things that we should, in some way, experience for ourselves on a regular basis each year, and teach to future generations what we have experienced, so that we do not ever forget them.
Just as we read the entire story of the Exodus in order that we should fix the journey out of Egypt into our memory, as if we had experienced it ourselves, Dt 4:9 implies that so too should we retell and remember the wondrous Theophany on Mt Horeb – the central salvation event of the entire Israelite faith – as if we had experienced that ourselves as well. We are to do this, “in order that [we] might learn to have a reverent respect for [God] all the days that [we] live on the earth, and so that [we] may so teach [our] children” (Dt 4:10b).
For this reason, some Talmidis like to celebrate this day – the 3rd of Tammuz – as a ‘Day of Joy’ (Num 10:10). It is a day of devotional prayer, when we celebrate the Manifestation of the Glory of Yahveh (the Theophany), and the giving of the Torah. It usually falls during the month of June each year (in 2023, for example, it is expected to fall around 21-22 of June).
The pieces of the puzzle
If you put the pieces of any jigsaw puzzle in the wrong places, or if you force the pieces to fit where they won’t go, then you will never see the bigger picture, no matter how forcefully you insist you are right.
In my work as a scribe, interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures, I have stuck to the technique of letting the author of any given book interpret his work for me – that is, seek out the meaning that the original writer ascribed to what he was writing. I have never been tempted by the technique that most people use, that of imposing our own meaning onto scripture, because that way, things only get messy – and accumulate more and more messiness as time goes on.
Only by being faithful to the original Message, does interpretation of the Miqra (the Hebrew Bible) become easier.
What do we celebrate at Shavuot, if not Torah?
There are three things that Shavuot was originally meant to be about:
1. thanksgiving for the wheat harvest in the Land
2. thanksgiving for the first-fruits of our crops, and for the firstborn of our domestic animals in the Land
3. remembering the ongoing history of our covenantal relationship with God
Because most of us here do not live in the Land of Israel, it is the third meaning that we Talmidis focus on. In the US, you have a thanksgiving meal in November, but in the Israelite religion, our supreme thanksgiving meal is during the festival of Shavuot, when we give thanks to Yahveh for everything that Yahveh has blessed us with, through the promises of the Covenant, as a result of living the Covenant.
peace and eternal blessings
your brother
Shmuliq