Revisiting Shavuot

It used to be that Shavuot, which we will celebrate on May 19-20, was the Rodney Dangerfield of Jewish holy days…it got no respect! That always bothered me because when you really think about it, Shavuot is IT! It’s the holiday of holidays marking the event of events – the revelation of God and the giving and receiving of Torah at Mt. Sinai. In essence, Shavuot is the most important of all our chagim and it is one deserving of our utmost respect.

Fortunately, Shavuot is getting more respect lately. Each year, it seems that more and more Jews across and beyond Judaism’s denominational spectrum celebrate the chag with tefillah/worship, family (dairy) meals and Torah study, often in the form of an all night Torah-thon called Tikkun Lel Shavuot. For those who participate, staying up into the wee hours to study Torah says that Torah is meaningful and indicates a desire and an openness/readiness to receive the Torah once again. One popular legend has it that the Israelites overslept on the morning that the Torah was to be given and that our staying up all night is a corrective to that original mishap.

Still, there is a way to go. Shavuot is not as popular as the other two Biblical pilgrimage and harvest festivals, Pesach and Sukkot, nor does it have the appeal of a Chanukah or Purim. Something is missing.

Perhaps seeing Shavuot in relation to the holiday which precedes it on the calendar may help. There is no escaping the connection between Shavuot and Pesach. The Torah has us actually count the days between the two holidays. It may not seem like the most significant ritual but it is both significant – and fundamental.

The Exodus is great story. It tells of how a crushed and afflicted group of slaves could triumph over tyranny and oppression. It elevated human dignity and freedom into ultimate values cherished by all who would consider themselves civilized. We then count the omer, because the freedom story, at least for us, does not end there. It culminates seven weeks later, on Shavuot, when we stood at Sinai in covenant with God.

Shavuot transforms the Exodus from a great story into OUR story.

Allow me to quote these words from Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, and one of our time’s most erudite and eloquent spokesmen. In discussing the relationship between Pesach and Shavuot, he writes,

Freedom...is not just the overthrow of a regime, the end of a period of persecution. It is the long slow process of building a society that respects the human person, built on the foundations of law and righteousness, justice and compassion. No people, no faith, have had a more exalted vision of law as the architecture of freedom - law as the word of God, the defence of liberty, and the guarantor of the equal dignity of rich and poor, strong and weak. Without law and the ethics it embodies, freedom becomes the possession of the few, not the many, the manipulative but not the vulnerable.

That was the towering insight of the Torah. It was as if God had said, "By bringing you out of Egypt, I have given you the possibility of freedom, but now you must make it a reality. I cannot do it for you, but I can show you how it is to be done. Here are My laws, My statutes and commands. Live by them and you will create a great society. Abandon them and you will become like every other nation in history. You have only one thing that makes you different - My Torah, your constitution as a people."

This is the deeper significance of Shavuot. The message of Shavuot is the essence of Judaism. This is indeed a holiday that deserves our utmost respect.

Yes, indeed…Shavuot is IT!

Chag Sameach…

~Rabbi Yaakov Chaitovsky