At this time the Jews are celebrating the holiday of Shavuot, which falls between May 15 and June 14 on the Gregorian calendar. All Jewish holidays follow the lunar calendar, which is why the variance in calendar day. It is timed to be 50 days after Passover, or seven weeks and a day. Shavuot actually means, “Feast of Weeks,” the Hebrew word “Sheva” meaning seven.

It is a harvest festival, and also marks the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. 

So on Passover the Jews celebrate freedom from bondage in Egypt, after which they wandered in the desert, following Moses, and received the word of God on Mount Sinai. 

While gate-keeping Wikipedia will say that Shavuot is NOT the same as the Christian Pentecost which occurs 50 days after Easter, a first grader with an open mind can easily discern that it is. 

Full disclosure:  I was raised Jewish, but never really understood or connected with it until I found Christ through Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. I realize the strangeness of that last sentence, allow me to explain, using the Pentecost/Shavuot as an example. 

Pentecost comes from the greek word meaning “fifty.” The festival is also called Whitsun, and marks the descent of the Holy Spirit into the apostles or early followers of Jesus 50 days after his resurrection.

So let’s compare the Jewish and Christian holidays around this time, and we will see that the whole point of Judaism was to carefully prepare, through complex ritual, holiday and symbol, for the coming of the Messiah (Christ), their King of Glory.

And then we will understand, by the end of this post, that while many Jews recognized Christ and became the first Christians, many other Jews rejected Him, and perpetuated Judaism, which then became an empty shell. Now there is nothing wrong with commemorating Judaism and keeping its symbology alive, but only in the light of esoteric Christianity can it be fully understood. And as far as I have found, Rudolf Steiner is the only one who makes all this crystal clear. Even the great scholar Alvin Boyd Kuhn missed it, as I have shown here.

So what is Shavuot really, then, if Judaism is all a preparation for when the Christ would incarnate in the Hebrew bloodline? As I said, it’s a wheat harvest festival, and it marks the giving of the Torah to Moses. 

The whole religion is centered around Christ symbols without ever using the word “Christ.”

As we know, bread (wheat) is a symbol of Christ:

John 6:35 “Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

He was born in Bethlehem, which means House of Bread in Hebrew (Beit Lechem). He was born of a Virgin, and Virgo is the sign of the bread harvest, the symbol of Virgo being the virgin out in the fields harvesting wheat.

The Empress in Tarot sits in a wheat field. She is pregnant with the Christ. Notice the dove, notice she has her foot on the moon, showing the sublimation over the hardening or calcifying moon forces, which is what Christ points us to again and again.  

The giving of the Torah to Moses is the descent of Christ, because Christ is also the Word, the Logos, and the Torah is according to rabbinical tradition the Word of God. In the card right before the Empress, the High Priestess, notice her scroll says, TORA.

TARO, TORA, ROTA (card 10, the Wheel Of Fortune, ROTAtion).

Moses represents the body of Jesus, that took in the Christ being (Torah), or in a larger sense, Moses is the entire body of humanity, receiving the Christ “for their sins.” Moses comes down from the Sinai (sin) mountain, only to find the Israelites sinning, worshipping false idols, in other words they became mired in materialism (the golden calf, money, moon-eye, stocks, bills/bulls) and needed the Christ (Torah) the Word, the Spirit, to remind them of their covenant with God. They needed to put their foot on the moon forces like the Empress.

They needed the two tablets, taBULL-ets, the two bulls, the bi-bull, or bible. 

And so Pentecost and Shavuot are the same, and come 50 days after Passover and Easter, which are also the same: the resurrection. Why is Passover a foreshadowing of the resurrection of Christ? Because the Hebrews are freed from bondage in Egypt. Egypt is here again the lower, materialistic impulse. The unrefined “goy,” if you will, who just lives day to day without any connection to their higher self, their spirit.

I am hard on modern Judaism, but the ancient Jewish practices before Christ were very lofty and served a divine purpose. All the customs were built in order to train the mind to remember that we are in the world but not of it. The fasts, the prayers, the sabbaths, keeping kosher, was all a sacrificial act of will, an abnegation; it was all divinely given instructions by Jehovah, (the moon god and brother of Christ,) in order to prepare a people that could eventually house or support a physical body for the great initiate Jesus, who could in turn take on the Christ. The Holy Spirit could not descend into just any old Joe Schmoe.

So Egypt is the goy. Passover is the flight from Egypt, just as Easter is the flight from the physical body, the corpse of Jesus, into Heaven (the Promised Land, Jerusalem). And so the Jews after many years of wandering in the desert reach their promised land. (Again, only symbolically, it is stupid to make such a big deal over the actual land of Israel, which is just a placeholder for these mysteries, and yet how many bloody wars have been fought over a piece of land? This is the profaning of the mysteries, bringing it down to the mundane level). 

The symbol of Passover is the Paschal Lamb. The Jews had to paint lamb’s blood over their doors, so that the angel of death would not kill their first born, as it did kill the first born of the Egyptians, which is what finally broke Pharaoh’s heart and made him agree to let the Israelites go. 

The lamb is of course another symbol of the Christ, he is the lamb, or the blood of the lamb. Passover and Easter happen in Aries, the sign of the ram or lamb. 

God’s Chosen People?

What was so special about the Jews that made them “God’s chosen people?” A satisfactory and non-racist answer to this question will only come by studying Steiner. Steiner talks a lot about how humanity in the ancient past had a natural atavistic clairvoyance. We were all psychic, on some level, and basically had the thoughts of Higher Beings beamed into our heads. But this had to be lost, if we were to gain freedom. The banishment from the Garden of Eden is a picture of this. The serpent who tempts us with the Tree of Knowledge is a symbol of this hardening or calcification of our bodies such that we were not so permeable to the thoughts and energies of the angels anymore (the Tree of Life). 

We had to take on the hardening serpent moon forces so that we could eventually sublimate them.

But the loss of the solar clairvoyance didn’t happen overnight, and certain groups or tribes of people took on this hardening more quickly than others. The Hebrews were one such tribe that were selected out to take on this separation impulse first, to sever the ancient clairvoyance so that a new impulse could be introduced into humanity that could eventually spread to everyone. But the insular Jews had to first cultivate it for many generations (from Abraham to Jesus), and this is why they kept to themselves and were not allowed to breed with non-Jews. Their blood had to be “pure,” (for lack of a better word). 

Returning to our symbol of Egypt as the lower, unrefined man, at the time when the Hebrews were carrying out this covenant with Jehovah, who took the Hebrews on as his people, the Egyptians meanwhile still had this ancient solar clairvoyance intact. The Egyptian culture is very rich and beautiful because it is essentially all channeled in from solar deities, and preserved very well. They embraced the Image, whereas the Jewish culture by comparison is stark and devoid of images, as much as possible, because all that imagery had to go inward, the script had to be flipped, the heiroglyph had to become the linear alphabet or Aleph-Bet, the collective tribalism had to become individualistic. 

The ego, the “I” had to be born, and it was not until Christ came that the ego of man was to come to full flowering, and each human being could say “I Am, ” instead of “We Are.” 

 “I AM the Bread of Life (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51); I AM the Light of the World (John 8:12); I AM the Door of the Sheep (John 10:7,); I AM the Good Shepherd (John 10:11,14); I AM the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:25); I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6); and I AM the True Vine (John 15:1, 5).“