Shavuot: A time for Jews to become the people God envisions us to be

I once mentioned to someone close to me that “reading is my secret weapon.”

Curious, and being a thoughtful, intelligent person, he asked me to elaborate. I explained that while I have never actually slayed a dragon, reading books placed me not just in the boots of a dragon slayer but into the very heart and mind of one.

Through the books I have read, I have traveled through time, committed murder, battled addiction, got the girl, saved the president – and even the world. 

I have led daring missions into enemy territory, blasted off into space, flown through the sky like a bird, and died a thousand deaths. I have lusted, loathed, and been feared; I have suffered poverty, xenophobia, alienation, and racism. 

I have floated down the Mississippi River on a raft, led a revolution, lost my innocence, found forgiveness, gained redemption, and searched for buried treasure. 

I have manipulated markets, exploited the poor and working class while making millions off the backs of their labor.

I witnessed my father defend a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, and felt trapped in a marriage to a man I did not love by society’s crushing expectations.

I burned books, stole great works of art, and used a tesseract. I have lived in Utopia and suffered dystopia. I have built cathedrals that have endured centuries, and liberated millions from oppression. I have seen pigs dressed in men’s clothing walking on two legs, been a prisoner in Auschwitz, and liberated Jerusalem while living for two years alone in a cabin beside a beautiful pond. 

A man who has done all this can do anything!

AND YET, even with all these encounters, through reading, I do not know our purpose here or understand humanity’s place in the cosmos. The true meaning to life evades me, despite all of these experiences. The problem of suffering persists, God remains incomprehensible to me, and my soul still aches for connection with the divine.

While all the books I have read have deepened my understanding of the human condition and better equipped me to search for answers, the answers themselves elude me. These questions can be wrestled with through literature, but they cannot be resolved by it.

This is why we study Torah. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz made the point that while others have the notion of scripture from heaven, Judaism seems to be based on the idea that Torah is heaven itself.

Torah is not just the Five Books of Moses, or even the Hebrew Bible. It is the sum total of all of rabbinic writing, exegesis, responsa, contemplation, and imagination. It is the entire Jewish bookshelf. It comprises the corpus of the Jewish reckoning with divine revelation.

The Torah is a translation of the mind of God. It may take the form of law, lore, history, poetry, and narrative – but it is none of that. It is the mind of God made accessible to man.

We do not study Torah to be informed by it but to be formed by it. Torah is not informational but transformational. It is the beginning of the answers that give meaning to our existence. 

When a great Hollywood actor prepares for his role as a homeless person, he lives as one on the streets of Los Angeles. For weeks, he leaves his home, eating as a homeless person would eat, sleeping where a homeless person would sleep, and just as important, talking with and interacting with homeless men and women. To the consternation of his co-stars, the very best actors arrive straight from the street, unshowered, to the sound stage to perform before the camera and then go on to win the Oscar. 

By spending 70 to 80 years learning the Torah and following the commandments, we too are method acting the role of God in preparation for the “sound stage of heaven” when we leave this world. The more we learn Torah, the more we learn to think as God does. The more we perform the commandments, our muscle memory becomes more God-like.

When we study Talmud, for example, we engage in an intergenerational debate about the word of God and how it can be made manifest in man. Rabbis from different centuries argue from different continents back and forth. This is only made possible because the Torah itself is timeless and eternal.

This idea is best explained by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the giant of the 20th century, who wrote: “When I sit to ‘learn,’ I find myself immediately in the fellowship of the sages of tradition. The relationship is personal. Maimonides is at my right. Rabbenu Tam at the left. Rashi sits at the head and explicates the text. Rabbenu Tam objects, the Rambam decides, the Ra’abad attacks. They are all in my small room, sitting around my table.” 

With these words, Rabbi Soloveitchik expresses not just the eternity of Torah but the friendship and intimate camaraderie it fosters throughout the ages.

Shavuot's most important theme

In other words, we commemorate not just what we received but what we became. We use literature to experience a thousand lives and take those experiences with us into Torah to build the one life that truly matters. 

Through Torah study, we don’t just read about heroes and villains, saints and sinners; we learn to become the people God envisioned. 

Shavuot marks not a historical event but an ongoing relationship. And that relationship is made even stronger when we gather around the table with Hillel and Rabbi Akiva to argue a point of law and share a piece of cheesecake. ■

The writer has a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and teaches in post-high school yeshivot and midrashot in Jerusalem.