FOR SHAVUOS
WHEN FORTY-NINE BRINGS FIFTY
A friend recently brought to my attention a tragic story. This friend’s grandmother, in her nineties, had taken ill. At some point, workers at the hospital where she was a patient gave this woman something to drink, without the knowledge of her family. She was gone within twenty-four hours.
Helping a person to commit suicide (called “mercy killings”) is a controversial topic. According to Jewish law, this would be considered murder. All would agree, though, that such a move without consent of the patient or family runs against any and every decency and civil law imaginable. Regardless of the patient’s condition, no one has the right to take matters into his or her own hands and choose to kill people.
Where does a person get the feeling to perform such an action? The same question can, essentially, be applied to other, less severe crimes, such as robbing, stealing, cheating, and lying. When one wishes to harm another one, direct confrontation is normally avoided. One goes, instead, behind the other’s back and pulls off the terrible deed.
People who behave in this manner are missing the message from the festival of Shavuos, a holiday celebrated from this coming Tuesday evening till this coming Thursday night. This festival commemorates the day the Ten Commandments, together with the rest of the Torah, were given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
Some may suggest that the Torah is a book of instructions. This is the document – they propose – given to a new people, plucked out of the confines of Egypt, traveling through a desert, and eventually setting up a kingdom in their own land, the Holy Land. They needed a guide, and guidelines, to help them grow and settle.
This is not true for many reasons. The Torah was given to the people for all time. The Torah itself references situations long after the actual date of those living during biblical times. Repeatedly, the prophets, some of whom lived over a thousand years after Sinai, implore the people to follow the Torah’s precepts and not to abandon this Divine document.
Moreover, the Torah was not given to the people as they left Egypt. It took forty-nine days, at a distant location called Mount Sinai, for the Torah to be given to the people. If the Torah were merely a list of rules, it should have been given at, or before, the Exodus from Egypt.
The Torah is a uniquely Divine document. Its every single letter was dictated by the Almighty to be pertinent for all generations and for all time. It is through this document that a human has the ability to connect with the Divine. And it is through this document that the Jewish people are a people for all this time, since language, country and culture differ from place to place.
According to the aforementioned, the question turns the other way: Why wait forty-nine days for the Jewish people to arrive at Mount Sinai. Why not give this document called “Torah” at the Exodus, or immediately after leaving Egypt?
The answer lies in the number forty-nine and its relationship with the number fifty. Over the past few weeks, the Good Shabbos Email has covered the special nature of the number fifty in Judaism. It had been established that the number fifty represents liberation (as in the Jubilee year), as well as salvation (offered to save even the wicked people of Sodom and Gomorrah), and it also represents the importance of the numbers mentioned in the census of the Jewish people.
The number fifty also plays a pivotal role in the receiving of the Torah by the Jewish people at Sinai, and in the festival of Shavuos, designed to relive and re-experience this monumental occasion. The Torah, in its directive regarding the days between the festival of Passover and Shavuos, instructs the following: “From the day following the rest day (of Passover)… you should count for yourselves seven weeks. They should be perfect… you should count fifty days.” (Vayikra (Leviticus) 23:15-16.)
Seven “perfect” weeks does not equal fifty days. They equal forty-nine days. How, then, does one count seven weeks and fifty days?
The yearly counting during this time mirrors the counting the Jewish people were performing following their Exodus from Egypt. In those days, the Egyptians were not just the oppressive and enslaving people. Egypt was, culturally, a location of spiritual depravity and uncleanliness.
When the Jewish people physically left Egypt, it was a challenge to remove the “Egypt” – its culture and manners – that had become entrenched within them. The forty-nine days then served as a spring board, through which to climb up, level by level, day by day, until the people had completed the work required for the entire gamut of human characteristics.
It was after completing these forty-nine steps, on the fiftieth morning, that the Almighty responded to their efforts by appearing in His full glory on Mount Sinai, delivering the Ten Commandments, together with the rest of the Torah.
In other words, day fifty was the response to the forty-nine preceding it. It was the revelation of the Divine reaction, so to speak, to their human efforts. It was, in fact, the greatest Divine revelation ever seen.
Ever since that time, as the festival of Shavuos approaches each year, this same count reminds and enables the person to prepare properly for the annual revelation of this great Divine Energy. Once humans complete forty-nine levels, the highest, most Divine level, is gifted to the people as a response. Hence, “you should count fifty days.”
The Torah is not merely a book of behavior codes, but is a G-dly revelation. It is an opportunity to connect with a transcendent, Divine energy; with the number fifty. It could not have been given coming out of Egypt, for this type of revelation is best appreciated and accepted when humans have done their part in the preparation.
When a person truly appreciates this Divine document for what it is, it is clear that all its rules, regulations, and parameters are designed to make a human more Divine. With this blueprint, it should be impossible for one person to stoop so low as to harm another. On the contrary, the Torah continues to allow humans to be elevated to greater heights.
SUMMARY: The Torah is a powerful Divine revelation to humans in this world. With appropriate preparation, the transcendence of the number fifty is fully appreciated.