On erev Shavuot 1993, a Volkswagen van pulled up outside our house in Ann Arbor. I was finishing my junior year in high school, and we were preparing for the holiday. An unfamiliar older couple exited van and came to the door.
I honestly don’t remember the interaction that followed, but the long and short of it is that this was my father’s brother Arthur and his wife Kate. They had driven from their home in Montana. Art was dying and he wanted to see my father before he passed away.
My Dad was the youngest of three children. And while my brothers and I knew our Aunt Marilyn, who moved out to California early in her adult life, we didn’t hear much about our Uncle Arthur. I remember seeing a small black and white photo of a young Lou (i.e. Dad) and his much taller older brother Art, who was wearing a sweater with a big S on it—for Michigan State, but that’s about it. We never really learned the story. It had something to do with Arthur’s being 11 years older than our dad, living in Montana (even more remote than California), and (probably, given the known family dynamics) having married Kate, who wasn’t Jewish. Like many other Jewish families of immigrant parents at that time, that could be the cause of a tremendous rupture. Now, as Arthur was dying, there was an attempt at reconciliation.
All I really remember of the days that followed was awkwardness. Arthur came to shul, and I remember feeling a mix of befuddlement, dislocation, and annoyance—which, as a father, I can now see as totally predictable teenage behavior. I don’t remember having a real conversation with him or Kate, just practicing a lot of avoidance. And I don’t remember really processing any of it with my Dad after they left after a couple days. But looking back, and having experienced my Dad’s death 25 years later, I can appreciate that even the act of welcoming Art and Kate into our home was a big deal for all of them. I’d like to think some repair occurred, even if it wasn’t obvious to me how.
I’d also like to think it wasn’t quite an accident that this visit took place on Shavuot, which is imbued with such a melange of valences and impulses. There is, of course, the inclusiveness of Shavuot. It is the day we read the Book of Ruth, a paradigmatic story of chesed, the force of loving connection that sees beyond boundaries (in Ruth’s particular case, the boundary of her status as a Moabite who is prohibited by the Torah from joining the Israelite people—but who, of course, does and becomes the ancestor of King David and the messiah). And this is the day when we re-experience the revelation at Mount Sinai, when, according to the Midrash, every person heard the voice of the Divine in a way custom-tailored to them. It’s a day for celebrating the multivocality of Torah, a day whose central observance is no more and no less than delighting in the overflowing storehouse of riches of our textual tradition, our inheritance.
Yet revelation is not only a happy event. It can, perhaps even should, be an overwhelming one. “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die'” (Exodus 20:16). There is disorder here, synesthesia: “they saw that which should be heard — something which is impossible to see on any other occasion,” as Rashi explains. He adds, “Startled, they moved back twelve miles, a distance equal to the length of their camp.” Revelation is not simply a warm embrace. It is that—and, in the same breath, something that pushes us back, causes us to recoil because it is so beyond the capacity of our human senses. It is a moment of both speech and silence, when everything—everything—is expressed through the utterance of the vowelless, noiseless aleph of Anochi, “I am YHVH your God.”
It’s easy to allow maamad har sinai, the moment of revelation, to be an abstraction, an idea. We can play with it as an intellectual exercise. We can read our texts and experience the delight of our minds lighting up at the stimulation. But a fuller engagement and reckoning will move us on many more and deeper registers as we experience contradictory gestures: both chesed and gevurah (unnboundedness and limitation), netzach and hod (strength and flexibility), all the worlds through which we have journeyed these seven weeks of the Omer. That journey has served as preparation for our encounter on Shavuot.
Every year before Shavuot we start reading the Book of Numbers, which begins with an instruction to Moses to take a census, counting the Israelites b’mispar shemot, according to the “number of their names.” The medieval Italian commentator Rabbi Obadia Sforno suggests that this unusual formulation suggests that each Israelite was counted not only by number, but with a recognition of their unique individuality. Perhaps there’s a Shavuot charge there for each of us as well: To encounter anew, through this moment of Revelation, the fullness of our existence in relationship with the Divine, with life, with one another, with ourselves—and, in the process, to tend what is broken, heal what is in pain, renew and redeem our lives and the world.