Shavuot is nigh, the holiday that commemorates the moment of revelation, the standing of the Jews at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. It is the holiday that celebrates everything that Jews believe is special about them: The revelation, the Torah, the closest human-divine communion ever held, and the great historic mission to be the bearers of this burdensome gift. But perhaps for that very reason, it is also the holiday of humility, and of the great danger of pride. I was reminded of this when reading Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer's latest comment on the holiday, in which he notes that the Mishnah describes the giving of the Torah at Sinai as "'the day of His marriage' -- the day the relationship between Hashem [God] and His people was sealed." Sinai was the wedding, Shavuot is the anniversary. And that's a powerful idea. By the time they arrived at Sinai, the Jews had already experienced a deep and redemptive relationship with God. God had already promised Abraham he'd be the father of a great nation, already carried out the great exodus, already sent his prophets and worked his miracles. But none of these - the promises, the rescues, the great human dramas and divine miracles - were the thing itself, the most important kind of relationship two parties can have: The covenant. Love can sacrifice, love can save, love can define us and fulfill us. But love does not build, slowly and meticulously, the world in which we wish to live. For that you need marriage. On Passover, the love overwhelms and heals and redeems. But it is only after 50 days of trekking through the desert, on Shavuot, that we find ourselves standing before Sinai to receive the meticulous rulebook of sanctity. It is only on Shavuot that the unequal divine-human relationship of rescuer-rescued becomes a *shared* covenant of daily ritual and detail and devotion. God does not just give us his law, notes Pfeffer. God "relinquishes control over His own Torah: it becomes ours to interpret and to realize." The Torah's truth, the Sages teach, "is not in the heavens...nor across the sea." Divine truth is not given in new revelation or ecstatic access to the divine will, but in staid interpretation of what is already given. Anything else after Sinai would not be a covenant, would not leave space for the human. The wedding has already taken place, the marriage, the Sages teach, is set and sealed. Or put another way, in order to share with humans, God must give something - must lose something. In God's case, control. And the people who receive his Torah, in order to be worthy of it, must similarly give something - in their case, dedication and devotion. Each gives, each loses, each is thus committed. And in truth, this giving, this sacrifice, detailed and mundane, is love. The Kotzker rebbe famously spoke of the difference between real love and "fish love." When someone says, "I love fish," they don't mean that they love fish, but that they want to kill a fish and eat it. It is not love of the fish, it is love of oneself, of what the fish does for me. To love truly, to love others rather than ourselves, we must be able to sacrifice, happily and consistently. That's the sign that you aren't experiencing fish-love, but the real thing. So it is with the great wedding of Shavuot. The giving of the Torah was a marriage contract; it built a home, created a progeny nation and shaped a world. That's what the Torah is for, what Judaism is for. "Not in the heavens," but here in our own hands. God relinquished his miracles and redemptions, handed us the tools and stepped back that we may ourselves find our own capacity for devotion, for a love of something bigger than fish. Shavuot is thus a radical and revolutionary holiday, because (bear with me, and please still let me into shul) it is the holiday of *God's* humility, God's retreat from his miraculous redemptions so that human wisdom may take its place in the world. It is the holiday of responsibility. Perhaps this is what the great 20th century sage Rabbi Soloveitchik meant when he once asked why the standard Jewish blessing includes the second-person "you" in its formulation. That's the blessing we all learn almost from birth: "Baruch ata adonai...." "Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who [insert wonderful thing God did, like bringing forth bread from the land]." That "you," Soloveitchik said, is awfully strange. For the minuscule creature to speak to the infinite unknowable so directly and informally is a truly cosmic level of disrespect. How could the Sages, who go on and on about the "kingship" and "grandeur" of God, have let that "you" slip into the most basic and common Jewish prayer? His answer is unspeakably wonderful and reveals something about the inner world of the great sages. Those who are holy and devoted, he explains, by the very fact of their holiness and devotion are in danger of falling into a vast and dangerous trap: Confusing their own will with God's, their own desires with God's desires. The more I devote and sacrifice to God's will, the easier it becomes for me to assume that my opinions, forged through a lifetime of steadfast commitment and faith, must be God's opinions. This is, in the end, a kind of righteous fish-love, a love of self. Not a love of God. And so the Sages instruct us to say "you" in every prayer. "You" and not "me." To distance our minds and egos and desires from any possibility that we might confuse them with God's mind and will. The direct address is thus not an act of brazenness but of humility, a forced distance between believer and God meant to remind the believer that they are not God, do not know God's will, that they are engaged in real love - in sacrifice and devotion, not just a more sophisticated version of self-love, of fish-love. Shavuot is the wedding anniversary when the human stopped receiving and began to give. And in that - in giving and devotion - we became closer to God than we could ever be through miracle and redemption. We are less than we imagine. The prophet Amos, after whom I named my third son, reminds us we are not special. He won't even let us feel special about the exodus itself. "Are you not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?" God says in Amos 9:7. "Have I not brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt - and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” Love and redemption are everywhere, they're there for everyone. Only marriage is special. And what's special about it, the necessary element without which it is no marriage at all, is not what you receive but what you give. We are God's only in what we give onto God. We are not made special by God's gifts to us. Only what we ourselves give - only real love - can make us that. And in that we partake of God's own humility, God's retreat into a covenant that made space for us, God's love of us that created a world in which we can act. We are less than we imagine, and that's the most beautiful gift God has ever given us. Happy Shavuot.
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