On the holiday of Shavuot, we celebrate the giving of the Torah, which tradition teaches us occurred on this day – 50 days after the first Pesach in Mitzrayim. However, the Torah doesn’t actually mention anywhere that this is the date of the giving of the Torah, nor is the holiday of Shavuot explicitly associated with this event. Rav Pinchas Friedman in Shvilei Pinchas of 5782 cites the Rivash to the effect that Shavuot doesn’t even necessarily fall on the same day every year. While it’s true that since the establishment of the fixed calendar it is always on the sixth of Sivan, when the Beit Hamikdash was standing the Sanhedrin might establish the beginning of the month of Sivan at any time during the latter days of Sefirat ha’Omer, and so the actual date of Shavuot might vary.
Thus we find that, uniquely among holidays, the date of Shavuot is not fixed at all and is in fact set by the Sanhedrin. Rav Friedman explains that the true greatness of the Torah can only be appreciated by recourse to the Torah She’be’al Peh, the Oral Torah, and our joy on Shavuot is a function of our receiving and upholding this Torah. Thus, it is only through the authority of the halachic leaders of Israel and by upholding our oral tradition that we can observe and celebrate Shavuot as the time of the giving of the Torah.
The Arizal taught, and it’s brought down in his compilation of teachings on the spring and summer holidays, Moadei Ha’Ari (and elsewhere), that Shavuot is unique among holidays because on this day the lower realms in which we reside are elevated into higher states of consciousness without any effort being required of us. This is similar to the late afternoon on Shabbat every week, when there is no specific action or ritual to be performed other than to appreciate and bask in the pure transcendent light that becomes available to us at this time.
Rabbi Itche Meir Morgenstern, in the annual collection of his essays Yam HaChochma of 5771, taught that typically when we reflect upon these progressive states of consciousness in our meditations and observance of the holidays, the transcendence is a mental state achieved by joining our own wisdom with the Supernal Wisdom. Thus, by means of opening up our minds to receiving an infusion of the Divine, we rise to higher states of awareness. However, on Shavuot, because of the nature of the conjunction of the higher realms with our lower world – which was necessary to facilitate the transmission of Torah from above to below, which transmission is necessary to repeat every year – our physical bodies themselves become pure tools of holiness by means of which we can affect the union of the lowest aspects of material reality with higher realms of spirituality.
In this vein, Rav Daniel Stavsky juxtaposes Pesach and Shavuot as representing the liberation of the body and the liberation of the mind, respectively. He asks in the essay on Shavuot appearing on his website the question from which I have taken the title of this article: Why is this night different from all other nights? He explains that just as we count seven groups of seven weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, so too do we count seven groups of seven years in the Shemittah cycle. The 50th year is the Yovel, when all the slaves in Israel are freed. Every seven years we free the land in its Shemittah, the dirt and rock that we labor to plow and plant and from which we grow our sustenance. But at the end of this cycle, we free our living souls – represented by the liberated slaves.
Rav Stavsky elaborates that under normal circumstances, in all our lives, we are bound by space and time; we exist in the physical universe. When Pesach comes to set us free, we become free to fully serve Hashem and devote ourselves to Him, but we are still trapped in the physical world. However, the Torah comes to give us the key to interfacing with and experiencing eternity. This is also why the Torah was given on a random mountain in the middle of the wilderness – we found ourselves entirely detached from our normal conception of place and of time, and we were free to connect with the Torah in a pure manner without any of the normal inhibitions and preconceptions that might hold us back in our regular familiar circumstances.
The 50 days of Sefirat ha’Omer give us an opportunity to prepare our souls to become free on Shavuot. On each successive day, we work on overcoming another negative aspect of our physical reality and mundane states of mind that restrain us from growing as we should. Having done this work, we stay up all night on Shavuot learning Torah – another separation from our experience of the mundane and every day. In this altered state of consciousness and as a culmination of the work we’ve been doing for the previous seven weeks, we are able to truly connect with Hashem’s Torah and experience it in its own space of no space and no time, entirely outside of our familiar place and time in the material world.
