Slice of delicious delicious raspberry cheesecake on a plate ready to eat
By Larry Gordon
My father, a’h, liked to say that while he enjoyed all the yomim tovim, he had a special affinity for Shavuos. Quite often, he would say that on Sukkos you are able to eat whatever you want but not where you want to. On Pesach you can eat where you want to but not necessarily what you want to. But on Shavuos, he would say, you can eat what you want, where you want. And that, you will most likely agree, is one of the great truisms of Jewish life.
So I was thinking last week what subjects to write about in advance of this three-day version of Torah-mandated solitary confinement. This is it, this is what it is—three consecutive days of Shabbos and yom tov, from Friday evening until late Monday night. Just contemplate what it is about for a moment. Just think, for 72 hours you are not going to pull out your cell phone even one time.
I already have this feeling of courage and mesirus nefesh welling in my system as I think about how we are going to pull this thing off. That is, no Internet, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram—no electronic communication whatsoever. And the fascinating thing is that even though some of us cannot get through Minchah during the week without checking our cell phones a few times, somehow we are going to survive three days without doing it even once.
But back for a moment to the food aspect of this holiday—and the aspect of eating “what we want, where we want to.” While that is generally true, it also contains within it a “not so fast, buddy” element stuffed somewhere into the equation.
To that end, I asked our chief copy editor, Shmuel Gerber, to find an article that I wrote on this subject more than a decade ago and that I updated for the Shavuos issue in 2011. The headline, a few of you may recall, was “Cheesecake, Soufflé, Blintzes, and Kugel at Mount Sinai.” That is a long headline; we must have had a different design in those days, because I don’t know how we fit such a wordy title on the front page of the paper, but somehow we did.
The focus of that article was the relationship between us—the Jewish people—and the events surrounding the giving of the Torah at Sinai that we commemorate over this yom tov, and how having all these cheese and other dairy dishes have snuck their way into and become an almost principal objective of the holiday.
While I am not rerunning the full essay now, I have it here beside me on my desk. I am enjoying reading it and will share updated aspects of that piece with you.
Firstly, where did this obsession with cheese on this yom tov come from? There are many good answers, but I believe the one that is most logical is also the most human and practical. This was the scenario: The Jewish nation was receiving the Torah at Sinai. There were myriad laws and regulations that they were now obligated to follow for the first time. It took time to learn and absorb all these rules and regulations.
One of the key laws was that of ritual slaughter, that is the halachos of shechitah. At the time of the reception of Torah at Sinai, the intricacies of how to properly slaughter an animal so that it would be fit for consumption were possibly not clear to us yet. Therefore, some explain, since the people’s kashrus observance for meat dishes could not be trusted with assurance, the fledgling nation resorted to eating dairy products.
And here we are today, over 3,000 years later—with all the kosher meat in the world at our disposal just for the buying or the taking—but no: they ate dairy then and, dedicated traditionalists that we are, we remain steadfast in our commitment and unity with our ancestors to eat dairy, just as they did all those years ago.
Just take a supermarket ad in this newspaper last week. The ad featured an attractive crusted cheesecake with copy that said, “When cheese cake looks this good, you almost don’t want to eat it.” But then the next line says, “Good luck with that.”
Still, it is not serious or necessarily proper to state that cheesecake or cheese dishes are the centerpiece of this yom tov. For that matter, cheesecake on Shavuos is not on the same plane as eating in the sukkah or the matzos on Pesach—which are vital to the mitzvos of those holidays—or even the apple dipped in honey that we eat on Rosh Hashanah.
But you would not know that from the record number of cheese blintzes and other creamy dishes being prepared this week. And then there is the matter of the next big thing for Shavuos beyond the cheese doodles and cheese curls. That is the matter of being up all night on the first night of yom tov to study Torah.
Frankly, it’s a nice departure from our usual yom tov schedule—that is, instead of going to sleep after dinner, going to shul or the local beis midrash to observe and celebrate the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people by staying awake until sunrise, studying Torah and invigorating that special relationship that exists between us and G‑d’s words that are directed to us.
And, by the way, this idea of staying awake all night learning is also a throwback to that Sinaitic experience of more than 3,300 years ago. As I wrote in that piece of a decade ago, we stay up through the night because the Jewish nation, which was selected to receive Torah at Sinai, made the apparently wrong but nevertheless conscious decision to go to sleep that night of the giving of the Torah.
You see, they thought then—as possibly many still do today—that Torah, its laws and dictates, is a spiritual pursuit more appropriately received when in an altered state of consciousness most akin to our condition when we are asleep. So what better way to receive the Torah from G‑d than to get under the covers and snore our way into a nice deep sleep?
But we have since been made to understand that this was a colossal miscalculation. The message of that day was that Torah is not strictly a cerebral or intellectual pursuit. The idea is to live it in our everyday lives in whatever we do and whatever we think, how we do business and how we treat our friends. Torah is not something out there designed for another planet, nor does it have a switch that allows it to be turned on or off.
Here’s an explanation of this event from that earlier article:
“Chassidic thought explains that the Jews’ oversleeping on Shavuos morning was not because their alarm clocks didn’t ring or the roosters didn’t cock-a-doodle-do. The Jews slept because they understood that they were souls in physical bodies and that the soul in this world is restricted by being enclosed in a finite body. To receive Torah, they wanted to have their souls—which ascend to Heaven during sleep—to receive the Torah unencumbered.
“We have learned many times that some of our greatest tzaddikim throughout the ages have had high aspects of Torah revealed to them while they were asleep. Our forefather Yaakov saw the entire future of the Jewish people, from beginning until the coming of Mashiach—but only when he was asleep. And this is what the Jews desired in unity as they slept so soundly on the morning of Mattan Torah.
“So if that’s the case and if this is such a beautiful thing, why do we in this day and age have to rectify this alleged faux pas by desisting from sleep on Shavuos night?
“And the answer is that Hashem admired the beauty of the Jewish intent to receive Torah from Him at the highest level possible. But this was not G‑d’s purpose of creation. Hashem created us and gave us Torah and mitzvos so that we can perform them here with our bodies in a physical world, thereby transforming mundane physicality into great and high holiness. Our function as flesh-and-blood humans is to take the physical things that this world has to offer and turn them against their nature, making them holy and fulfilling Hashem’s intent of creating a lower worldly environment suitable for Hashem to dwell in and amongst us, which was the intent at Creation.”
That leads to a greater understanding of the purpose of our creation and the challenges of these modern times. In other words, nothing that we do or indulge in is disconnected in any way from our attachment to Torah. That means if you are not eating steak or flanken on that first night of yom tov, that conduct is for a purpose. And all those cheesecake recipes you found yourself perusing over the last few weeks—that too might be a part of the process of receiving the Torah. Now chocolate cheesecake? That might be a level of highness beyond our grasp.
Chag sameiach. v
Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com.