Love and the Law

One evening in 1663, the London socialite Samuel Pepys decided to check out London’s latest attraction: Jews, who had just been allowed back into England. Pepys sought out a typical synagogue service in order to get a sense of what was for him a foreign faith. Unbeknownst to Pepys, the evening he had selected to visit was Simhat Torah, when Jews celebrate completing the annual reading of the Mosaic Law with raucous dancing.

Pepys was bewildered by what he saw. “But, Lord!” he wrote in his diary, “to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.”

Pepys’s visit may have been ill-timed, but he did witness the soul of Judaism. For Jews, the law is the source of our most profound joy. And while Simchat Torah is a venerable tradition, the true celebration of the law is the holiday of Shavuot, marked by Jews this month as zeman matan torateinu, the time of the giving of the law. The Torah—a rigorous and complex code containing 613 commandments, to which the rabbis later added a myriad of further prohibitions and obligations—is for Jews an exquisite source of happiness, the ultimate embodiment of the Almighty’s love, and God’s greatest gift.