Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21–24)
Shavuot and the “Set Times”
This week, let’s play a little game. The game is called (cue music) One of These Things is Not Like the Others — One of These Things Just Doesn't Belong. Here are the things:
Passover
Shavuot
Rosh Hashanah
Yom Kippur
Sukkot
They all belong, as I warned you last week that they would, in Leviticus 23. They are the “set times” of YHWH, the mo’adim, as we're told in verse four of that chapter, after which they are announced in order. Remember that the first month is Nisan, the spring month when we left Egypt. Even though the year begins in the fall, the months start being counted from Nisan.
v. 5 — 1st month (Nisan), 14th day at twilight — Passover offering to YHWH
v. 6 — 1st month, 15th day — YHWH’s Festival of Unleavened Bread for seven days
v. 24 — 7th month (Tishrei), 1st day — a day of rest, a memorial with shofar blasts
v. 27 — 7th month, 10th day — the Day of Atonement
v. 34 — 7th month, 15th day — the Festival of Booths [Sukkot] for seven days
In our current calendars, the Passover offering and the Festival of Unleavened Bread are combined into one. The day of rest on the 1st of Tishrei is of course what we now call Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Fun fact: In the Bible, that phrase occurs only in Ezek 40:1, and it refers not to the 1st day of Tishrei but to the period of the year when the 10th of Tishrei falls.
The holiday that doesn't belong, the one that is not like the others, is the Festival of Weeks, the holiday of Shavuot. It’s different because Leviticus 23 does not tell us which day of which month Shavuot is supposed to fall on. We know it falls somewhere in between the 1st month and the 7th, but (despite the fact that it’s clearly marked on the calendar you got from the Jewish funeral home) the exact day on which it falls is more complicated than it is for all the other “set times.”
Lev 23:9–14 says that the first sheaf harvested must be offered to YHWH, after which, vv. 15–16 explain …
You must count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day you bring the sheaf for the wave-offering. They shall be seven full weeks, until the day after the seventh week. You must count 50 days. Then bring a new grain offering to YHWH.
“Week” in this text is not the modern שבוע shavua, the word used in the name of the festival, but שבת shabbat, the same word as in “from the day after the Sabbath.”
That is our holiday of Shavuot. You don't celebrate it on a particular day in a particular month; you must count 50 days and count seven weeks. If I'm not mistaken, this column will post (depending on where you are on our planet) on the 27th day of that count, meaning that three weeks from tomorrow night, on the evening of Thursday, May 25th, Shavuot will begin.
Why do we call this holiday Shavuot? That name is not given to it here in Leviticus 23. In the festival chapters of the book of Numbers, Num 28:26 refers to the offering of new grain “at your weeks [בְּשָׁבֻעֹ֖תֵיכֶ֑ם, b’shavuoteikhem],” without mentioning 7 weeks or 50 days, but also without setting a calendar date for the offering. Exod 34:22 names this holiday as Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, but without saying when it is observed. Only Deuteronomy 16 both calls it the Festival of Weeks and instructs us to count 7 weeks starting “when the sickle is first put to the standing grain” (Deut 16:9, NJPS translation). The 50-day count is not mentioned there.
In the chapter that we're reading today, Leviticus 23, it is not named at all, and the date we must begin to count on is a flashpoint of controversy. Both v. 11, telling us when to offer the first sheaf, and v. 15, telling us to begin the count on that day, use the phrase ממחרת השבת mi-moḥorat ha-shabbat, which I translated earlier in the most obvious possible way: “the day after the Sabbath.”
If we had to pick a particular Saturday and start counting on the Sunday after it, we wouldn't know which one to choose — unless we were using a solar, non-rabbinic calendar, as some ancient Jews indeed did. Since a festival is a sabbath of a kind, rabbinic tradition understands that “the day after the Sabbath” really means the day after the festival day, the first day of Passover. In that case, even on the rabbinic luni-solar calendar Shavuot can always be dated exactly. Count 50 days starting on the second day of Passover and you will inevitably end up on the 6th of Sivan (unless you have made the mistake of crossing the International Dateline).
The Torah, though, does not give us a day and a date for it. What then makes it a “set time,” and why is it in the list of all the other holidays that do have particular dates? To answer this question, let’s think about how these dates connect with conditions during the year.
The calendar starts with Passover on the full moon of the first spring month, and it ends with Sukkot, which begins on the full moon of the seventh month, the first month of autumn. That means the sequence of holidays runs roughly from equinox to equinox. All winter long, during the rainy season in the land of Israel, there aren't any holidays. Nobody wants to schlep through the rain and the mud, even to appear at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Last week we looked at “the eighth day” in Leviticus 16 after the death of Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s two sons, and we saw God inventing a day of atonement. By the end of that chapter, God has decided that the Day of Atonement has to happen annually. Now, in Leviticus 23, God is declaring there to be “set times” that are supposed to carry the Israelites all the way through from the beginning of the productive period of the year in the spring to the end of it in the fall. They are set, fixed. This is going to take the Israelites from point A to point Z.
The Torah also realized, it seems to me, that there needed to be a little bit of flexibility. It seems that both here and in the book of Numbers the original plan was there would be this one occasion in the year — call it the beginning of the summer —that would not be a set time like all the others. This one would be flexible and people could celebrate it at a time that made sense in their lives that particular year. Whenever the first sheaf, the omer, was brought, that would start a count. The count it would start is very particular — seven weeks, 50 days, adding one day to the end of that seven week count — but when the count begins would be flexible.
As with so much else in the relationship between God and the Jews, God discovered that if he gave us an inch we would take a mile, and so the date of Shavuot is not flexible any longer. It’s on a particular calendar day. It too is a “set time.” It would be great if Shavuot were a day that we could celebrate on our time rather than one of the set times. It would also be great if we were still living in the garden of Eden, but that's not going to happen either. In the meantime we're going to make the best of it. If you like cheesecake the best of it is not too bad.