In so many ways we live in a bleak and difficult time. And as always, we address life somewhere between the constraints and opportunities that reality presents to us and the choices that we make in the face of that reality. I think about that dynamic tension in the light of the Festival of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and also celebrates the barley harvest and the beauty of summer days. That same coupling — of Torah’s revelation, on the one hand, and natural/agricultural reality on the other — is found quintessentially in parsha Behar, which begins, interestingly enough, with this same pivot. God speaks to Moses at Mount Sinai saying, “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘When you come to the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath to the Lord.’”

The rabbis of old posed an interesting question about this odd juxtaposition: “What does the revelation at Mount Sinai have to do with the year of letting our fields lie fallow during the Shemita year, during the sabbatical year?” When I was in rabbinical school (slightly after the Iron Age), I was taught that these verses reflect the opposition between the natural world and civilization, that Shemita has to do with our living in harmony with nature, and that Mount Sinai is an artificial imposition on nature for the sake of (unnatural) morality. In that perspective, Shavuot marks the supremacy of ethics over nature: The giving of Torah imposes itself on a moment of harvest, creating morality in the unnatural display of divine power.

I no longer see a deep dichotomy between morality and nature. Instead, I’ve come to believe that seeing these clusters in opposition is, in fact, the signal mistake of Western civilization: that we never step outside of nature, that our morality itself is an evolutionary product, that we as mammals bubbled up from the experiences of all of our ancestors going all the way back. 

It’s not so much nature versus civilization or creation versus revelation. Instead, God provides the backdrop of creation, and within creation invites us to innovate goodness. We find ourselves living in a natural world that we did not choose or create, and the pertinent question is: what are we going do with the world we find ourselves in? How are we going to make it beautiful and blessed and joyous? How are we going make it possible so that we and our loved ones and those who come after us will be able to thrive in this world?

Sinai offers the guidebook for making good choices in the world. Shavuot is all about integrating the two into a grand synthesis of creation and revelation together.

Shemita, in that light, is what we do to keep nature vibrant. Sinai offers the guidebook for making good choices in the world. Shavuot is all about integrating the two into a grand synthesis of creation and revelation together.

Shavuot reminds us that we as a community must, despite the challenges, continue to lean into curiosity, possibility, compassion, and love. In life, we all face mighty constraints. We participate in communities that already have a history. They already have a culture. They already have wounds and challenges and traumas. We engage with a society that has trauma at every turn. And we live in an age full of fiscal and existential threats that leave us all in a brutal difficult place. 

Back when our species was emerging from the primal sludge, we developed a fear or fight response that served us well. After all, if you’re confronting a saber-toothed tiger, that is no time for nuance. But the contemporary challenge is that we now live eternally in fight or flight. As a result, we are drowning in anxiety, tension, and despair, heightened by social media round-the-clock news, and whipped into a frenzy by advocates so relentlessly partisan that it becomes a sin to listen to someone with whom you don’t agree. 

 And so how do we, in such a time, carve out a path of life? The Torah offers a lifeline, and a command: “Choose life.” Not because that choice is self-evident; it’s actually hard to do. In a world in which everyone is spoiling for a fight, how do we choose life? How do we stand for love? How do we, in a world of conflict, insist that there’s another way? How do we affirm that this alternative path is a way, not of weakness, but of strength? 

Let’s keep affirming the clarion words of Joshua, who is echoing, in turn, the words of his teacher, Moses: “Be strong and courageous. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be dismayed.”

Now I want to point out the bad news hidden in the call to be courageous: nobody says that to someone who’s about to face something really unpleasant. In the real world, there will be serious challenges, and they will be hard. The greatest danger will not be that we can’t overcome them, because we will be able to overcome them. The greatest danger is that we are all prone to despair. We are all easily victimized by our own sense of being squelched. We abandon home, assuming that those who are challenging us are destroying us and, in our terror, we allow ourselves to be remade in their image. 

Don’t let the haters alienate us from our truest nature. Don’t despair. Don’t surrender. Don’t become remade with the rigidity and the frailty of the extremists, our true enemies. The best way to fight back is to stay broad-hearted, to stay flexible and open and resilient, to be able to affirm their humanity even as we oppose their injustice. 

To all of us, I bless us 

• That we are able to step into the world with open and flexible hearts. 

• That we build communities of care and presence and diversity. 

• That we reach out beyond our borders to find and to create coalitions of well-meaning people with whom we may differ on important points, but who understand the centrality of affirming humanity in a first place. 

And in holding these values together, I bless us that we will build in our hearts, with our very lives, tabernacles of purity and of holiness, in which those who are under our care will experience the embrace of angels. We will purify the sanctuaries of our souls; we shall keep the eternal light shining.

And I bless us that those who are in the outer courtyard will remain there, outside.

Rabbi Dr Bradley Shavit Artson, a Contributing Writer for The Jewish Journal, holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He is also dean of the Zacharias Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe. 

We can agree on many things when it comes to the holiday of Shavuot: Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi in the former’s eponymous book is profoundly inspiring. The rabbinic intern who gives the 3:30 a.m. lecture at your local synagogue’s all-night learning program is a good team player. And the cheesecake served for dessert is a gastronomical challenge to those of us who are lactose intolerant.

What has long been debated, however, is, well … when we celebrate Shavuot, and why.

The Talmud relates that the rabbis disagreed with another group of Jews known as the Boethusians about the date the Bible dictated for the holiday’s observance. “And you shall count for you from the morrow after the day of rest, from the day that you brought the sheaf [omer] of the waving; seven weeks shall there be complete,” reads Leviticus’ 23rd chapter. To the rabbis’ rivals, the count towards Shavuot was to begin the first Sunday following Passover. The rabbinic perspective, on the other hand, determined that the kick-off of the seven-week cycle is the day after Passover’s initial holy-day, a Sabbath-like day of rest.

Even after traditional Judaism standardized the post-Passover’s-first-day position, the festival’s meaning was hardly finalized. Though the Torah ascribes to Shavuot the aforementioned agricultural significance, the Sages concluded the festival actually commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments amidst the fire and brimstone of Sinai. After all, if one counts fifty days after the 16th of Nissan, you land on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan, conventionally believed to be the date in which the Israelites received those divinely-engraved tablets. Alas, not if you’re Rabbi Yossi. He insisted that Moses descended the mountain clutching those precious commandments on the seventh of Sivan, not the sixth, calling into question Shavuot’s numerical alignment with the day of revelation.

Centuries before these controversies, around the time those hearty Maccabees took up arms against the oppressive Seleucid Greeks, a Second Temple-era Jewish writer composed the Book of Jubilees. Purporting to be a version of Genesis and parts of Exodus dictated by an angel to Moses and situating every story it tells within a certain year of the 50-year Jubilee cycle, the book presents its own radical take on Shavuot’s significance. According to Jubilees’ author, the festival occurs on the 15th of Sivan, and is premised not on “weeks” but on promises, or oaths, which the Hebrew “shavua” can also mean.

The Book of Jubilees places Shavuot’s origin in the first recorded oaths in history. After washing away the earth’s evil with a flood, God promised Noah that never again would the world be destroyed. He also permitted mankind to eat meat, while forbidding blood to be consumed along with it, a commandment Jubilees has Noah and his children swearing to uphold. “For this reason,” records Jubilees, “it has been ordained and written on the heavenly tablets that they should celebrate Shavuot during this month — once a year — to renew the covenant each and every year.” Likely, Jubilees connected covenant to blood following the book of Exodus’ 34th chapter recounting that Moses sprinkled blood on the Israelites following the revelation at Sinai, when Moses stated “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord now makes with you concerning all these commands.”

Following in the post-flood footsteps of this initial promise between God and his loyal subjects, Jubilees informs its readers that crucial events in the lives of the patriarchs occurred on the date of the holiday. God changed Avram’s name to Abraham then, and it’s also the day Isaac was born. Isaac and Ishmael joined together in a feast on Shavuot (an episode invented whole cloth by Jubilees) and Jacob received the covenantal blessing from his father Isaac, as well. Shavuot is also Judah’s birthday, the day that Jacob made a treaty with Laban, and the day God told Jacob that He would protect him on the journey down to Egypt.

The covenant at Sinai that is commemorated on Shavuot, according to this reading, is just the latest example of the loyalty between God and his people, a bond strengthened over and over again, across the generations.

Likely, suggests Yeshiva University’s Professor Ari Mermelstein, Jubilees has Shavuot’s observance date back for centuries to offer strength to the Jews of its time. With the oppressive Seleucid Greeks running the political show, the Israelites in the second century BCE might have been convinced that God had abandoned them. Fear not, Jubilees seems to assure its readers, God is still loyal to his covenant, as he has always been. As Mermelstein puts it, “Sinai emerges as the latest affirmation of a single covenant … God may punish Israel for their sins, but the existence of a unilateral pact that extends back to creation [i.e the time of Noah] will eventually compel a reconciliation between the parties.” As the former Harvard and Bar Ilan University professor James Kugel elaborates, in Jubilees’ view, “things really did not begin at Sinai but with Israel’s ancestors – especially Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God has established his early covenants with them – with them and with their descendants, that is, with us, the Jews of Jubilees’ own day. We were God’s people long before the Sinai covenant, we worshipped Him back then in the same way we worship Him now, and we will remain His people forever.”

While debates may have long defined Shavuot, Ruth’s promise of unceasing devotion to the divine is one that Jews throughout our history – from Jubilees’ era to today – continue to have in common.

While Jubilees’ bizarro version of midrash might seem strange, the spiritual sentiment it expresses remains resonant. The rabbis ended up codifying Shavuot’s contemporary observance on a different date and made no connection between its commemoration of the giving of the Torah and the actions of Noah and our forefathers. But we share with this ancient book’s author a commitment to the covenant with God and His Torah, despite countless historical trials and tribulations. While Jubilees won’t be read in your synagogue over the holiday, we will hear once again Ruth say to Naomi “Your God shall be my God.” While debates may have long defined Shavuot, Ruth’s promise of unceasing devotion to the divine is one that Jews throughout our history — from Jubilees’ era to today — continue to have in common.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”