On the List

This post was written and scheduled before Shavuot began.

The cheesecake came out of the oven an hour ago and is cooling on the counter, which is more presence than cheesecake usually has in this house. Erev Shavuot in Atlanta. The flowers came this morning — three bunches of white and green, scattered on the table where the chumashim are already stacked for tonight. The chag starts a few hours from now. The house has the half-quiet of last-minute preparation.

I went to the grocery store after lunch. The dairy aisle was thinned out — most of the cream cheese, half the butter — and the cashier said something like “must be a Jewish holiday” without realizing she was right. In Atlanta you can run an entire chag without anyone asking which one. The signs of it are visible if you know what they mean.

This Shabbat is the second day of Shavuot — Sivan 7, in the diaspora — and the Torah reading is the last chapter of Moshe’s farewell speech: Devarim 14 through 16, the festival calendar in concentrated form. Tithes, shemittah, firstborn animals, Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot. The Shavuot passage is fourteen verses long, in the middle of the chapter. It tells you to count off seven weeks from the start of the grain harvest, to bring a freewill offering, to make a festival to the ETERNAL. And then it tells you to rejoice.

וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֞ לִפְנֵ֣י ׀ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ אַתָּ֨ה וּבִנְךָ֣ וּבִתֶּ֘ךָ֮ וְעַבְדְּךָ֣ וַאֲמָתֶ֒ךָ֒ וְהַלֵּוִי֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בִּשְׁעָרֶ֔יךָ וְהַגֵּ֛ר וְהַיָּת֥וֹם וְהָאַלְמָנָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר בְּקִרְבֶּ֑ךָ בַּמָּק֗וֹם אֲשֶׁ֤ר יִבְחַר֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ לְשַׁכֵּ֥ן שְׁמ֖וֹ שָֽׁם׃ You shall rejoice before the ETERNAL your God with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite in your communities, and the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your midst, at the place where the ETERNAL your God will choose to establish the divine name.

— Devarim 16:11

Vesamachta. And you shall rejoice. The command is in the singular — the verse speaks to you, the reader. And it does not stop at you. It names a list.

You. Your son. Your daughter. Your male slave. Your female slave. The Levite in your gates. The stranger. The orphan. The widow.

The list does the work of the verse. Nine categories in one breath. The Hebrew piles them up with vavs, the word for “and”: atah uvincha uvitecha v’avdecha va’amatecha v’halevi v’hager v’hayatom v’ha’almanah. Each vav folds another person into the rejoicing. Three are your immediate family. Two are your household labor. Four are people without a clan of their own to do the rejoicing with. The Levite has no tribal land. The ger, the convert, has joined the people but has no ancestral inheritance. The orphan and the widow have lost the people who would otherwise bring them.

This is the first place in the Torah where the rejoicing command — vesamachta — is attached to a specific chag. There is no vesamachta at Pesach in this passage. There is no vesamachta at the firstborn-animal offering. Shavuot gets the command, and the command names a guest list before it names a menu.

The Rambam reads the verse exactingly. In the Mishneh Torah he writes that if you sit down for the chag with your own family behind a closed gate and the Levite and the convert and the orphan and the widow are eating alone somewhere else in your town, what you are doing is not the joy of the mitzvah. He calls it the joy of the belly. The verse, on the Rambam’s reading, is structural. The four people without inheritance have to be at the table or the simcha in the verse is not happening.

That is the joy on offer. Joy with the four people who would otherwise be eating alone.

There is a midrash that comes up at Shavuot the same way it comes up at the Pesach seder: every convert who converts was standing at Sinai. The receiving of the Torah is something Jews understand as ongoing. The convert who walked into the mikveh has been there the whole time. The list in Devarim 16:11 makes the claim concrete. The ger is named — by category, in the founding text, in the verse that lays out the chag — before the ger arrives.

Tonight, when the chag starts and we sit down for the dairy meal, my husband will say the same blessings he always says. Then we will sit at the table where the chumashim are already open, because the night of Shavuot is the night you stay up to learn. We have done this once before. Last year I was in Israel, three weeks into being a Jew, and the Jerusalem streets were closed to traffic for the chag. This year the chag is in our living room, with cheesecake from the same recipe my husband’s mother used.

There is a Hebrew word that doesn’t translate cleanly into English: vatik. It means a seasoned member of the community. A regular. Someone who has been at this for a while. I am not vatik. I have been a Jew for one year and one week. Vatik is not in the Devarim 16:11 list, and that is its own kind of relief — the verse asks whether you are at the table.

The list is closed. Nine categories. Family, household, the four without inheritance. The Levite has no land. The ger has no ancestors who marched out of Egypt. The orphan has lost his father. The widow has lost her husband. And every one of them gets named before the chag, by category, in the verse that says: rejoice.

Vesamachta. And you shall rejoice. The verse is in the singular, the imperative, the second person. The command is to me. The list is everyone I bring with me.

The cheesecake is cool now. The flowers are on the table. The chumashim are stacked. The first night of Shavuot starts soon.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham