(15) And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering—the day after the sabbath—you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: (16) you must count until the day after the seventh week—fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to Adonai. (17) You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering; each shall be made of two-tenths of a measure of choice flour, baked after leavening, as first fruits to Adonai. (18) With the bread you shall present, as burnt offerings to Adonai, seven yearling lambs without blemish, one bull of the herd, and two rams, with their meal offerings and libations, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to Adonai. (19) You shall also offer one he-goat as a sin offering and two yearling lambs as a sacrifice of well-being. (20) The priest shall elevate these—the two lambs—together with the bread of first fruits as an elevation offering before Adonai; they shall be holy to Adonai, for the priest. (21) On that same day you shall hold a celebration; it shall be a sacred occasion for you; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a law for all time in all your settlements, throughout the ages. (22) And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I Adonai am your God.
How is Torah like a harvest? What laws of the Shavuot harvest act as "Torah-on-one-foot?"
(3) Moses went and repeated to the people all the commands of Adonai and all the rules; and all the people answered with one voice, saying, “All the things that Adonai has commanded we will do!” (4) Moses then wrote down all the commands of Adonai. Early in the morning, he set up an altar at the foot of the mountain, with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel. (5) He designated some young men among the Israelites, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed bulls as offerings of well-being to Adonai. (6) Moses took one part of the blood and put it in basins, and the other part of the blood he dashed against the altar. (7) Then he took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, “All that Adonai has spoken we will faithfully do!”
In Hebrew, we call the Ten Commandments Aseret HaDibrot – not Aseret HaMitzvot. What is the difference between mitzvot and dibrot? How might that difference affect a reading of na'aseh v'nishma?
The Gemara cites additional homiletic interpretations on the topic of the revelation at Sinai. The Torah says, “And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the lowermost part of the mount” (Exodus 19:17). Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: the Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, overturned the mountain above the Jews like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial. Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there is a substantial caveat to the obligation to fulfill the Torah. The Jewish people can claim that they were coerced into accepting the Torah, and it is therefore not binding. Rava said: Even so, they again accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27), and he taught: The Jews ordained what they had already taken upon themselves through coercion at Sinai.
Creation is the origin, redemption the goal. But revelation is not a fixed, dated point poised between the two. The revelation at Sinai is not this midpoint itself, but the perceiving of it, and such perception is possible at any time.
Martin Buber
R. Aba son of R. Hiya son of Aba said in the name or R. Yochanan: Those who write halachot (laws of the oral Torah) are like those who burn the Torah, and one who learns from them receives no reward.
The Rabbis feared that if the realm of the oral crossed into the realm of the written, it would devalue both realms, cheapening the eternal sacredness of the written Torah, and etching in stone that which should have been more informal and ephemeral in nature.
And yet, necessity demanded that the oral law be written down; later on in the same excerpt from the Talmud, the Rabbis conclude that it is better for Torah to be uprooted than for Torah to be forgotten in Israel. Their argument is profound: it is better to change the very nature of our system, the very essence of our traditions, in order to preserve that system, and maintain those traditions.
This concept is what the Rabbis are asking us to celebrate on Shavuot. When we observe this traditional, Torah-based holiday in this radically non-traditional, oral-law based way, calling the holiday by the name the Torah has given it, and celebrating it as the Rabbis re-imagined it, we are celebrating the paradox that is our religion. We are celebrating the complex, intertwined system of the oral and written traditions, and acknowledging that, in Judaism, the very purpose of innovation is to preserve that which is traditional and sacred, which in turn actually requires that the very nature of the tradition must be flexible and malleable.