Why Cheesecake?

Mount Sinai is a breast and Torah is its milk.

This week we reach the oft-neglected holiday of Shavuot (aka Pentecost / the Feast of Weeks). Although technically as big a deal as Passover and Sukkot, Shavuot remains a bit vague in many people’s minds. Originally a consecration of the wheat harvest, now celebrated as the anniversary of receiving Torah on Sinai, many Jews have no idea that this holiday exists. But, I’ve found, if anything is going to jog folks’ recognition, it tends to be this: cheesecake. Shavuot is the holiday on which it is customary to feast on dairy — cheese blintzes, ice cream, mousse-y desserts — in pious disregard of their side-effects on the Ashkenazi digestive tract.

But - besides masochistic self-indulgence - why is this? Why cheesecake?

One boringly practical answer is that if your animals birth their young in the spring, right about now you’re likely to have a lot of milk on your hands. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon almanac’s name for this moon is Thrimilche, or “thrice-daily-milking.” Passover gets its name in part from its association with the skip-like gait (in Hebrew piseyach) of lambs; the ancient seder featured a whole roast paschal lamb along with the unleavened bread of the first grain harvest. Seven weeks later, by the time we get to Shavuot, the crop has grown in and the young have been weaned, leaving the perfect wherewithal for, yes you guessed it, cheesecake.

In some senses Shavuot actually forms the conclusion of Passover. The Talmud’s name for the holiday is Atzeret, which means “culmination” or “stopping” (Pesachim 68b), and as we see in Leviticus 23, it is precisely because it is the end of a process begun on Pesach that Shavuot has no specific biblical date assigned. Rather, it comes at the end of the seven intervening weeks of the Omer, where the wheat harvest was daily measured and accounted. Seen thus, the Omer period is like hol hamoed, the intermediate days within a single holiday.

And so, just as Pesach is celebrated with flat, unleavened matzah, Shavuot was originally celebrated with the presentation of two great loaves of fully leavened bread. It is this loaf offering that provides the basis of some classic rabbinic explanations for eating dairy on Shavuot. The Shulchan Aruch posits that since there were two loaves, we are to celebrate Shavuot with two different meals: one dairy and the other meat. (Safely a day apart). I’m not too convinced by this or by the other mainstream suggestion: that the Israelites ate dairy at Sinai because, upon receiving the Torah, they were suddenly overwhelmed by the halakhic complexities that come with eating meat. Or, alternatively, they celebrated with dairy because the Torah reassured them that milk is kosher and not, as one might otherwise assume, a “limb from a living animal,” which would be strictly prohibited. (Ta’amei haMinhagim)

Other commentators connect the double-loaf offering to the Torah’s two tablets of stone, a beautifully matching pair just like the breasts so admired in the Song of Songs. (Song of Songs Rabbah 4:5:1) These two breasts — “like two fawns, twins of the gazelle” — are in turn symbolized by holy brothers Aaron and Moses, spouting Torah like milk. In an extraordinary verse in Numbers 11, Moses refers to himself as the wet nurse of the people of Israel, and the Talmud underscores his rightness to teach because of his special backstory with breast milk. (Sotah 12b, quoting Isaiah 28:9) Elsewhere, the Talmud emphasizes the connection between milk and Torah, explaining that just as the breast sates a baby’s appetite on each return, repeated study and contemplation of Torah will likewise yield ongoing satisfaction (Eruvin 54b, commenting on Proverbs 5:19).

Even though there is some wonderful ancient midrash imagining humble little Mount Sinai as a lump torn from the side of Mount Moriah (the Temple Mount), just as the challah offering is torn from dough before baking, I think the cheese part of the cheesecake analogy is even more compelling. Sinai can easily be seen as a breast, flowing with the life-giving milk of divine revelation. Indeed, Shaddai, another biblical name for God, seems directly to allude to shaddayim, “breasts.” The Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Ropshitz notes that chalav, Hebrew for “milk,” has a numerical value of 40. Our dairy indulgence thus recalls Moses’ 40 days and nights being suckled straight from the mountain itself. Likewise, the numerical value of gevinah, cheese, is 70 — alluding to the Torah’s 70 different faces; and there are even those, like Rabbi Shimshon of Ostropol, who creatively misread Psalm 68’s reference to God’s mountain being full of peaks, gavnunim, to understand this as referencing a mountain made of cheese.

For the Zohar, the milk of Shavuot is another aspect of the transformation begun on Passover. Where Pesach is associated with blood, with full maturation blood can become milk (Niddah 9a). In this wonderfully female-centric image, the blood is the blood of menstrual fertility, the seven weeks of the Omer represent seven days of preparation before a wedding, and Shavuot and its milk their culmination in childbirth and nursing. This shift also represents the inner transformation of God, for while blood red signifies divine judgment, gevurah, white is the color of divine love, chesed, God’s overflowing desire to give.

“The Torah of chesed is upon her tongue,” notes the book of Proverbs — and indeed we understand milk as symbolic of human kindness as well as divine largesse. Dairy is soft and chewable, less directly destructive than eating meat, and requiring no sharp objects or teeth to consume. There are even those who see dairy on Shavuot as an allusion to the vegetarianism prescribed in the Garden of Eden and anticipated at the end of days.

While a milky diet may emphasize our childlike softness and dependence, it is interesting to note that the particular night-time emphasis of Shavuot celebrations, even staying up all night long to learn, places the holiday squarely in the domain of the Mother; in Kabbalah, Shekhinah is associated with the darkness, the moon, and also with Torah herself. One reason given for pulling a Shavuot all-nighter is that the sleep deprivation might lessen our sense of being a distinct, impermeable self, helping us instead to merge and receive from Source like mother and baby. This sense is echoed, perhaps, in the teaching that only the open aleph, aaaaa, of anochi (“I am” — the first word of the Ten Commandments) was uttered aloud at Sinai, and all of revelation came through on that powerfully pre-verbal sound, basic and universal.

The whiteness of milk likewise references the Torah’s ground of white fire, the blank page on which the “black fire” of revelation takes shape. Milk’s sweetness and comfort, meanwhile, represent the nourishment Torah can offer. But we should also consider, to quote one of the Talmud’s great aphorisms, that “More than the calf needs to drink, the cow needs to nurse.” Here, ultimately, we see an image of the great Mother compelled to dispense her largesse. Oozing like milk through every pore of reality, gushing forth in abundance at certain seasons, certain locations, the nectar of communication is arguably more satisfying to the giver even than to its recipient. So as much as humanity might benefit from drinking the milk of Torah, it’s perhaps even more the case that God just needs to express it. For that, quite simply, is Her nature.

Chag Shavuot sameach — may you have a nourishing holiday.

Pace yourself with that cheesecake!

I would be remiss not to explicitly mention and thank Rabbi Dovber Pinson for his excellent Spiral of Time series. The volume on the month of Sivan provided many tasty tidbits for this article.