I Want a Revolution and a Revelation: Getting Ready for Whatever’s Next
How on earth do we get ready for “whatever’s next” when we have no clue what the world will look like “post-COVID-19”? The Jewish holiday of Shavuot offers a suggestion: check your values, be authentic, and open yourself to the unknown.
After counting seven times seven days from Passover, Jewish people celebrate the holiday of Shavuot (this year beginning at sunset on May 28). An ancient agricultural festival, Shavuot (“Weeks”) long ago was linked to the singular experience of standing as a people at Mount Sinai to receive God’s loving law (a.k.a. The Ten Commandments). It’s the holiday for Revelation.
I gotta admit, the word “Revelation” makes me think of outdated and harmful ideas like the valorization of blind faith and an undue reliance on a Deity that absolves humans of any responsibility to address the world’s problems and inequalities. Reform Judaism (the denomination to which I belong) has long taken a dialectical approach, one that we can trace to the early days of the Hassidic movement, which combined a sense of personal responsibility for acting in the world with a passionate faith in a loving God. For example, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov chides those who would refuse help to someone in need, claiming, “Don’t worry: God will provide!” Essentially, it’s the position, attributed to countless scholars and figures across many faith traditions, that one should “pray as if everything depends on God; act as if everything depends on you.”
COVID-19 starkly demonstrates that there’s a lot over which we have no control: the things that “depend on God,” or the weather, or the temperature of the environment versus the ideal conditions for the virus, or the way the virus evolves and changes to better invade humans. And there’s lots over which we do have control: the underlying racist and classist systems that make this virus more threatening and more deadly to certain populations than others. So what do we need in this moment? Do we need to slog and fight for an overhaul of the status quo, or await a breakthrough moment that can quickly return us to normalcy?
It seems to me that, just like Hamilton the musical’s Angelica Schuyler, Shavuot asks for both a revolution and a revelation.
While the first day of Shavuot calls for a public reading of the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the holiday’s second day reading includes a pretty revolutionary claim: “There will be no needy among you, for the Eternal shall bless you” (Devarim/Deuteronomy 15:4). It turns out, though, that this is no revelation from on high, no prediction; rather, it is an instruction: “For there will never cease to be needy folks in your land, which is why I command you: Surely open your hand (פָּ֠תֹחַ תִּפְתַּ֨ח אֶת־יָדְךָ֜) to the needy and poor kinfolk in your land” (15:11).
The revolutionary notion of narrowing the gap between rich and poor continues in the holiday’s other major text, the Scroll of Ruth, a tale that begins with famine and death but ends with harvest and lineage. Filled with rich, metaphorical language that changes famine to feast and evokes the nurturing of motherhood and the emptiness of the grave, much of Ruth’s story takes place in the wheat-fields and threshing-houses associated with Shavuot. Ruth’s counterpoint, Boaz, represents connection, abundance, and generosity, and his actions reinforce the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Devarim texts that call for us to give to the needy with open hands. Though Ruth is quite literally a stranger to him — both unknown to him and a member of a non-Israelite tribe, Boaz advocates for her in the fields, giving her protected access to food, water, and shelter (Ruth 2). There is so very much abundance in the Scroll of Ruth that it ends, of course, with the birth of a son, who will himself go on to become the grandfather of King David, the ancestor of the prophesied Messiah (Ruth 4). Among the baby’s many ancestors are counted Naomi, related not through a direct biological connection but the love between Naomi and Ruth (4:16–17).
From an outsider, member of a tribe despised throughout the Jewish Bible, Ruth becomes the mother of abundance, hope, and futurity: what a revelation!
Ruth’s revelation came about in part through miracles, but in part through a revolution: through a re-turning of the social order, like the tilling of soil in preparation for planting the seeds that eventually grow into wheat for the thresher. At Mount Sinai, revelation was louder, more overwhelming: “On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled” (Shemot/Exodus 19:16).
But I want to argue that Sinai asked us to create a revolution, too: a revolution of the self.
Ruth’s experiences echo some of the experiences of the people of Israel as they wandered in the desert after Egypt: both had suffered hunger and hardship; both sought to reestablish family and inheritance and connection after having their families torn apart by the whims of famine and Pharaoh.
And, though this isn’t the dominant reading of either story, both Ruth’s reversal of fortune and the Israelite’s collective experience of revolution each demonstrate the possibility and the importance of being one’s full and authentic self.
