Drash for Shavuot

Chag Sameach, Lovers of Torah!

Clara and I arrived here on 23 May of last year.  But due to the variations of the Jewish Calendar, in Jewish terms we’ve been here just over a year.  I know that because, last week, as I was preparing my drash for Bamidbar, I realised I’d spoken on that Parashah the first Shabbat we were here on the Gold Coast.  So I had to look up the drash I gave that Shabbat and read through it, and Make sure I wasn’t repeating myself this year.  And there it was, on my hard drive…and thank God what I’d decided to say last week for the first weekly portion in the Book of Numbers, wasn’t the same message I gave a year ago!  And now, every time I prepare a drash, I’ll have to check my thoughts against what I said for the same Parashah the year before.  As you can see, when a rabbi starts developing longevity on the job, his job becomes ever harder!  But the worst thing is the High Holy Days, Yamim Hanora’im of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  Because we rabbis see our drashot on those days as a kind of valedictory, we pour our hearts into our sermons for those days and really endeavour to say something profound and new.

          I don’t usually sweat the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, of which Shavuot is one, nearly as much.  In fact, I seldom give drashot on these festival days.  Why?  Well for one thing, each festival has its own message that is built-in, if you will, to the history and purpose of the day.  Shavuot, which began just over an hour ago as sunset, is Chag Matan Torah…the festival of giving the Torah.  This is the anniversary, according to the Rabbis, of the event on Sinai that largely defines us as a religious group.  Actually, the three festivals taken as a series, define Jewish religion, that is the relationship of the Jewish people to the God of Israel, in its totality.  Passover’s message is that we needed to be free of the tyrannous rule and servitude of Pharaoh if we were to serve God.  Through signs and wonders, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God provided that freedom.

Shavuot’s message is that we need memory and parameters if we are to service God.  The Torah provides both.  Its text recounts our oral history, how a band of nomads came to be a people, and how that people was forged in adversity.  Its text provides the legislation that informs us what God, who gave us our freedom, expects of us.  On Shavuot we read the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Utterances.  These do not, in and of themselves, constitute a law code.  Rather, they form a sort of preamble to the law code that is Halachah.  The Ten Commandments form a basis for all the legislative messages in the Torah.  When we read the Ten Commandments, as we shall in our Torah reading tomorrow morning, we do not for a minute think that we’re reading a sum-total of God’s expectations of us.  Rather, we are looking at the ‘tip of iceberg’; we are looking at an elegant encapsulation of the principles that underlie all of Jewish law.

And then of course there’s Sukkot, which happens after Yom Kippur.  Its message is that the same God who gave us freedom, the same God who gave us a blueprint for our life as a people, kept us safe and nourished during our years of wandering.  Even after imposing upon our distant ancestors the sentence that they would die in the desert in preparation for their children’s inheriting the Holy Land, God then stayed with the people.  He saw to their needs and comforted them.  He instructed them to craft the Tabernacle, to be used in the cultic rites that were a reminder of His presence.

Three festivals, three different themes.  And taken together, they spell out what it means to be a Jew.  But tonight, I’m going to break my pattern and offer you a few thoughts.  Why?  Well, because I can…of course!

I had a girlfriend once.  Yes, I know…quite incredible!  And yes, this was before Clara and I met!  So I had a girlfriend, and we were the only Jews in our small city of about 80,000 souls.  Okay, we weren’t the only Jews in this city!  But we were the only visible Jews in this city.  My girlfriend, Donna was very visible, because she was half of the pair of principal presenters on the evening news program on this city’s only television station.  I was visible because I was in the Navy and did a lot of community service work.  So there were other Jews around, a small congregation of them not to mention those who wouldn’t be caught dead in the local synagogue!  (Sound familiar?)  But since they didn’t have public roles, and they didn’t dress like Paul Corias, one wouldn’t know they were there…unless one knew them personally.

So this young woman, Donna the Jewess who was on the evening news, and I sometimes made community appearances together.  She liked to take me along because I was a perfect foil.  And I was often able to go, because I would wear my uniform and my commanding officer was happy for his sailors to make appearances in town in uniform.  So one day Donna and I were at a local school where we were judging some competition:  I think it was the National History Day Fair or some such.  And afterward, while talking to the children, it somehow came out that Donna was Jewish.  And because it was a Christian school, a few of the children were immediately full of questions.  At that moment, I was busy with another cluster of children who were asking about all the cool badges and ribbons on my uniform.  Donna called me over to ask me to field a question that she couldn’t answer. “Don can answer that,” she told the child who’d asked. “He loves the Torah.”

Now I’d never thought of myself as a particular lover of the Torah.  I was simply a Jew, always trying to learn something new, always trying to discern what it was that God wanted me to do.  (And speaking in rhyme like Johnny Cochran…)  Of course, I would touch my Tallit to the Torah when it went past, and then kiss the Tallit, as a sign of veneration.  And I tried to live out the values and the lifestyle that we learn from Torah.  But if someone would say of a person, “he loves the Torah,” that would have evoked images of Chassidim dancing ecstatically with the scrolls on Simchat Torah or some such.  I simply didn’t see myself as fitting that description.

So my friend’s proclamation, that Don would be the one to answer the child’s question because “he loves the Torah,” got me to thinking.  Especially because I was able to answer the child’s question which, it turned out, was not a difficult one.  When I had a chance to really chew on Donna’s words, I realised that I did, indeed, love the Torah.

And most of you do, too.  No, you don’t do so demonstratively.  At least, not all the time.  But the fact that you’re here tonight, celebrating the Feast of Weeks, says something important.  When other Jews are home waiting for NCIS to begin, you’ve come here to spend an hour at shule, honouring that it is an important festival today and wanting to make a statement about it.  And your statement, repeated in every Jewish community in the world today beginning here in Australasia and working its way west, reverberates powerfully.  On a weeknight, when you’ve just been in this sanctuary a couple of days ago and will be again in just a few days, you’ve taken the time to attend this service.  Even if you don’t think of yourself as the most religious Jew on the planet, you’ve added your voice and your presence to an important phenomenon.  Yes, chances that you think yourselves this way…and perhaps I’m embarrassing you by saying so.  But unless I’m dead off base, you too are Lovers of the Torah.

Oh, I guess I could now go on to tell you of the responsibilities that being a Lover of Torah entails.  I guess I could try to convict your hearts to translate that love into some particular action.  But not tonight.  Oh, I reserve the right to bring that message some other night, some other day.  But for now, let’s just bask in the notion that we are Lovers of Torah.  Try not to be embarrassed about it.  It doesn’t mean that you’re too Jewish, too religious!  It just means that your heartstrings, or perhaps some other imperative, pull you to this place tonight.  Chag Sameach, Lovers of Torah!