Words From Rabbi White

Shavuot is the holiday associated with Torah. I hope that we all have given thought to increasing our study of Torah: whether through books; through following such sites as YUTorah, the OU sites, and/or various Chabad sites; or through the various programs provided by our synagogue.

The Ashkenazim recite every year, before the reading of the Torah on the first day of Shavuot, the akdamot.  This poem, composed in Aramaic, after describing how impossible it is for human beings to describe the greatness of God, proudly explains how Jews have rebuffed the attempts of the Church towards tempting (or forcing) us to apostasy, chas ve-shalom.

Akdamot is sung in a special traditional melody, that cannot be changed, and that is used only on three occasions: for akdamot, for the Yom Tov kiddush, and for calling up of the special aliyot on Simchat /torah.

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When my wife a”h and I were married, we traded presents: she gave me a 20-volume Vilna Talmud; I gave her a 5 volume mahzor, with Yiddish explanations, and with her name, Sarah Devorah, stamped on each volume. I have promised that set to my great granddaughter, born a month after my wife passed away, and given her exact name.

This year, on the morning of the first day of Shavuot, before going to shul, I was glancing through that Mahzor. It contained a poem that I had never seen before: the reading of the 10 commandments were preceded by an Aramaic poem, called "arkhin."

This poem follows a midrash that HaShem, on the day of the giving of the Torah, bent the heavens down to the top of Mt. Sinai, and told Moses, his faithful one, “come and go up the mountain.”

According to this tradition, Moses was afraid the angels would scare him, but HaShem assures Moses that there would be nothing of which to be afraid, as Moshe’s ancestor (i.e. Abraham,) had already survived the burning coals that, according to a well known midrash, had been prepared for him by Nimrod. (As we know from another midrash, the angels were jealous that the Torah would be given to Moses, and not to them.)

In general, midrash reads between the lines of the Torah. We can imagine that for an octogenarian, even as great as Moses, climbing up a mountain must have been a daunting request, and he needed HaShem’s reassurance that he would have nothing to fear.

The mahzor is a repository of some fascinating material: always something new to learn!

Shabbat shalom