Be Like Savta

There’s an older woman who goes walking in the early morning hours in Sacher Park in Jerusalem. You can tell by the smile lines around her eyes that she has seen many, many years. She doesn’t walk very quickly, and she has two walking sticks that she uses for balance. I call her Savta.

To be clear, I have no idea who she is. I don’t know her name, I don’t know where she lives, and I don’t know anything about her personal life. What I do know about her is that when I run past her, she always breaks out into a huge smile and, with a genuine joie de vivre, wishes me a good morning. Occasionally she’ll even cheer me on with a hearty, “Kol hakavod,” the Hebrew expression that essentially means, “Good job!”

I love seeing her. She is so sweet and completely genuine, and she brings a smile to my face with all of our very small, very brief interactions. And I’m not the only one upon whom she bestows her good morning wishes. I’m one of many regulars who go running at that hour, and Savta has a smile and a kind word to say to all of us.

It seems that she just likes people. There’s no agenda here; she is truly happy to see you, the stranger, out and about as you get in your morning exercise. She doesn’t have to know your name to wish you a good morning; she doesn’t have to know where you live to cheer you on. She’s just happy to see you, and her happiness is infectious.

On a very fundamental level, my interactions with Savta remind me how to relate to and treat the people around me. We find ourselves now in the period between Passover and Shavuot, a seven week stretch in which we count up daily from the second night of Passover until we reach the holiday in which we commemorate the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The commandment to count, to mark this time, which is found in this week’s Torah portion, directly links the two holidays, implying that we are in an interim period right now.

In theory, that should mean that the period is marked with joy. It should contain similar restrictions to the interim days of Passover and Sukkot, in which there are no displays of public mourning and the time should be treated as festive. And yet, at this same time, we observe a period of mourning as we remember the 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest Mishnaic sages, who died during this interim period.

The Talmud explains that the cause of their death was that they “did not treat each other with respect” (Yevamot 62b). There are various interpretations of what exactly that means, but the underlying theme is that there was something wrong in their interpersonal relations, and God apparently felt that they were unfit to be the leaders of the next generation.

What is particularly striking about the death of these 24,000 is that it specifically happened in this period between Passover and Shavuot. Why now, in what should be a time of joy? What is it about this time period?

As One Person, With One Heart

Passover marked the inception of the Jewish nation. In the moment when we walked out of Egypt as a free people, we were bound together as one nation under God. Yet, to maintain that sense of unity, you need something more than a shared experience: you need a shared moral code, a guide, if you will, that will teach you how to build a society that cares for the poor and considers the widow and orphan. That, of course, is what we celebrate with the holiday of Shavuot; the revelation at Sinai is what changed us from an extended family with a shared history to a people who would build a world of moral decency.

The Torah describes the arrival of the Israelites at Sinai as follows: “And Israel camped there facing the mountain” (Ex. 19:2). In Hebrew, verbs are conjugated based on the tense and subject. The verb camped, in the verse, is written in the singular, referring simply to Israel as a collective noun. However, Rashi explains homiletically that the verb in the singular is to teach us that the Jewish people camped there “as one person, with one heart,” united in a spirit of brotherly love.

The Torah could not have been given at Sinai without that unity; it was the prerequisite to receiving God’s law which would forever bind us together as we worked to build a moral and just society. And every year, as we lead up from Passover to Shavuot and we prepare ourselves to renew our national covenant with God, we laser in on that unity, in part by mourning the 24,000 who were lost because they lost sight of it.

Not everyone can be Savta, and that’s okay. But we can all stand to learn from her. We can all, in some way, channel her energy and her love and joy for the people around us. Perhaps we wish good morning to our neighbors whom we otherwise ignore. Maybe it’s waving at the mailman as he drops off yet another package at our door. But if we each, in some way, can be more like Savta, then we can get ourselves ever closer to one person, one heart, thereby paving the way for us, as a unified nation, to re-accept the Torah in just a few weeks’ time.