Shavuot in exile

It was the 23rd of May 2026. Shavuot. Also known as the Feast of Weeks, one of the Shalosh Regalim, the three major pilgrimage festivals. I’ve looked at the holiday commandments before, the way you do when you’re going through the motions. This year I decided to actually sit with them. Not the family tradition. Not the rabbi’s drasha, which I’ll confess I never had much patience for anyway. The text.

I looked at what the Torah says:

• Celebrate the harvest and bring first fruits to God (Exodus 23:16; Exodus 34:22)
• Count seven weeks from the first grain offering and bring a new grain offering (Leviticus 23:15–16)
• Bring two loaves of bread and multiple animal sacrifices (Leviticus 23:17–20; Numbers 28:27–30)
• Hold a sacred assembly and refrain from work (Leviticus 23:21; Numbers 28:26)
• Rejoice before God at the chosen place together with your household, your servants, the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow (Deuteronomy 16:10–11)

Let me go through these one by one.

Bring first fruits? I don’t have a farm. And before you ask: no, you cannot substitute money. The bikkurim are physical produce, brought physically to the Temple. The conversion to money that Deuteronomy allows is for the second tithe, not for this. Bring a new grain offering? See previous. Two loaves and animal sacrifices? There is no Temple, and the Torah is explicit that sacrifices can only be offered at the chosen place. Rejoice before God at the chosen place? That’s Jerusalem. I could go there. I don’t even need a donkey, there’s a train now. But what do I do once I get there? Visit the Western Wall? The Western Wall is a retaining wall. It has no inherent sanctity in the Torah. The Temple was above it and to the side of it, and we’re not allowed to build there. The holiest thing in Judaism has become a wall we stand next to because we can’t get to what matters. That’s not observance, that’s a vigil. Celebrate the harvest? I work in tech.

So what did that leave me with? One commandment. “On that same day you shall hold a celebration; it shall be a sacred occasion for you; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a law for all time, in all your settlements, throughout your generations.” (Leviticus 23:21, JPS).

This was kind of underwhelming. Shavuot is supposed to be one of the three major pilgrimages. Think about what that actually meant. You would spend weeks preparing. You pack your first fruits into baskets, load them onto a donkey, and join a swelling caravan of families from across your region, all walking toward Jerusalem. The roads fill up. People sing. By the time you reach the city it is overflowing with tens of thousands of pilgrims who made the same journey. The priests are at the Temple. There are sacrifices, communal meals, music. You stand in a crowd before God at the place He chose and you feel, physically and unmistakably, that something is happening. It was an event. Now it’s just what I do every week on Shabbat anyway, except I am allowed to cook. That’s not a major holiday, that’s glorified Columbus Day.

Sure, a lot of this can be solved if we rebuilt the Temple. This is not insurmountable. Ezekiel gave us the template. But even Ezekiel’s blueprint is not perfect. It doesn’t solve the farmer issue. It describes a world in which Israel is still an agrarian society with the specific twelve tribes in their specific territorial allocations. Shavuot would still be missing a lot of its laws even with a Third Temple standing tomorrow.

Moreover, the Third Temple won’t be standing tomorrow. I consider myself rather optimistic on this front. I genuinely believe that we can start building a Third Temple in a few decades. So with maybe another decade spent on construction and infrastructure, that’s still 40 Shavuot devoid of much meaning. What are we supposed to do now?

The lost society

This brings us to a core truth which I’ve been avoiding for years: the Torah was fundamentally designed for an agrarian tribal society. It has a core set of requirements which are no longer met:

• A functioning Temple or Tabernacle as the sole site of sacrifice and communal worship
• An active priestly class, Kohanim and Levites, organized and serving in rotation
• A majority agricultural population, farming land they personally own
• Tribal identity, with the twelve tribes in their specific territorial allocations
• A national religious economy centered on Jerusalem, with tithes, pilgrimages, and redistribution flowing through it

These requirements may never come back in full. Tribal identity is essentially gone, and has been for centuries before the Second Temple fell. Most Jews today cannot tell you with certainty whether they are Kohanim, Levites, or Israelites beyond family tradition of uncertain reliability. Without these foundations we cannot fulfill the Torah as intended. The society the Torah was crafted for no longer exists.

This is evident everywhere you look in scripture. Without the historical context, the Torah simply doesn’t make sense. Abraham sets up the carcasses of slaughtered animals in a row and God passes between them as a walking torch, sealing a covenant through an ancient Near Eastern ritual that no modern reader would intuit without a footnote. God sends an angel to ambush and wrestle Jacob in the middle of the night for reasons that remain genuinely unclear. The Hebrews are enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years as part of a plan God announced to Abraham generations earlier, casually, as though scheduling inconvenience. None of these are intuitive to the modern reader who spends most of their time sitting in front of a computer screen with AC. We can explain the context. We can study it, make sense of it. But our understanding will always be the understanding of a foreigner reading someone else’s letters. You will never be able to shake the feeling that the Torah was not made for you, and that you can never truly grasp its significance.

