Shavuote, the Feast of Weeks

by Rabbi David Hartley Mark

            Say “Pesach,” and most knowledgeable Jews will respond: “The Seder meal! Matzote! Horseradish. Four Questions.” As for Sukkot, the answers should come equally quickly: “Build the Sukkah; try to eat, or possibly ‘dwell therein’ for the period of the holiday—and small children especially love a sleep-out in the little grass shack. Their back yard suddenly becomes a place of mystery, and every cricket’s-chirp is magnified to the trumpet of a bull elephant. Kids adore the lulav and etrog with their exoticity, like a touch of the Holy Land in their hometown.”

            But Shavuote? True, we extol it as the “Time of the Giving of the Torah,” but Torah Study is incumbent upon us all the days of the year, not just the two- (or one-) day-period of this holiday. Shavuote boasts no Sukkah (though the burgeoning spring would appear a natural time to build one, not the fall, and there are reasons for that), dreidels, or matzo. If pressed, we respond, “Oh, and dairy. Eat dairy on Shavuote.”

            This single mitzvah for Shavuote, that of dairy consumption, hearkens back to several sources:

1. It is the holiday on which eating dairy earns us the same mitzvah-credit as Torah study. In the Song of Songs, learning Torah is compared to eating milk and honey, as in “Honey and milk are upon your tongue.”

2. We try to mimic the lifestyle of the professional Talmid Chacham, or Torah Scholar, who is too poor to afford meat, except perhaps on Shabbat. By eating dairy, we become symbolically learned.

3. Finally, when Moses returned from Sinai and taught the Israelites Torah for the first time, he included the kosher laws. The Israelites, careful to perform God’s will after the Golden Calf debacle, realized that their meat was traif. Accordingly, they ate veggie for one day, giving themselves time to slaughter beasts and prepare fresh kosher meat.

It is clear, therefore, how much holiness inheres to a cheese kugel when eaten on this yuntef.

I am sure that somewhere amid the kugel, blintzes, cheese pirogen, and other delights, we will be able to discover new dimensions of Judaism.

Chag Shavuote Same’ach!

Rabbi David Hartley Mark

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