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Easter and the Pentecost; Passover and Shavuot.
Easter and Pentecost. On Easter Day we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus and on Pentecost the arrival of the Holy Spirit. As a Jew, Jesus would have celebrated Passover and Shavuot at the same times.
But what are Passover and Shavuot?
Jesus had made his annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Passover is one of the three Pilgrimage Feasts mandated in the Torah. The other two mandated Pilgrimages are Shavuot and Sukkoth.
Most of us grew up learning the stories of Exodus, how the Israelites were warned to stay inside their homes and to paint the door frame with blood so the Angel of the Lord would pass over their homes as he killed the first born son of the Egyptians.
Shavuot is likely less familiar, but like the other two Pilgrimage Festivals, is related to the Exodus story. It celebrates the day that Moses was given the Torah on the Mountain of Sinai, and the day that the Jews accepted God’s Law, became a Nation of God.
Like Easter, it is a movable feast and falls seven, seven day weeks after the Second Day of Passover. It is called “The Feast of Counting” as the Jews anticipate the days, count the days, from Passover to the day of acceptance.
But how did the exact time of celebration come about?
No one actually knows when the Passover happened, or when exactly Moses received the Torah, so why do we celebrate Passover, Shavuot, Easter and Pentecost at these particular times of year?
Historically, Passover was celebrated with the first offerings of Barley. Wheat ripened slightly later and Shavuot was also the first offering from the Wheat harvest. The timing for these Pilgrimages corresponded to bringing the first of the harvests to the Temple, as offerings and for blessings.
The Third Mandatory Pilgrimage is Sukkoth. It too is related to the Exodus and when I was growing up, one of the most fun celebrations.
I grew up in an almost all Jewish neighborhood, so all my friends were Jewish. I was the Shabbat Goy, the Christian boy the orthodox Jews could call on to do things on Shabbat, turn on lights, turn on or off the stove, run errands.
One advantage though was getting to celebrate Sukkoth with my friends. Sukkoth commemorates living in the desert while on the Exodus march. All the kids get to make tents from tables and we got to sleep in them and have our meals on the floor and eat with our hands and get dirty and all the things we couldn’t do at other times.
But even Sukkoth is timed with the harvest. One of the traditions of Sukkoth is shaking the Four Species. The Four Species are Date Palm Fronds, Willow Branches, Myrtle and Citron, a fruit like lemons. As folk living here in the Rio Grande Valley know, citrus fruits are a Fall Harvest.
To celebrate, you take the Date Palm Frond, some Myrtle and the Willow in the left hand, and hold the Citron in your right. As you bring the two hands together, they are blessed. You then shake them three times to each of the four corners, to North, East, South and West.
The ceremony is a prayer of thanks for the year’s bounty and that there be rain enough for all the coming years’ growth.
Beyond the symbolic meanings of the Exodus in Passover, Shavuot and Sukkoth, beyond the symbolic meanings of Easter and the Pentecost, there was life, and an acknowledgement of the cycles of life and the harvest.
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How pierceful grows the hazy yon! How myrtle petaled thou! For spring hath sprung the cyclotron - How high browse thou, brown cow? -- Churchy LaFemme, 1950
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