Because ultimately, it wasn’t.

What we would want, ideally, is some sort of patch to the Torah. One that makes it more relevant to our day-to-day lives. This would not be unprecedented. The Torah has been revised before, and not always at God’s initiative.

The first example predates even the Temple. Originally the Torah consecrated the firstborn as the priestly class (Exodus 13:2). After the golden calf, when the Levites were the only tribe that rallied to Moses while the rest of Israel worshipped the calf, God reassigned the priestly role to them instead (Numbers 3:12). The firstborn were replaced because they failed the test. It was a structural reform of the religious system in response to a historical event. The Torah’s own internal architecture was adjusted mid-implementation.

The next two reforms weren’t even God’s idea. When Israel asked Samuel for a king, God was openly offended. “It is not you they have rejected,” He tells Samuel, “it is Me they have rejected as their king.” (1 Samuel 8:7, JPS). He proceeds to warn them in exhaustive detail about what a king will do: take their sons for his army, their daughters for his kitchens, their fields for his officials. This is not a ringing endorsement. And then He grants the request anyway, because the people wanted it and the relationship was apparently worth preserving even at the cost of the ideal arrangement.

The Temple is even more striking. It was entirely David’s idea. He tells the prophet Nathan he wants to build God a permanent house, and Nathan initially says yes, go ahead. That night God comes to Nathan and corrects him. “Are you the one to build Me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites out of Egypt to this day… Did I ever speak a word to any of the judges of Israel whom I instructed to shepherd My people… saying: Why have you not built Me a house of cedar?” (2 Samuel 7:5-7, JPS). He never asked. He was fine with the Tabernacle. But He tolerates the idea, and assigns the construction to David’s son Solomon. The Temple, which becomes the central institution of Israelite religion, the thing the entire sacrificial system depends on, was a human initiative that God agreed to go along with.

So the precedent exists. The system has been patched before, sometimes at God’s direction and sometimes at human initiative with divine tolerance. It is not theologically absurd to ask for another patch.

In fact this was almost tried. Ezekiel and Jeremiah both seem to have sensed that the existing framework was approaching some kind of breaking point. Ezekiel 18 quietly dismantles one of the Torah’s most troubling features, the principle of inherited guilt. “The person who sins, only he shall die. A child shall not share the burden of a parent’s guilt, nor shall a parent share the burden of a child’s guilt.” (Ezekiel 18:20, JPS). This directly revises Exodus 20:5, where God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation. Ezekiel knew this was no longer workable and said so.

Jeremiah goes further. He explicitly announces that the existing covenant is being replaced. “See, a time is coming, declares Yehova, when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors.” (Jeremiah 31:31-32, JPS). Not renewed. Not reinterpreted. New. And this new covenant, he says, will be written on hearts rather than tablets. Internalized rather than imposed.

It’s almost like the prophets understood that their reality was getting out of sync with the world the Torah described and wanted to do something about it, but couldn’t. Jeremiah announces the new covenant and then it doesn’t really arrive. Ezekiel designs a Third Temple with different dimensions and different rules, a clear signal that the old system needs revision, and then history moves on without building it. The reforms are drafted and then left on the table.

As if the project stalled before it could be completed.

The paradox of eternity

The reason the prophets came short is pretty obvious. After all, the Torah is supposed to be an eternal covenant. Deuteronomy 29:28 puts it plainly: “the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, to observe all the words of this Torah” (JPS). Not for a generation. Not until further notice. Forever. Similarly we are banned from adding or removing from the Torah: “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2, JPS; see also Deuteronomy 13:1). Proposing a “new covenant” is indistinguishable from heresy. It also says that the Torah TODO: I want to elaborate more on this verse and show it in full is accessible and that we don’t need someone to draft us a reform. This is what לא בשמים היא means: “it is not in the heavens” (Deuteronomy 30:12). Moses is saying you don’t need a prophet to descend from on high and hand you the correct interpretation. It is already in your mouth and in your heart. TODO: we will get to the Rabbis later The Rabbis later use this verse to overrule a divine voice in a legal dispute (Bava Metzia 59b), closing the last available appeal mechanism from within the system itself. This one is particularly troubling because it is literally not true. Sure, at the time of Moses keeping the Torah was achievable, but as discussed, that is no longer the case.

