Sublime

In a very real sense, the covenant is vulnerable to history and must be ratified again and again. The holiday of Shavuot is the response to these concerns. Shavuot celebrates and renews the covenant of the Jewish people.

Talmud

Do not mistake the words of Kiddush for a flat, pedestrian text, a rite to be discharged as quickly as possible.

A central task of this generation is to incorporate experiences such as the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel into the religious understanding of the Jewish way. Shavuot should properly be called the holiday of the Continuous Giving of the Torah. It celebrates “what God and humans have wrought.”

h’assidim et les mitnagdim

On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die… but Teshuvah [returning, turning, repentance], Prayer, and Righteous Deeds can transform [ma’avirin] the evil of the decree.

Through Shavuot, Jewish people reaffirm their destiny as the people of the Unfinished Covenant, the carriers of the once and future redemption.

reading and every new interpretation. The rabbinic understanding of the dynamic of Oral Torah—ever growing and always the key to fixing the meaning of Written Torah for each particular time and place—is profoundly compatible with a Process understanding and is strongly rooted in the metaphysics that Process articulates.

Despite this the Talmud understands the Torah to be commanding us to remonstrate even with our teacher or leader, should we see him doing something wrong.