I hope that your Passover has been delicious and loving. The Festival comes to a close this week-end. And with the end of Pesach, we enter a period of fifty days leading up to the Festival of Shavout. These fifty days correspond to the seven weeks between the Exodus from Egypt and the receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Those seven weeks provided an opportunity for the Israelites to learn to handle the responsibilities that accompany freedom. Only with such preparation could they be sufficiently mature to accept God’s law.

Pirkei Avot 6:6 teaches us that there is a virtue a day which leads to such preparedness. “Torah is greater than the priesthood or sovereignty, for sovereignty is acquired with thirty virtues, the priesthood with twenty-four, and Torah is acquired with forty-eight qualities. These are: study, listening, verbalizing, comprehension of the heart, awe, fear, humility, joy, purity, serving the sages, companionship with one's contemporaries, debating with one's students, tranquility, study of the scriptures, study of the Mishnah, minimizing engagement in business, minimizing socialization, minimizing pleasure, minimizing sleep, minimizing talk, minimizing gaiety, slowness to anger, good heartedness, faith in the sages, acceptance of suffering, knowing one's place, satisfaction with one's lot, qualifying one's words, not taking credit for oneself, likableness, love of G-d, love of humanity, love of charity, love of justice, love of rebuke, fleeing from honor, lack of arrogance in learning, reluctance to hand down rulings, participating in the burden of one's fellow, judging him to the side of merit, correcting him, bringing him to a peaceful resolution [of his disputes], deliberation in study, asking and answering, listening and illuminating, learning in order to teach, learning in order to observe, wising one's teacher, exactness in conveying a teaching, and saying something in the name of its speaker…”