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.”
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