Shavu'ot I: From Matzah to Bread

So it turns out Shavu’ot is not just the holiday of dairy food, but also the holiday of bread. Bread? Yes, bread. We count 49 days from the holiday of matzah, Passover, to the holiday of bread, Shavu’ot.

On Passover we are forbidden from eating bread or anything else that has risen in some way, but on Shavu’ot, the Torah tells us that the principle offering brought to the Temple is to be the shtay halehem, two loaves of bread, brought in gratitude for the grain harvest.

This movement from matzah to bread cuts at the heart of the spiritual difference between these two holidays. On Pesach, we eat matzah to show that we, like the Israelites when they fled from Egypt, are ready to pick up and run at a moment’s notice. We show that we have a kind of zrizut, alacrity, when it comes to God’s commands. We will not sit and wait for our bread to rise in our comfortable homes, but move quickly when it is time to move.

Shavu’ot teaches a different spiritual message. Yes, in a time of crisis like the time of slavery in Egypt, it is appropriate to run. But one should not always be on the move in relation to God. Part of what is required is the establishment of homes and institutions, the setting up of a daily life dedicated to God. That is precisely what the giving of the Torah aimed to do, to give us a way to put into daily practice our worship of God. The Ten Commandments are not rules to flee by, but rules to live by. They are rules by which to set up a society, a society revolving around belief in God, respect for one’s parents, Sabbath observance, and certain basic rules of human decency. So too the rest of the Torah. The point is not a one-time crisis relationship, but the setting up of everyday lives which live and breathe God’s words within society.

Perhaps that explains the mountain (Sinai) as well. A mountain is physically the opposite of running away; it is stable and permanent, difficult to move. By contrast, the most prominent images of the exodus’ physical spaces are first, the doorposts upon which the Israelites splattered the Passover lamb’s blood, and second, the corridor of water made by the two walls of the Red Sea. These are transitional images, images of movement which form a stark contrast to the sense of stability and institutionalization implied by Mount Sinai.

The name of the holiday, Shavu’ot, meaning “weeks” (referring to the 7 weeks between Passover and Shavu’ot) expresses a similar sense of longevity. This is a holiday which is not so much about the day of the holiday itself as it is about “weeks,” a whole period of time, indeed, an entire way of life. The giving of the Torah is not really a one-time event, like the exodus from Egypt, but a continual event which happens every day we study the Torah and observe its rules. The Torah, like bread, is a daily staple, not an exceptional treat.

This notion of the dailiness of Torah may also explain why we do not have any special actions to perform on this holiday, like the matzah-eating of Passover or the sukkah-dwelling of Sukkot. On Shavu’ot what we celebrate, the Torah, has no symbol and needs no symbol because it is so all-pervasive in our daily lives.

Shavu’ot: The Holiday of the Evil Impulse?
Finally, I want to offer a related but slightly different reading of the difference between Passover’s matzah and Shavu’ot’s bread. The rabbis associate the rising agent in bread dough (se’or shebe’isah) with the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. On Passover we make a special one-time effort to be exceptionally righteous and pious, to completely sublimate our evil inclinations. But such an effort cannot be sustained permanently. Nor should it be. For, as the rabbis also point out, without the evil inclination, the world would not continue to exist; all creative and procreative activities depend on the evil inclination for their impetus. “Were it not for the evil impulse, a man would not build a house, take a wife, or beget children (Genesis Rabbah 9.7).”

On Shavu’ot, what we celebrate is not the negation and sublimation of the evil impulse, but its harnessing for the sake of good. We take the haughtiness of the human spirit’s evil impulse and use it as a leavening agent to make our daily dough rise, to create bread, the staff of life. The Torah does not preach asceticism except as a one-time exceptional enterprise as part of the Passover celebration. Shavu’ot is about the daily life of Torah, a sustainable life that includes and indeed thrives on the evil impulse, but harnesses its creative juices to the good work of Torah in the world.