Shavuot: Pesach's Culmination
Shavuot: Pesach's Culmination

These are Hashem’s appointed seasons, holy convocations, which you shall proclaim in their seasons: In the first month, on the fourteenth of the month in the afternoon, is Pesach for Hashem, and on the fifteenth of this month is Hashem’s Festival of Matzot… And you will count for yourselves from the day after the day of rest, from the day on which you bring the Omer of the Waving, seven weeks which will be complete; until the day after the seventh week, you shall count fifty days – and then you shall offer a new meal-offering to Hashem” (Leviticus 23:4-16).

Of all the Festivals that the Torah commands us to celebrate, Shavuot is unique in being the only one whose date the Torah does not specify. Instead, it is celebrated the fiftieth day after the second day of the Festival of Matzot.

On a simple level, this is because before Hillel II (Hillel ben Yehudah, Nasi – i.e. head of the Sanhedrin) instituted the fixed calendar back in 4119 (359 C.E.), the fiftieth day of the Omer was not necessarily Sivan 6th: if both Nisan

"...And even though he tarries, in spite of all I shall wait every day for him to come”.

and Iyyar had 29 days, Shavuot would fall on Sivan 7th; if both had 30 days, it would fall on the 5th; and if one had 29 days and the other 30 (which always happens with the fixed calendar), then it falls on the 6th. Hence the Torah does not specify what date Shavuot falls on.

But on a deeper level, this emphasizes the connexion between Pesach and Shavuot. As a contemporary gadol ba-Torah explains: “Although liberated from enslavement to Egyptian idolatry, [the Jews] had not yet received the Torah which would transform them into a holy nation. Hence, the Pesach Festival is called z’man cheiruteinu (‘the time of our freedom’) – freedom from servitude, the time when Israel was transformed into a nation. But the Shavuot Festival is the continuation of that process, when they received the Torah and transformed into a holy nation… In order to reinforce this principle of a holy nation, God linked Pesach (the Festival of national freedom) to Shavuot (the time when God gave us the Torah) by the Counting of the Omer” (Rabbi Meir Kahane Hy”d, The Jewish Idea Chapter 23).

Commensurate with this, the Talmud (Megillah 4a, Sanhedrin 101a et al) refers to Shavuot as Atzeret (‘concluding festivity’), and the Midrash expands this to “the Atzeret of Pesach” (Song of Songs Rabbah 7:2; Yalkut Shimoni, Pinchas 782). This even has practical halachic ramifications, according to the Ram”a (Rabbi Moshe Isserles, Poland, c.1525-1572): “The universal custom is to eat dairy foods on the first day of Shavuot, and it seems to me that the reason for this is that it parallels the two cooked dishes that we eat on the night of Pesach, in memory of the Pesach sacrifice and in memory of the Festival sacrifice. Similarly [on Shavuot] we eat dairy food and after that meat; this necessitates two separate loaves of bread on the table which represents the Altar, and this therefore recalls the two loaves of bread which would be offered [in the Holy Temple] on the Festival of the First-Fruits” (Gloss on the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayyim 494:3).

It is obvious that the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai on Shavuot was the culmination of the Exodus from Egypt 50 days earlier. But it seems to me that the date of Shavuot is the culmination of a far greater historical process that also began on the date of Pesach.

To understand this, we have to go back almost half a millennium before the Exodus, to the day that three angels appeared to Abraham and Sarah to herald the birth of their son Isaac the following year (Genesis 18:1-14). The Talmud and the Midrashim are consistent about the chronology: the angel promised Sarah that she would bear her son Isaac exactly one year hence (18:10); the 400-year period of Abraham’s seed living as “strangers in a land not their own” (15:13) began with the birth of Isaac and finished with the Exodus from Egypt. Since the Exodus occurred on the 15th of Nisan, Isaac was born 400 years to the day earlier, i.e. also on the 15th of Nisan. And since the angelic prophecy to Sarah was one year to the day before Isaac was born, this episode also happened on the 15th of Nisan, 401 years before the Exodus.

This was also the day before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, sparing only Lot and his two daughters who fled into the hills (Genesis 19:1-25). The night following the destruction, Lot’s daughters, fearing that they and their father were the only three people remaining in the world, plied their father with drink, and impregnated themselves by him. They gave birth to sons – the elder bore Moab, and the younger bore the ancestor of Ammon (19:30-38).

Moab dwelt east of the Dead Sea; and three-quarters of a millennium later, Elimelech and Naomi with their two sons Machlon and Chilion would leave Bethlehem and cross the River Jordan to the fertile fields of Moab to escape famine in their native Judea. As the Talmud (Bava Kamma 38b) makes clear, God had preserved the entire Moabite nation throughout those long centuries, in spite of their frequent attacks against and persecution of Israel, solely for the sake of Ruth who would one day emerge from their royal house. And when Elimelech, Machlon, and Chilion died and Naomi, a widow bereaved of her sons, returned home to Israel, Ruth, her erstwhile daughter-in-law, returned with her. There she married Boaz and gave birth to Oved, who begat Yishay (Jesse), the father of King David, the ancestor of the mashiach.

There is a universal custom to read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot (see the Yalkut Shimoni, Ruth 596; Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayyim 490:9). One of the reasons is that Ruth’s great-grandson, King David, whose birth is the climax of the Book of Ruth, died on Shavuot (Jerusalem Talmud, Beitzah 2:4, Chagigah 2:3) – so what better time can there be to remember him, to recall his family history, than his yahrzeit?

And King David, of course, is the progenitor and ancestor of the mashiach. So the mashiach is the culmination of the sequence of events which began so inauspiciously that night 3,723 years ago when Lot and his two daughters fled from Sodom and Gomorrah – the night that would one day become Pesach – and began the dynasty from which will one day come forth mashiach. “…And even though he tarries, in spite of all I shall wait every day for him to come”.