To Wake Up as the People Who Never Sleeps: Commentary on Shavu’ot 5784
By Rabbi Jonah Rank, Rosh Yeshivah of Hebrew Seminary
When I pray, I talk to God. When I study, God talks to me.
— attributed to Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991)
Schwartz goes to shul to talk to God. Goldberg goes to shul to talk to Schwartz.
— old American Jewish saying
Jews are not merely ‘the People of the Book.’ For thousands of years, we have been telling each other stories, transmitting values, and giving each other advice and instructions that have never found their way onto parchment or paper. Of all the accusations that antisemites have leveled against the Jewish people, we have never been charged with having too few words to share. The Hebrew Bible’s 929 chapters may amount to epic length, but our religion does not end there. Rabbinic tradition long revered our Torah shebbe’al peh (תורה שבעל פה, “the Torah that is oral,” the words of our sages) alongside the Torah shebbikhtav (תורה שבכתב, “the Torah that is in writing”). With the Mishnah alone comprising over 525 chapters—and the Mishnah being only one of thousands of holy works by rabbis and learned Jews—our tradition has never been sparing in offering sacred words. Plus, with new Jewish books, classes, teachings, students, talks, and leaders emerging on a regular basis, the very idea of divine communication has never ceased from our people and never will.
A Jew who lives in Jewish community should never stop encountering Godly ideas. In fact, as has been canonized in the evening service Jews now pray around the world, God demonstrates God’s love for us by gifting us lifelong learning. The standardized Ashkenazic text of the prayer preceding the recitation of the Shema) begins as follows:
אַהֲבַת עוֹלָם
בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל עַמְּךָ אָהַבְתָּ
תּוֹרָה וּמִצְוֹת חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים אוֹתָנוּ לִמַּדְתָּ
עַל כֵּן יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ
בְּשָׁכְבֵנוּ וּבְקוּמֵנוּ
נָשִׂיחַ בְּחֻקֶּיךָ
וְנִשְׂמַח בְּדִבְרֵי
תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָתֶךָ וּמִצְוֹתֶיךָ וְחֻקּוֹתֶיךָ
לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד
כִּי הֵם חַיֵּינוּ
וְאֹרֶךְ יָמֵינוּ
וּבָהֶם נֶהְגֶּה
יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה
Through an eternal love,
You have expressed Your love for the House of Israel.
You have taught us Torah, mitzvot, statutes, and laws.
Therefore, Adonai, our God,
When we lie down, and when we wake up,
We expound Your statutes,
And we rejoice in the matters of
Studying Your Torah, Your mitzvot, and Your statutes
Forever and ever.
For they are our life
And the span of our days.
We review them
Morning and night.
God’s love for us is unending because our relationship with God’s word never ends. In the Mishnah, Avot 5:22, the 1st century C.E. sage Yochanan ben Bag Bag—referring to the Torah—instructed us:
הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בַּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בַּהּ; וּבַהּ תֶּחֱזֵי, וְסִיב וּבְלֵה בַּהּ, וּמִנַּהּ לָא תְּזוּעַ, שֶׁאֵין לְךָ מִדָּה טוֹבָה הֵימֶנָּה
Turn it, and turn it [again], for all [wisdom] is inside it. Gaze upon it. Age and grow weary with it. Do not move away from it. There is no greater virtue than it.
In other words, the Torah itself should contain all the answers and the truths that matter. Luckily for ben Bag Bag, he got to be on the ground floor in the development of the ‘oral Torah’—the rabbinic expansion of the religion of the Hebrew Bible. Some 2,000 years later, we merit to be students in the chain of Jewish tradition. We still study and renew the Torah by discovering and creating connections between the wisdom of our spiritual forebears, linking ancient texts to the concerns that preoccupy us today. The reason that our Torah has remained relevant—even though we have changed so much—is that we never broke the chain of tradition; the Torah has remained an object of sacred scrutiny ever since it landed in the laps of our ancestors.
At approximately the age of 70, in the year 1625, the Prague-born Rabbi Yeshayahu HaLevi Horwitz moved to the holy city of Safed in the Land of Israel and encountered there a rich tradition of kabbalistic customs that changed how he observed and taught Jewish practice. In his encyclopedic work, Sheney Luchot HaBerit (שני לוחות הברית, “The Two Tablets of the Covenant”), Rabbi Horwitz introduced the holiday of Shavu’ot by offering a then-lesser-known mystical observance of this festival:
בלילה ההוא של חג שבועות ידוד השינה מכל מי שרוצה לדבק בקדושה, ויעסוק בתורה כל הלילה
On that night of the Festival of Shavu’ot, slumber should be dispelled from anyone who wants to cleave to holiness. One should study Torah all night. (Massekhet Shavu’ot; p. 29b of Sheftel Segal’s c. 1863 edition from Poznań.)
Rabbi Horwitz claims to derive an endless night of Torah study from a long passage in the Zohar (III:97a–b) describing the night of Shavu’ot as an evening of marital bliss after a couple has refrained for a long time from physical intimacy due to a prior state of ritual impurity. Although the Zohar does not claim that there is an actual practice of staying awake all night to study Torah, the students of the Zohar believed that the words of the Zohar were—like the words of the Torah—both eternal and dynamic. The sacred works would never change, but—because we gain life experience and live through history, and because these books contain profound messages—we change between, and because of, each of our encounters with holy teachings.
Rabbi Horwitz’s predecessors in Safed were among the first Jews to experience one of the most impactful technologies to alter the state of both the body and the mind: coffee. It was in the early 16th century when, in neighboring Egypt, coffee spread from Sufi mystics to the general Egyptian population—and humans discovered that their brains could now stay alert and awake for longer than ever. It would not take long before Kabbalah met caffeine and a nocturnal Judaism developed in a way that history had never known.
