My 7-year-old granddaughter usually visits around Shavuot. She loves to visit her doting zayde. Naturally. What’s not to like? We eat ice cream and tell stories, usually about the holidays.
This child’s mother is a loving, dutiful daughter who calls her indulgent father weekly and occasionally remembers his birthday with a pair of socks only a size or two wrong, or maybe a box of hankies that always fit.
Her child, this fudge-ripple-loving granddaughter, knows almost all the Jewish holidays. “Sarah,” I say, “tell me about Pesach.”
“We eat matzah and Bubbe makes knaidlach.” Right on the money.
“OK, Sarah, here’s a hard one — Purim.”
“Oh, that’s easy. Hamantashen.” Excellent.
“Chanukah, what about Chanukah?”
“Latkes and applesauce.” An admirable child. She knows as much about the holidays as most of my adult friends.
But I didn’t want to embarrass her with questions about Shavuot, which begins Thursday at sundown. It’s a tough one.
Since I knew she’d flunk the Shavuot quiz, I sat her down at our kitchen table and told her the story of the holiday. I told her all about the tribulations her ancestors suffered on the trek to the Holy Mountain. Specifically, I mention the absence of ice cream, candy, Barbie Dolls, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ballet lessons. I tell her that little girls of 7 had to leave their doll babies back in Egypt. And I remind her that automobiles and buses were three millennia away and most little girls didn’t even have a donkey to ride on.
Then I tell her about the epiphany on the mountain: the Ten Commandments and the Torah.
“Can you imagine our good luck, Sarah? He gave it to us. He could have given it to lots of other nations…”
“So why did he give it to us?” she interrupts.
Hmmm, tough question. I don’t want to taint her Jewish pride with arrogance, but I also don’t want to make an ethical equivalence between our team and the hairy heathens that inhabited that corner of creation: the Philistines, Hittites, and Amalekites. If you gave a Torah to an Amalekite, he’d use it to prop open the wine cellar door! There’s a fine line to walk between pride and arrogance. I’d like to build a little ethnic pride, but I don’t want her wearing an “I hate Hittites” T-shirt. Nor do I want her to spend her life in court defending herself from litigious Hittites. (You can’t call ’em Hitts, ya know.)
“Have a little more chocolate ripple,” I suggest. Then I explain that the joy of Torah brings with it heavy responsibilities in leadership and obedience. Honor and obligation go together just like when the teacher chooses you to be hall monitor. And I also note that the nastiest real estate dispute in recorded history — between us and the Palestinians — is clearly addressed in Torah: Genesis; chapter 15, line 18. He who holds title to the entire earth gives the seed of Abraham (that’s us, you know) that slice of land from the Nile to the Euphrates. End of argument.
I try to tell her that the Divine Book is an encyclopedia of regulations, history and poetry. Those regulations are especially important because rules make civilization. Nations and zaydes and 7-year-old, ice cream-eating little girls all need rules. Not a terribly chic notion in the hedonistic culture of 2002.
Every year at Shavuot my explanation contains another layer of understanding. Next year I’ll give her the “what if?” hypothesis. What if no Torah? No commandments? We might be dressed in wolfskins full of fleas and carrying a sharpened stick to protect ourselves from our neighbors, who’ve never heard of the Ten Commandments.
And the year after that, I’ll explain that the Holy Book shaped Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism. You could say, without hesitation: no Torah, no Western civilization.
And without generations of Torah study, who’d have the intellectual curiosity or mental muscle to discover refrigeration for fudge ripple ice cream?