There’s also the eternal threat of damnation. God tells us explicitly that if we do not follow the commandments He will deliver us into our enemies, but if we do follow them, we are promised prosperity. Deuteronomy 28 devotes sixty-eight verses to this. The first fourteen describe the blessings: flourishing harvests, defeated enemies, a nation that other peoples fear. The remaining fifty-four describe the curses in escalating detail: disease, drought, defeat, exile, madness, your children taken, your sanity broken. “Yehova will scatter you among all the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other” (Deuteronomy 28:64, JPS). These are the terms and conditions we agreed on. There is no avoiding this.

We arrive at a paradox. We have a system that is broken yet cannot be fixed. One which is forever but created for a specific time period.

I expect to hear some pushback here. After all, the Torah doesn’t say that all the commandments need to always be achievable. The seventy-year Babylonian exile is the obvious precedent: Jeremiah explicitly promises that God will return the people after seventy years (Jeremiah 29:10), and 2 Chronicles 36:21 frames the exile as the land “making up for its sabbatical years.” The disruption was real, but it was bounded. But that was seventy years. This second exile has been going on for thousands. In fact it might go on forever because as discussed, we are no longer farmers. I am tired of waiting.

Now I am making an assumption here. I am presuming that all of the commandments of the Torah have to be achievable to be meaningful. I am unapologetic about this point. To me, it is pretty clear that the Torah is describing a system. One that doesn’t make sense when the components are missing. But the Torah doesn’t make any such claim. This is a theologically consistent and yet unhelpful point. You see the Torah never actually clarifies what its purpose is. We don’t know for certain if it’s supposed to be a system. To me it looks pretty obvious, but that could simply be because I am a systems thinker. I cannot prove it one way or the other. And this brings us to the next major issue: the chain of authority has been broken.

It didn’t used to be this way. As I alluded to above, in the times of Moses and later, it was absolutely reasonable to keep God’s commandments. If you had a religious question, there was an authority in place to answer it. Jethro describes the layered system in Exodus 18: minor disputes go to lower judges, harder cases escalate upward, and only the most difficult reach Moses himself, who brings them directly before God. Deuteronomy 17:8-13 later formalizes this as a supreme court of Levitical priests and judges, whose ruling on difficult cases is binding on pain of death. And when even human deliberation wasn’t enough, the Urim and Thummim served as a direct oracular mechanism for consulting God on questions of national importance (Numbers 27:21). The system had layers. Human judges at the base, a supreme court in the middle, and a direct line to God as the final escalation path. Moreover if the people of Israel were sinning and not keeping the commandments (as was an unfortunate pattern), God would send a prophet to rebuke them. This was a relationship. There was a clear authority on what the correct interpretations and commandments were and someone to hold you accountable to them. This no longer exists. The Second Temple was destroyed and God is no longer sending prophets.

Now we must ask what might be the most uncomfortable question thus far. Has God given up? After all, we’ve seen Him repeatedly try to send prophets to rebuke the people, enemy nations to get them into line, but every time Israel returns to sin. God tries multiple different approaches, as I’ve highlighted in another essay of mine, but none of them pan out.

God giving up is not a hypothetical. He does it multiple times. He gave up on the flood generation: “Yehova regretted that He had made humans on earth, and His heart was saddened. Yehova said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I created’” (Genesis 6:6-7, JPS). He gave up on Saul as a king: “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned away from Me and has not carried out My commands” (1 Samuel 15:11, JPS). He even suggests giving up on the people of Israel themselves. When Moses comes down from Sinai to find them worshipping the golden calf, God says: “Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and I will make of you a great nation” (Exodus 32:10, JPS). Moses talks Him out of it. He floats the same idea again after the spies’ report demoralizes the people (Numbers 14:12). This has traditionally been understood as metaphor. But what if it wasn’t? What if God saw Israel sinning yet again and decided as He had before that the experiment failed?

Imagine for yourself that you have the blueprints for a steam engine. It’s beautiful and well designed. But you look at the bill of materials and see that most of the components are no longer manufactured. You try to contact the client but get no answer. You start asking yourself “what am I supposed to do here? Do I just use the components I do have? Because that’s not going to be a functional engine.” But then you start questioning the purpose of the blueprints. You double check them but don’t find a background section. You assume the purpose was to get from A to B. But if that’s really the case, then maybe an electric train would be better. Then you remember that the contract you signed said that if you can’t deliver you will be liable for damages. You see your colleagues argue about what the correct implementation of the steam engine was. An argument they’ve been having for thousands of years. The client has not contacted you or asked for updates during this time. A dark thought enters your mind. Maybe the client got bored of the steam engine idea. Maybe he decided to build cars instead. Maybe he went to a more reliable contractor this time.

My children have defeated me

I am far from the first person to recognize