Shavuot

Ruth Skit

TBD

Welcome to the our final Seder of Ner Shalom's Year of the Seder. We have explored new avenues of Jewish practice, understanding, and empowering one another's Jewish expression through this year. Although we may or may not continue to use these innovative seders to celebrate all the holidays next year, I hope we can continue to carry these new ideas and experiences into how we understand the traditions of our ancestors in the years to come. Celebrations and traditions are made up of building blocks of ritual. While some of the blocks are thousands of years old, a lot of how we have been using them our whole lives, what seems like rituals direct from Sinai, are actually only a generation old, maybe a century old, maybe even unique to our own families and households. The blocks can be knocked down and built up anew in a way that honors their origins without feeling stuck to what our grandparents.

Shavuot is a criminally undercelebrated holiday as it is, and I hope by exploring it through this new lens we can encourage others to join in the fun in years to come!

Shavuot celebrates the Revelation on Mount Sinai. It comes exactly 50 days from Passover, a time we mark as the time it took our ancestors to leave the immediacy of slavery in Egypt to a safe long term camp grounds at the foot of Mount Sinai. Our tradition tells us when God tried to reveal Godself and the Ten Commandments to all of the Israelites, the ground shook and the people saw thunder and heard lightning, and they were frightened. They sent Moses up to receive the commandments for them, and allowed their faith to be further shaken when he was gone for 40 more days up on the mountain.

Like many Jewish holidays, Shavuot was probably originally a harvest festival for ancient Near Eastern pagans from which the Israelites evolved. Continuing in monotheistic times, Jews equate Shavuot with the wheat harvest, which is why we read the Book of Ruth which centers greatly around grain harvesting in the Holy Land. In the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, it was a pilgrimmage festival on which people brought their first fruits of spring as a sacrifice to the Temple.

Shavuot is the only Biblically mandated holiday that doesn't have specific laws of celebration around it, other than abstaining from work. Perhaps this is why it has not been widely celebrated in non-Orthodox circles: we don't have strong traditions around it to anchor us to the holiday, the way that Passover has its matzah and Sukkot has the Sukkah. However, over the centuries, celebrations of Shavuot have included all night study sessions to recreate the anxious night of the Revelation, and eating sweet dairy dishes to honor the "milk and honey" of freedom, the Holy Land, and the Torah.

Today we celebrate with our blintz brunch, some prayers and songs, a play, and some classical Jewish wisdom.