Parshas Bamidbar/Shavuos

BS"D

Next week we will celebrate one of the three Festival holidays from the Torah, the holiday of Shavuos, literally the Festival of Weeks. This holiday celebrates the completion of the Omer Count (as spoken about in past weeks), and coincides with the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai to the Jewish people after the Exodus from Egypt. While this is a very vast subject, and there are any number of topics that we could speak about, we will have to limit ourselves to just one. There is a very famous Midrash, which speaks about the scene in Heaven at the time of the Giving of the Torah. When Moses, Our Great Teacher, ascended to Heaven to receive the Torah, the Angels complained to Hashem, and demanded to know why the Torah was being given to such lowly creatures, like Humans, and in such a lowly place, like this physical world. In truth, the Angels asked a fair question. The Torah is the wisdom of Hashem himself, which is surely much higher than this gross physical world, so what business do we have with it? Furthermore, why does something so spiritual deal with food (kashrus), relations (permitted and not-permitted), and other mundane matters.
To understand this we should first understand the difference between Man and Angel, which is illustrated in their manner of creation. About the Angels it is written, "With the spirit of [G-d's] mouth, [he created] all of His hosts". This teaches us that the Angels were created in one shot, with souls and bodies together (yes Angels also have bodies!). Man, on the other hand, was first created as an inanimate body, from the dirt of the Earth, and only afterwards, "[G-d] breathed into his nose a spirit of life", implanting a soul within that body. Since the body of an Angel and his soul, are intrinsically connected from the instant of their creation, the body of an Angel remains slightly "spiritual", and his soul remains slightly "physical". Man, however, who was created in two seperate pieces, and then, so to speak, assembled, has a completely physical body, and a totally spiritual soul. This allows him to exist in the physical world, and still maintain his connection with spirituality, while an Angel who "falls" to the physical world "loses" his holiness.
Given this distinction, we can now understand the deeper intention of the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. It is written in the Midrash, that Hashem desired to have a "Dwelling Place in the Lowest World" (Dira b'Tachtonim), literally a home (and even a House, Speedily in our Days!) on planet earth, and Torah and Mitzvos are the tasks that we have to perform to prepare this home. It is like a king who desires to move to a new palace, and he sends ahead to his servants a list of things to do to prepare the residence for his arrival. So too, we, as Hashem's servants, have a lists of tasks to prepare the palace, this physical world, for the arrival of the King. Therefore, to fulfill this task, me must have physical bodies in the physical world, and therefore the Torah was given specifically to Man. Just as important, every Jew has a totally spiritual soul, which is "an actual piece of Hashem", that gives him the desire and strength to fulfill this goal, and when we perform this mission, we unify two oppisites: a physical body and a spiritual soul. This fusing of opposites and resolving of contradictions comes from the essence of creation, and the essence of Hashem, and this is revealed in its strongest fashion on the holiday of Shavuos. May we merit to see it with our physical eyes!