Dear TEE Community,
Last Monday was the holiday of Shavuot. While less familiar to many Jews than Sukkot or Passover, Shavuot is one of the three major festivals of the Jewish year. In the Bible, it is described as a celebration of first fruits, connected to the barley harvest. The talmudic rabbis added a theological dimension by connecting it to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
In Jewish tradition, the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot took on several levels of meaning. On the most basic level, they represent the journey from Egypt to Sinai. This required that the Israelites undergo a spiritual transformation to become a people ready to receive the Torah. During the Exodus, the Israelites physically left Egypt’s geographical boundaries, but their internal liberation required the full seven weeks’ journey. Each day represented a gradual shedding of their enslaved mentality—the psychological and spiritual constrictions that kept them bound even after their physical freedom.
The rabbinic tradition also recognizes a mystical significance in the number forty-nine, developing the concept of forty-nine gates of understanding. This tradition describes ascending levels of wisdom, where each gate opens broader comprehension of divine knowledge. Like the Exodus journey, this ascent requires moving beyond limited perspectives toward increasingly expansive awareness. The fiftieth gate—corresponding to the fiftieth day when Torah was given—represents ultimate openness to receive divine wisdom.
Both frameworks describe an essential movement from narrowness (“Egypt/Mitzrayim,” literally “narrow places”) to openness and spiritual receptivity. The rabbinic teaching suggests that forty-nine represents completion at the threshold of transformation, as seven weeks of seven days create a perfect cycle of spiritual refinement.
The rabbinic tradition’s recognition of forty-nine’s significance extended to the academy, where students were required to demonstrate mastery by presenting forty-nine arguments supporting any given position and forty-nine arguments against it. This practice cultivated the essential movement from narrow, fixed thinking to intellectual openness—the same journey from Mitzrayim to expansive understanding that characterizes the journey to Sinai.
The academy’s forty-nine/forty-nine requirement teaches that greater wisdom emerges not from dogmatic certainty but from the ability to hold multiple viewpoints simultaneously. This intellectual flexibility mirrors the spiritual work of Shavuot: moving from the narrowness of unexamined assumptions toward openness to divine revelation. One who can argue both sides of any question develops the mental spaciousness necessary for receiving new understanding.
The rabbis recognized that genuine transformation—whether intellectual or spiritual—cannot occur instantaneously. The movement from narrowness to openness demands patient, deliberate work over time. Just as the Israelites needed forty-nine days to transform from slaves capable only of survival into a nation ready for covenant, spiritual seekers must gradually expand their capacity for wisdom and connection.
Shavuot thus becomes an annual opportunity to practice this essential Jewish skill: examining our own fixed positions, entertaining opposing viewpoints, and gradually expanding our capacity for the kind of intellectual and spiritual openness that allows Torah to enter our lives. As part of our Shabbat services this week, we will have the opportunity to practice this skill as we discuss the meaning of the Ten Commandments.
I hope you will join us.
Rabbi Drorah Setel