Shavuot has a lot of names. It’s the holiday of the giving of the Torah and of first fruits and of water, but it’s also in many ways a holiday of identity. In fact, one might say that its essence is in identity.
The most commonly known idea behind the holiday, the idea that it marks the day that the Torah was given, is simple to connect to identity. It was the day when the Jewish people became the Jewish people. The acceptance of the Torah was the moment when the people who had come out of Egypt decided to be a nation, with its own laws and not just a people connected by blood. It was the moment when each person present switched from “freed slave who is a descendant of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov” to a member of “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
Another major part of the holiday is the reading of Megillat Ruth, which tells the story of Ruth, the Moabite woman who refused to leave Noami’s, her mother-in-law, side, even after they both lost everything and she could have gone home to her well-off family instead of going with Noami to Bethlehem where she would have to pick scraps off the fields in order to eat. She eventually meets Boaz, gets married, and is marked down in history as the grandmother of King David.
What some overlook is what made Ruth known and worth inscribing in the main canon of Jewish texts (Tanakh). While she was born and raised a Moabite, with Moabite traditions and gods, she decided that she identified with Noami and her people instead and went to extraordinary measures to achieve her goal of joining that people, of concreting her identity.
Even after her sister-in-law leaves the two on their way back to Bethlehem and returns to Moab, Ruth finds it inconceivable that Naomi is even trying to get her to go back to Moab as well.
“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. Thus and more may the LORD do to me if anything but death parts me from you.”
The book shows that she was known, not because of her relation to David, since that came much later, but rather because of her own independent actions. When Boaz shows her kindness, she responds with astonishment “Why are you so kind as to single me out, when I am a foreigner?” To which Boaz responds, “I have been told of all that you did for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people you had not known before. May the LORD reward your deeds. May you have a full recompense from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have sought refuge!”
The lengths to which she went to follow what she believed in and connected to were astounding, so much so that the entire town knew of her deeds.
The less commonly known idea behind the holiday, despite it being the only reason explicitly mentioned in the Torah, is the Bikkurim (first fruits). At first glance, it may seem odd to claim that this has anything to do with identity. After all, it’s just an offering. But the difference with this offering is that part of the commandment to bring it is to also say a special statement and paragraph when you bring it. The text is in following verses:
“You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, ‘I acknowledge this day before the LORD your God that I have entered the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to assign us.’…You shall then recite as follows before the LORD your God: ‘My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The LORD freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which You, O LORD, have given me.’ You shall leave it before the LORD your God and bow low before the LORD your God. And you shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that the LORD your God has bestowed upon you and your household.” (Devarim 26:3, 5-11)
The Bikkurim, I believe, tie the various ideas of the holiday together. The paragraph read with the Bikkurim portrays our history as a people. It shows the steps that eventually brought us to the giving of the Torah and to Israel. It even shows a contrast and comparison to the story of Ruth. While many translate the words אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י as “the Aramean (Lavan) tried to destroy my father,” the Ibn Ezra, a commentator from the 11th-12th century, rejects the idea as the verb form in the phrase can only refer to “my father” and the following phrase “and he went down to Egypt” only makes sense in Hebrew if the Aramean is the same as “my father.”
“Thus the lost Aramean was my forefather. The intent of this passage is: I did not inherit this land from my forefather, for he was a pauper when he came to Aramea, and he was a stranger in Egypt, where he was few in number. Afterwards, he became a great nation; and you, God, brought us out of slavery, and gave us the good land,” writes the Ibn Ezra (Devarim 26:5).
In this light, Yaakov’s journey can be compared to Ruth’s. Both, in the end of the day, came to Israel from the outside. Yaakov was simply lost, a pauper in Aramea and a stranger in Egypt. It was external factors that eventually transformed him and his descendants into a great nation and brought him to the land, despite the fact that these factors came into play as a reward for his actions and life. Ruth is similar, but different. In some ways, she too was “lost” in Moab and it was external factors that exposed her to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. However, it was her own initiative, her own determination, that drove her to pursue this and to cleave to it. She found on her own that this was her people, her identity. It was not placed upon her as it was with Yaakov, she reached out and grabbed a hold of it. Judaism was not a family tradition from her grandfather or a religion revealed to her through prophecy or divine visions. She went against everything her family had ever known and arrived to decisions on her own, even against the advice of the one Jewish person in her life, to become a part of the Jewish people.
Ruth perhaps even transcended the level of those at the giving of the Torah. While they too accepted the Torah on their own initiative, they still had some form of blood connection and divine visions to guide them or even force them to that decision. The Sages say that they accepted the Torah out of fear. Ruth, however, accepted the Torah out of love, much as the Jews in Shushan did after Purim. When everything was pushing against her, she decided to fight the flow and connect to what she believed in.
As LGBTQ+ Jews, we often experience a similar battle to the one Ruth fought. For those of us that want to stay close to our communities, the ideas and people we believe in, there is often a wave of opposition and even more comfortable alternatives. We face the same decision. Do we fight for what we believe in? Do we fight all the pushes and pulls working against us? Or do we live our own lives, choose our own destinies, define our own identities, despite the odds?
So this Shavuot, marking for us in Israel a time when we are slowly returning to some form of routine daily life and בעזרת ה' marking the beginning of the end of the pandemic in other communities as well, may we all draw on that strength to fight the odds and live as we are, not as other believe we must be.
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