Shavuot 2023

There are lots of way to think about Shavuot, which begins this Thursday evening. There are, for example, many customs that pertain solely to the festival of Shavuot—the custom of eating dairy foods, for example, or the custom of engaging in nighttime Torah study on the evening before we gather on the first day of the holiday to hear the Ten Commandments read out from the Torah scroll in synagogue. And there are others as well, some widely observed and others less so. The reading of the Book of Ruth is universal, for example, and is part of our observance at Shelter Rock as well. And the chanting of the majestic hymn called “Akdamut Millin,” written in the eleventh century by Rabbi Meir bar Isaac, a contemporary of Rashi who lived in the city of Worms, is a feature of our Shelter Rock worship as well.

But the specific issue I thought I’d write about this week as a way of introducing the festival has to do neither with contemporary ritual nor liturgy, but with the question of inclusivity and exclusivity. For modern Jews such as ourselves, this is a big issue that manifests itself in many different ways. How wide open should our doors be? Should anyone at all ever be deemed unwelcome in our sanctuaries? Should membership in our congregations be predicated on anything other than the wish of an outsider to step inside and take his or her place in our midst? Should Jewishness itself be a criterion…or should non-Jews who are eager to be supportive friends of the Jewish community be permitted to sign on as members too?

Shavuot provides an interesting way to think through those specific issues.

One of the prominent rituals that characterized Shavuot in ancient times was the magnificent procession leading to Jerusalem created by the nation’s farmers bringing their first fruits to the Temple. The Mishnah describes the scene vividly:

[The night before the procession, people] would spend the night in the open street. Early in the morning, an appointed official would say: “Let us arise and go up to Zion, to the house of the Lord our God.” Those who lived near [Jerusalem] would bring fresh figs and grapes, while those who lived far away would bring dried figs and raisins. An ox would go in front of them, his horns bedecked with gold and with an olive-crown on its head. Flutists would join the procession and play until they actually reached the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount, they would take the baskets and place them on their shoulder, then walk as far as the Temple Court. When they got to the Temple Court, and while still holding the baskets on their shoulders, they would recite the passage from the Torah that begins with the words: "I acknowledge this day before the Lord your God that I have entered the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to grant to us” (Deuteronomy 26:3), then continue on until completing the whole passage. When reaching the words, “My father was a fugitive Aramean,” they would take the baskets off their shoulders and hold them by their edges while the priests would place their hands beneath them and wave them. Then they would complete the entire passage, deposit the baskets by the side of the altar, bow and depart.

I’ve always loved that description, especially the image of the horns of the oxen covered with gold and the beasts themselves wearing with olive-branch crowns. But the specific issue I want to write about today has to do with the declaration mandated by Scripture in Deuteronomy 26 that requires the person bringing the first fruit offerings make reference aloud to the Land of Israel as “the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to grant to us.” The Mishnah takes that seriously and concludes that, although converts are obliged to perform all the commandments just like any other Jewish people, a convert bringing the first fruits to the Temple is excused from making the declaration, since to refer to the land as having been given to that person’s ancestors—who were obviously not Jewish people—would constitute a falsehood.

And that offhand ruling sets the stage for a complicated, interesting debate. On the one hand, we have the principle, mentioned countless times in our law codes and legal texts, that converts to Judaism are to be treated precisely as any other Jewish people. They have the same obligations, the same burdens under the law, the same requirements. Yet here we hear the rabbis of old stepping away from that bedrock principle for the sake of honoring the literal meaning of an ancient prayer. It’s an interesting set-up and arguments can be made on both sides: it feels right not to make false distinctions between converts and native-born Jews, but it also feels right to honor converts by not requiring them to recite untruths in prayer—which practice would only debase the larger concept of approaching God through prayer in the context of candor and honesty.

So what should the law be? There were many attempts to answer the question before a final decision was made by Maimonides in the 12^th century. So that was a cool thousand years too late to be of any use to actual converts bringing their first fruits to the Temple. But the specific issue here is masking a dozen other ones hiding just behind it, many of which are fully relevant today. Can a convert without Jewish ancestors recite a prayer that references God as “our God and God of our ancestors”? Can a convert who is specifically not descended from the patriarchs and matriarchs of old recite the first part of the prayer in which Jacob is referenced as “my ancestor”?  And behind all those details is the largest question of all: if the Jewish people are a family, a blood group, a people in the shared-DNA sense of the term, is conversion even really possible? Even people who marry only become their spouses’ parents’ children-in-law, not their actual children!

Enter Rambam, who is willing to base himself (here and in many other places) on the Talmud Yerushalmi, the understudied and under-respected Talmud of the Land of Israel. And so he issues his ruling:

A convert may bring the first fruits and make the declaration, for the Torah (i.e., at Genesis 17:5) states with regard to Abraham: "I have made you a father to a multitude of nations," which verse clearly implies is that he is the divine Parent of all who would enter under the shelter of the divine Presence. (And it for that specific reason that) God’s promise that Israel would one day inherit the Holy Land was given to Abraham first.

There’s a lot there to unpack, but the short version is that Rambam understand that God meant the change of Abram’s name to Abraham specifically to reflect that, henceforth, the man’s destiny would be to become father to a multitude of nations.  I suppose you could interpret that phrase to reflect the fact that Abraham’s other son, Ishmael, became the progenitor of a mighty nation, as did his “other” grandson, Esau. And as also did all six of Abraham’s children with his second wife, Keturah. That interpretive line would make sense, then, because Abraham actually did become the progenitor of many different nations. But Rambam doesn’t go there and instead imagines the Hebrew phrase av hamon goyim (“father of a multitude of nations”) to mean that the Israelite nation, descended from Abraham through his grandson Jacob/Israel, would not in the end be a simple in-house group of family members linked to each other by DNA or, as the ancient would have said, by blood, but would rather be a faith group tied to each other by common adherence to the covenant with God and by matters of faith. The “nations” in “father of a multitude of nations,” therefore, references the variegated nature of the future Jewish people, a people consisting of natural-born Jews and Jews-by-choice.

It's actually a rather startling to see Rambam, the greatest halakhic decisor of all time, considering a mishnah that could not be more clear and coming down against its plain meaning by insisting that it simply does not reflect the law and that a convert to Judaism may indeed recite the declaration.

As we consider similar questions in our Jewish world, we would do well to consider Rambam’s take on the law regarding the first-fruits declaration seriously. People, he is saying almost clearly, who have traditionally been excluded need not permanently be kept out. Careful study of the Scriptural text can lead to all sorts of entry points for all sorts of people. What is requisite is not unflagging allegiance to the simple meaning of the words of Torah, but a supple intellect capable of focusing the words of the Torah through the prism of our own moral consciousnesses to determine if we have plumbed their depths adequately to take their simple meaning as the law. In other words, the task facing the pious is not to memorize a million verses and then be able to recite them by heart, but to develop a feeling, caring heart capable of interpreting the law so that it ends up fully and totally supportive of what we know to be just, kind, and fair.

That we read Ruth on Shavuot only make this point even more strongly. The book is a good tale, but it’s the end that counts—the last few verses in which it is revealed that Ruth, a Moabite convert to Judaism, became the great-grandmother of King David, the greatest of all Israelite kings and the poet whose psalms left an indelible imprint on Jewish life. What Ruth teaches is that, for all blood matters, faith and commitment matter more.