On what day was the Torah given? On what date do we celebrate the festival of Shavuot? Seemingly simple questions, yet ones for which the Torah’s text provides no clear answer.
In a fascinating passage, Rabbi S. R. Hirsch notes that Shavuot is unique among all biblical festivals in that no calendar date is prescribed for it – rather, it is observed seven weeks from the omer offering. Combining a selection of Talmudic traditions and calculations, he demonstrates that the Torah was most likely understood to have been given on the 51st day after the Exodus. Thus the 50th day from the omer is in fact the day BEFORE the Lawgiving (which the Torah identifies as having taken place on the sixth or seventh day of the third month).
As we also examine in Judaism Reclaimed, the Lawgiving itself was in no way concentrated on that day at Sinai – the Torah was transmitted in the course of 40 years. Some of its most important features may only have been taught to the people on the Plains of Moav decades later. Both R’ Hirsch and Rambam emphasise that the primary significance of the Sinaitic spectacle was “in order that the people hear when I speak to you, and they will also believe in you forever”. Rambam understood that the people somehow participated in Moshe's prophecy to an extent that authenticated and legitimised all of his Lawgiving over the subsequent decades. In this way, perhaps, the entire Torah can be said to have ‘originated from Sinai’.
On a separate note, another favourite Jewish-school-Shavuot teaching which Judaism Reclaimed addresses vividly depicts God holding Mount Sinai above the nation and threatening it with destruction if it fails to accept the Torah. Maharal asks why this menacing threat was necessary in light of the Jews’ faithful utterance of “na’aseh venishma” (“we shall do and we shall listen”). His suggested answer is that the timing of this threat was intended to impart a clear message that the Torah’s laws are absolute and binding. It was thus required to reinforce the Jews’ faithful acceptance so that they should not imagine that their voluntary acceptance of the Torah could at any time be subject to reversal.
But can we relate this midrashic teaching in any way to the Torah’s actual description of events at Sinai?
While the nation’s declaration of “na’aseh venishma” is widely quoted, it is normally done so without the immediately preceding words: “And he took the Book of the Covenant and read it within the hearing of the people, and they said, "All that the Lord spoke we will do and we will hear."” A midrash Mechilta, along with other commentaries (see also Devarim 28:69), identify this “Book of the Covenant” as being none other than the fearsome litany of rebukes and curses enumerated in parashat Bechukotai – described by the Torah as one of the final passages transmitted at Sinai.
Might the vivid midrashic depiction of the mountain being held threateningly above the nation’s heads be an allusion to the significance of the tochachah passage of rebuke at Sinai? If so, it could then be construed as an embodiment of the message that our relationship with God and the Torah is premised not on our fickle and fluctuating feeling and fortunes but on an accepted sacred duty – and privilege – which we, as Jews, bear and carry with us throughout our lives.
First posted to Facebook 27 May 2020, here.
