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May 21, 1999/6 Sivan 5759, Vol. 51, No.34
Rites link faiths
Torah Study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Shavuot
The similarity of Passover and Shavuot for Jews with Easter and Pentecost for Christians, manifest in both timing and importance, attests to the deep structural affinity between Judaism and Christianity.
Easter has no fixed date on the calendar. It falls each year on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Passover falls on the 15th of Nisan, which is always a full moon. Passover and Easter often coincide, as Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus, which Christians believe occurred two days after his crucifixion, during Passover week.
The lunar Jewish calendar is adjusted to the solar year by adding an extra month every two or three years, just prior to the month of Nisan, to keep the festivals in their seasons. This year Easter occurred on April 4, the fourth day of Passover.
Both holy days deliver a message of redemption and salvation. Passover commemorates a historical event that endowed the Jewish people with a universal mission of ethical monotheism. Easter commemorates a historical event redolent with the promise of eternal life to the Christian believer. These bedrock events of each faith community interface their liturgies throughout the year.
Fifty days after the celebration of Easter, Christians observe the festival of Pentecost (Greek for 50th), recalling the moment when the Holy Spirit graced Jesus' apostles, enabling them to speak in foreign tongues (Acts 2:1-4). The festival is astoundingly parallel to Shavuot (this year celebrated May 21-22), which falls 50 days after the second day of Passover.
In the Torah, Shavuot concludes the wheat harvest begun at Passover, thus bringing closure to Passover, much as Shemini Azeret does to Sukkot.
In the 19th century, Jewish religious reformers borrowed from their Christian neighbors the rite of confirmation long associated with the festival of Pentecost. In the Catholic Church, confirmation is one of the seven sacraments, sometimes called the "sacrament of Christian maturity." Performed at the age of reason, it signifies the voluntary internalization of a faith imposed at birth by baptism. And the Holy Spirit of the first Pentecost is believed transmitted to the newly confirmed.
In their reworking of tradition, Reform Jewish leaders strove to replace bar mitzvah with confirmation. Age 13 struck them as embarrassingly short of adulthood, and further, Judaism had no rite to mark the passage of young women to maturity. Accordingly, Reform Jews introduced a confirmation for adolescents to be celebrated on Shavuot, heralding the completion of their Jewish education and acceptance of adult responsibility, akin to the experience of Israel at Sinai.
Shavuot is not particularly rich in ritual. In the 16th century, the kabbalists of Safed introduced the practice of spending the first night of the festival in group study (Tikkun Leil Shavuot). The innovation rested on the Zohar's belief that what takes place at Sinai is not just renewal of the covenant, but the reenactment of the marriage between God and Israel. The night before, members of the entourage of the "bride" adorn her with ornaments through the ritualized study of Torah (Gershom Scholem, "On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism," pages 138-39).
Far older is the Shavuot custom cited in the Shulhan Arukh of strewing the interior of the synagogue with grass and leaves. The Mishna suggests that at Shavuot, God determines the fecundity of fruit trees, an extension of the biblical command to bring the first fruits to the central sanctuary on Shavuot (Mishna, Rosh Hashana 1:2; Numbers 28:26). Although the decorations underscored the original agricultural roots of the festival, the profusion of plants in the synagogue ultimately came to too closely resemble church practice, so at the end of the 18th century, the Gaon of Vilna forbade the custom (Mishna Berura 494:3).
Just as studying a foreign language helps us understand our own, studying comparative religion brings us to appreciate what is distinctive about the religion we avow, and what we share with others.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. For other commentaries on the Internet, visit www.jtsa.edu/pubs/schorsch/.
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