Among the most enduring spiritual practices developed by caffeinated rabbis in the 16th century was Tikkun Leyl Shavu’ot (תקון ליל שבועות, “the repair [of God’s broken universe] during the night of Shavu’ot”)—the all-night encounter with the Divine, as advanced by Rabbi Horwitz. Rabbi Horwitz sought to demonstrate how effective a spiritual practice this course of nighttime study could be. He therefore produced for readers of Sheney Luchot HaBerit a copy of a testimonial from a manuscript authored by Rabbi Shelomoh Alkabetz, author of the prayer “Lekhah Dodi” (“לכה דודי,” “Come, My Beloved”), now widely recited to welcome Shabbat on Friday evenings. In this ‘guest-written’ text, Rabbi Horwitz records Rabbi Alkabetz’s report from the Tikkun Leyl Shavu’ot he held at the home of Rabbi Joseph Karo, author of the now-widely-read code of Jewish law Shulchan Arukh:
ובעת שהתחלנו ללמוד המשנה ולמדנו שתי מסכתות, זיכנו בוראנו ונשמע את קול המדבר בפי החסיד נר”ו קול גדול בחיתוך אותיות, וכל השכנים היו שומעים ולא מבינים, והיה הנעימות רב והקול הולך וחזק, ונפלנו על פנינו ולא היה רוח באיש לישא עיניו ופניו לראות מרוב המורא והדיבור ההוא מדבר עמנו והתחיל
At the moment that we began to study the Mishnah and we had learned two tractates, our Creator granted us merit. We heard the voice of the [Divine] speaker through the mouth of the pious [Rabbi Joseph Karo], may the Merciful one protect him and bless him: a loud voice sputtering letters. The neighbors had been listening, but they could not understand. The melodiousness was great, and the voice was streaming and magnifying. We fell upon our faces. There was no spirit in any man to lift his eyes and his face to watch; so great was the awe and that [Divine] speech, speaking to us. It began. (Ibid., p. 30a.)
Rabbi Alkabetz was generous too in recording what the Divine voice spoke; God transmitted evidently, in a distinct voice, through the mouth of Rabbi Karo a rather long monologue of blessing and affirmation to these overwhelmed sages. (The coffee must have been great.)
For Rabbi Horwitz, to be granted such a close encounter with the Divine necessitated a long reading list for the night of Shavu’ot: several verses from every weekly Torah portion, at least 6 verses from each book in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the opening and closing teaching of each tractate of the Mishnah, the beginning and end of the early Jewish mystical textbook Sefer Yetzirah (ספר יצירה, “The Book of Creation”), sections of the Zohar, a list of every single mitzvah, and more. The only words that should emerge from one’s mouth, wrote Rabbi Horwitz, should be from that reading list or words necessary to arouse people who may be falling asleep (p. 29b). In his conception, it was best “שיזהרו שלא ידברו באותה הלילה בשום לשון חול הכל בלשון הקודש” (“that people not speak that night in any language of a secular matter; everything should be in the language of the holy”) (p. 30a).
Jewish communities who today assemble their own Tikkun Leyl Shavu’ot rarely limit the activities of the evening to the recitation of written works or to Jewish text study. A Tikkun nowadays is likely to feature some Jewish-tinged yoga, meditation, Israeli dance, Jewish educational games, singing, speeches, and far more that would have felt completely foreign to Rabbi Horwitz and the circle of mystics in Safed. If the purpose of the Tikkun Leyl Shavu’ot is the tikkun (תקון, “repair”) itself that comes when we better our Jewish selves or the world around us or when we connect with the Divine—then we must be open to the possibility that the world improves through many non-text-related activities. For us to conduct an entire evening, as Horwitz advised, “בלשון הקדש” (bilshon hakkodesh, “in the language of the holy”)—we do not have to read the Hebrew Bible as it was written; nor do we need to understand the oral Torah itself as only what the sages before us have said. We have the capacity to expand the realm of the holy.
We designate the night of Shavu’ot now not only for traditional Torah study. If our bodies permit us to do so healthfully, we take the whole night to stretch out the Torah beyond the limits we ever suspected of it. Shavu’ot invites us into a trance-like immersion into a sea of endless Jewish exploration. On the night of Shavu’ot, we dampen our concern for sleep so that we can transcend time and travel infinite new sacred pathways. (God, too busy being concerned with holy matters, never slumbers either, according to Psalm 121:4.) Shavu’ot welcomes all Jews to bring to each other the sparks of holy ideas, knowledge, and feelings that we have found along the way. It is possible that Rabbi Horwitz’s excerpts from the best of Jewish literature might equal the exact formula for the incredible Divine encounter Rabbi Alkabetz witnessed, but many other forms of Divine encounters await our discovery. God intended for us to see the divine image within one another (Genesis 1:26), so it is only appropriate that we act as both teacher and student on Shavu’ot, as we each seek God.
This Shavu’ot offers us a reset: a new year to do another deep dive into the lesser known territories of Jewish text, culture, history, values, and community. If certain corners of Judaism less familiar to us—even if they may be better-known to others—Shavu’ot proposes we go where we personally have not gone before and to inspire others to do the same. If Schwartz has only gone to shul before to talk to God, Schwartz might not know the same secrets to the good Jewish life that Goldberg learned along time ago. On Shavu’ot, Goldberg teaches Schwartz, and Schwartz must teach Goldberg too. When we recall this holiday’s moniker of Zeman Mattan Toratenu (“זמן מתן תורתנו,” “The Time of the Giving of Our Torah”), we must contemplate the suffix -nu (-נו, meaning “Our”); this is the holiday when we grow through meeting the Torah anew. On that night of Shavu’ot, we can all converse with, and like, God.
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