Ruth doesn’t get a happy ending because she was lucky; she gets a happy ending because she was Ruth: persistent, clingy, stubborn, impractical, passionate. When Naomi tried to turn her away, knowing that “home” (Moab, and her mother’s house) would represent certainly and safety, Ruth “clung to her” (Ruth 1:14). She didn’t follow sure fortune; she followed her feelings: “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried […]” (Ruth 1:16–17). When Boaz gathers Ruth under his cloak as a signal of their marriage, it is not in spite of her status as “foreign,” but because of her authentic actions, her willingness to enter a new land and belong “to a people you had not known before” (Ruth 2:11).
(Here’s where you’re gonna have to come with me on a bit of a journey, from Sinai to those Hassidim who balanced leaning on a loving God with a deep sense of personal responsibility for making the world better.)
The revelation at Sinai was a collective experience, but it happened to a collection of individuals, which is itself a revolution.
Enslaved in Egypt, the people of Israel, according to the Midrash, kept their Hebrew names, linking themselves always back to a heritage and a promise, the covenant with Abraham that assured the whole world would find blessing through the Jewish people. A link to heritage, then, was crucial to their sense of self and purpose and hope.
But, at Sinai, God gave this beleaguered and traumatized people a new sense of individuality within the collective experience. For, as we read in the Torah, the word of God revealed at Mount Sinai, amid clouds of smoke and peals of thunder and the loud blasts of the shofar, was revealed in the grammatical second-person singular.* It is you who are called to a relationship to Something, SomeOne, that can be called Eternal. It is you who are called to make the words “there shall be no needy among you” true. It is you who are called to act.
The revelation of Sinai lies not in the originality or primacy of those Ten Commandments, but in the call to act in response to the Law as unique and capable individuals. This is the wisdom of the Hassidic Rebbe, Zusha of Hanipol (19th century), who cried on his deathbed, musing how he would answer when God inevitably asked hom, not “Why weren’t you more like Moses?” but “Why weren’t you more like Zusha?” (See Buber, Tales of the Hassidim).
The lessons I am taking from Shavuot this year are these: to prepare for an unknown future, with the experience of trauma and disease ever-present in our minds, we need to be ready for a revolution and a revelation. We need to be more and more like ourselves, following our passions persistently and listening to the Eternal call for justice as though it were uttered to us alone. And we need to articulate those revolutionary ideas upon which we can act, when the opportunity arises, hands open to those in need, gathering in all the bounty we can.
When God tells Moses to help prepare the people for their experience of Revelation, God tells them to “keep themselves separate” (וְקִדַּשְׁתָּ֥ם, the root for “to be holy,” distinct, set aside, in Hebrew) (Shemot/Exodus 19:10). Our earliest traditional commentators link this set-aside holiness to the practice of immersing in a mikveh, a ritual bath. And it is from this very story, this experience of preparing for receiving the revelation of the law of the covenant between God and the Jewish people, that the rabbis derived the practice of requiring immersion in a mikveh as part of the conversion experience. And this is the final lesson I am taking from Shavuot this year: readiness and receptivity.
Contrary to many translations of the Hebrew, the object of immersing in the mikveh is not to become “clean” (as opposed to “dirty”); rather, the purity the Israelites achieved in preparation for Revelation, the purity a convert attains as part of our casting our lot with the Jewish people, represents a readiness for whatever happens next. It is receptivity and openness. It is to ally oneself with a ragtag band of desert wanderers, to cast one’s lot with outcasts, to join an ongoing revolution aimed at protecting the widow, and the orphan, and the stranger. It is to jump in feet first to an unknown future Revelation, and to say, Yes, I will work to make this Revelation actual in the world. Through a revolution of how I view myself and my power and my influence, I am ready for whatever happens next.
*I’m gonna ask y’all to suspend your (understandable) concerns about sexism and the exclusion of women, trans, and non-binary folks from the Torah and its earliest interpreters. I believe that our sacred Jewish texts, though Divinely inspired, were collected, written, and edited by fallible and biased human beings. I ask you to read broadly and generously with me. As many Biblical scholars and translators assert, from all Jewish denominations, the second-person masculine singular employed in the verses in question certainly do not exclude anyone who is not male (for example, we assume that all human beings who consider themselves a part of this covenant are commanded to “honor your father and mother”).
