The month of Sivan begins with the festival of Shavuot, which falls on the sixth day of the month. In the Torah, Shavuot is described as an early summer harvest festival, celebrated with offerings of bread from the new wheat crop and other first fruits. In rabbinic literature, Shavuot also commemorates receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Traditional readings for Shavuot reflect both the agricultural and historical dimensions of the holiday. The harvest celebration is marked by reading the Book of Ruth. In that story, after her husband’s death, the eponymous Moabite follows her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, to Naomi’s home in Judea. In a newly adopted land and among a newly adopted people, Ruth cares devotedly for Naomi, eventually marrying into the family again, and conceiving a child who will become the progenitor of none other than King David. What does this have to do with the agricultural dimension of Shavuot? Ruth’s story plays out against the background of the barley harvest.
The Torah reading for Shavuot is more straightforward: In synagogue, Jews read the passage in Exodus describing the receiving of the Ten Commandments.
The two meanings of Shavuot, and the texts chosen to represent them, can feel superficially distant. For the Kabbalists, however, the giving of the Torah and the story of Ruth are intimately connected.
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In the imagination of Tikkunei HaZohar (part of the later strata of the Zohar, usually printed as an independent volume), the story of Ruth and her mother-in-law returning to Judea (Ruth 1) merges with the story of Moses bringing the tablets down from Sinai (Exodus 32).
Bereshit — created two.
Thus it says: “The two of them walked” (Ruth 1:19).
They are the two Torahs: A Written Torah and an Oral Torah.
Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 31, p.75b.
Explore this passage in context on Sefaria.
Like all teachings in the Tikunei Zohar, this one begins with a reflection on the first word of the Torah: bereshit — in the beginning. Tikkunei HaZohar starts by observing that the word bereshit can be anagramed to bara shtei, “created two.” This hints that in the act of creation, the unity of the divine necessarily enters into duality.
This idea is exemplified in the two women, Naomi and Ruth, walking one road back to Judea. They are an unlikely pair, one an Israelite born in Judea, the other a Moabite born in enemy territory. One is an elderly woman whose sons have died, the other a woman whose childbearing years are still ahead. Naomi is a critical link to the past, Ruth a crucial bridge to the future. Created two.
According to Tikkunei HaZohar, these two women, walking side by side, are the two Torahs that come down the mountain with Moses: the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. At the moment of revelation, the Written Torah is visible and physically present. Carved in stone, it bears a record of Israel’s past. It will be copied over and over in every generation, with great precision, so that the Jewish people’s link to the past will not be severed, so they do not become an uprooted tree. But the Oral Torah, a Torah not yet written down, has no physical form yet. It is an ongoing revelation, channeled through human lives, articulated in the mouths of each generation. God appears to us in this duality. Created two.
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Two tablets came to Mount Sinai, and immediately: “the whole city buzzed with excitement over them” (Ruth 1:19).The whole world was shaken, as it says: “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they were shaken and stood at a distance” (Exodus 20:15)
Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 31, p.75b.
Explore this passage in context on Sefaria.
The duality of creation is also manifest in the two tablets that Moses carries. When the two tablets first appear, as when the two women first walk into town, the entire world takes notice. In Judea, the town buzzes with excitement. At Mount Sinai, the ground shakes. This reminds us of the excitement of beginnings, or renewed beginnings. They engender both fear and excitement, stepping back and leaning in. Created two.
In both cases, there is also an almost immediate rupture.
But:
“The women said, can this be Naomi?” (Ruth 1:19) This is the sweetness of Torah?!
At that moment, “he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:19), and Torah flew away from there.
And Torah said: “I went full,” to Mount Sinai, but now “God has brought me back empty” (Ruth 1:21).
Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 31, p.75b.
Explore this passage in context on Sefaria.
Naomi, whose name literally means “sweetness,” arrives home and renames herself Mara, which means “bitterness” (Ruth 1:20). Meanwhile, at Mount Sinai, Moses physically descends the mountain only to witness the Israelites morally descend into idolatry. He hurls the tablets, and they shatter at the foot of the mountain. As the excitement and the novelty of a new beginning fades, we often realize how much our experience of earth-shaking and sweetness was born of our own projections.
To walk away from the sweetness of Torah is to experience the tablets shattering and all the words of Torah flying away (see the classical image in Tanchuma Ki-Tissa 26), so we are left with nothing but broken shards of a vessel that once held Torah within it. Torah, which was so full, is now left empty, and the same is true of us. Sometimes, out of sheer despair, we turn the vessels themselves into idols.
But like Naomi, who became Mara yet ends up embracing a new grandchild, and like Moses, who went back up the mountain to obtain a second set of tablets, we must find our way back. We must make our way through the pain and reconstruct. We must reclaim Torah on the other side. Created two.
The month of Sivan is the beginning of this process. After Sivan, which opens with the joyous receiving of the Torah, we will go through the shattering of the destruction marked in the months of Tamuz and Av, the reconstruction (teshuvah) of Elul, and finally reclaim our relationship with God and Torah in the celebrations of the month of Tishrei: Yom Kippur and Sukkot.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
