Rabbi Green: GOT TORAH?

Got Torah?

Make it raw and real

In honor of the phony raw-milk-bird-flu scare, we'll be celebrating Shavuot (June 11-13 this year) with LOTS of delicious raw milk from our very own cow, goats and sheep!

We'll also be enjoying delicious homemade yogurt, kefir, butter, cream cheese, cottage cheese, ice cream with whipped cream, and hopefully mozzarella cheese too, ALL from our own exclusively RAW milk.

We will not settle for the cooked or homogenized variety. Nor will we make do with some watered-down skim version.

Our acceptance of the Torah is RAW and REAL. Our delight in Torah study is rich and creamy, not tepid or watery. Its living wisdom nourishes our soul. The Torahs teachings are fresh and ever-relevant, not cooked, canned, or past-due.

The yoke of Torah weighs heavily on us because it's the real thing. (Speaking of which, only heavy cream -- raw, of course -- from our Jersey will be stirred in my coffee after a sleepless Shavuot eve. 'Half-and-half' or other 'lite' cheap imitations will not do.)

My sympathies for all you folks who have no choice but to suffice with dead commercial milk stripped of its vitality, tainted with industrial toxins, the only kind that's available in your urban homogenized society and commercialized consumerist lifestyle.

In contrast, the nourishment from our milk comes directly from the blessings that G-d Almighty has endowed us, with no human intervention besides for our own personal effort.

The dairy we'll eat on Shavuot is from milk that we milked ourselves from a heifer, ewes, & does who are nourished by the grass of the fertile earth G-d gave us, watered by the rains from the One Above.

How apropos on Shavuot when we celebrate receiving G-d's greatest blessing, His holy Torah, that descends to us from upon High, whose wisdom we study tirelessly and endeavor to acquire, making it our own ('kinyan Torah').

The Torah is likened to “honey and milk under your tongue” [1]. Sublimely sweet and nourishing, a Divine gift directly from its Divine Author. G-d's wisdom is a part of Himself, as it were [2], akin to how a mammal mother nourishes her young with milk, life-giving fluid of her own body.

Similarly, G-d's Torah nourishes our soul and sustains us as His treasured people, עם סגולה. And if it's good for souls, it's good for bodies too, since the two go hand in hand. Torah: it does a Jewish body good. It does EVERY body good.

Here on our homestead, traditional dairy will be sweeter and more meaningful to me this Shavuot than ever before.

I wish you were here to savor it with me.

Happy Shavuot!
May we merit to receive the Torah with joy and inner inspiration. And may G-d bring us imminently to the Land flowing with milk and honey, with our righteous redeemer Moshiach tzidkeinu.

Notes:

[1] Song of Songs 4:11.

[2] The Ten Commandments commence: "I am the Lord your G-d..." "I am" in the original Hebrew is "אנכי Anochi." This word can be read as an acronym for the four words אנא נפשי כתבית יהבית, Aramaic for "I personally inscribed and transmitted Myself (through My Torah)." See Shabbat 105a, according to Likutei Sichot volume 27, page 25.