Shavuot

Shavuot is often trivialized in the modern world. It falls at an awkward time of year, after many religious schools have finished up classes. It doesn't have any big symbols like building a sukkah for Sukkot, nor any major rituals like the Pesach seder. However, there is a lot to like about Shavuot and it has become one of my favorite holidays.

Like most Jewish holidays, Shavuot has both an ancient agricultural meaning and a more recent (though still pretty old) rabbinic meaning. Agriculturally, Shavuot is known as Chag HaBikurim, the festival of the first fruits or Chag HaKatsir, the festival harvest. Through these names, Shavuot is tied to the wheat harvest and to the custom of bringing the first and best of the harvest to the Temple in ancient times.

The agricultural connotations have little meaning to Jews living in Galut, as we do. Therefore, the later rabbinical layers have come to take on some very special meanings. My personal favorite is Z'man Matan Torah -- The Time when the Torah was Given. The tradition is that on Shavuot all Jews -- not only those who were living at the time, but all Jews in all generations -- stood together at Mt. Sinai and received the Torah.
To remember receiving the Torah, every year on Shavuot, we stand again in our congregations all over the world as the Ten Commandments are read from the Torah.

In anticipation of this re-enactment, many groups and synagogue hold a tikkun leyl Shavuot the night before the Ten Commandments are read. A tikkun is an all-night study session intended to get you in the right frame of mind to receive Torah. Receiving Torah, after all, is a dynamic and ongoing process.

Our local community does not hold an all-night tikkun, so this year we invited some friends over for a small personal tikkun. Various people promised to teach something, or to lead a discussion, but it was kind of a free-form evening and we figured we would go until we ran out of things to say.

First of all, we had to rearrange our family room to make room for everyone, including comfortable pillows and blankets in case people (or children) felt like taking a nap.

Okay, the pillows and blankets hadn't arrived yet when that picture was taken, but at least there were lots of places to sit and lounge around. We also set up a tent on the back patio so that the youngest members of the group could settle down out of the way.

The early part of the evening was somewhat oriented toward the kids, with the adults having various discussions in the background. They made a delicious Torah cake, where they had to look up verses in the Tanakh (Jewish Bible) to figure out the ingredients. Fortunately, I had checked out the verses the night before because there were a couple of errors in the version I found. The corrected version is available as a PDF.

Other kid-oriented activities: We read a midrash about b'nai Israel receiving the Ten Commandments from G-d at Mt. Sinai. The entire decalogue was said all at once and it was hard for the people to understand, so they asked Moses to go up alone and receive the word of G-d. So we stood 10 adults around the room with abbreviated versions of each commandment and we read them all at once. Afterwards, we had a nice discussion of what the kids actually heard.

Around midnight, we took a short walk around the neighborhood and then went out into the back yard to gaze up at the sky. Another midrash tells how, at midnight on erev Shavuot, the heavens open up and prayers are heard.

We also had a couple of simple crafts available for the kids -- ones that required little to no adult supervision -- such as tissue paper flowers.

One of the participants prepared a list of topics she was ready to talk about, and has allowed me to reproduce it here:

Jews and Brisket
The Changes of Our People - Our Nation
Intermarriage
Chinese Food
British Jews vs American Jews and Self Identity
Who is a Jew
Patriarchs, Mad and Imperfect
The First Born Jewish Son, Syndrome
Belief levels, Mystic vs "Reality"
Prepare to be Assimilated
Jewish Mothers and Food
Why don't we listen harder to our Converts?
Do We Need the Diaspora - Cue Community
Jews and the "Swan Lake Syndrome"
Jewish souls
Being Isaak
Jewish Identity in America Today, from my point of view
The connection between Midrash and OCD in Jews
To Frum or not too Frum
30 minutes crash courses and introduction to Judaism
The Flood
The history of the Tikkun

What is truly interesting about this list was that, over the course of the evening and early morning, we touched on almost all of these topics, even though our "official" list of topics was slightly different:

Jewish views toward death and afterlife
What makes a Jewish community?
Day and Night in Jewish Thought
What is holy/holiness/a holy people?
The Evil Eye, amulets, and superstitions
Why being a Red Sox fan is similar to being Jewish

We even had a participant via webcam from England. I hate to confess that I don't really remember most of what she talked about because I kind of dozed off right about then, but it was nice to have yet another point of view presented.

In the morning, we woke up the kids and ate blintzes and fruit. And then we went to the synagogue, where I got to read the 10 commandments from the Torah. One of my favorite Torah readings of all time.

All in all, it was a very satisfying experience. If you don't have an all-night tikkun where you live, think about putting one together next year.

I Didn't Forget ... I Just Got Busy

I didn't forget to write about Bamidbar, this week's Torah reading. I just got overwhelmed by preparing for two of my children to move back into the house for the summer. And I really wanted to write about Tikkun Leyl Shavuot instead, anyway.

Maybe tomorrow night while I am on the road to La-La Land to pick up the offspring, I will take some time to write about what we are planning to do for Shavuot.

Counting the Omer

I don't know why I said I would write about counting the omer. It's not really a custom that I personally perform. Here's how it works -- every night, starting with the second night of Pesach, you say a blessing and then a formula that states the day of the omer. Tonight, for example, is the 38th day of the omer. (Jewish days begin at sundown, which is another topic for some day.)

Though I don't formally count the omer each night, I do keep track of the omer. When trying to figure out why, I came up with two reasons:

First of all, counting the omer is a commandment. So I follow the spirit of the law here, if not the absolute letter.

Second, counting the omer ends and culminates with the holiday of Shavuot, the day on which we received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. Apart from being one of the three major festivals of the Jewish year (along with Sukkot and Pesach), Shavuot commemorates the day we (b'nai Israel) truly became a people with a common purpose. I love this significance of the omer.

Since there's not a whole lot involved with counting the omer and I don't do it anyway, I'm not going to explain how to do it.

Some thoughts on Behar/Bechukotai

This coming Shabbat, we will read the double parshah of Behar/Bechukotai. It is found in Leviticus 25:1 - 27:34.

I thought preparing a short discussion of the weekly parshah would be a relatively simple task, but -- as so often happens when one studies Torah -- I found myself going in an unexpected direction.

Here's the way it works. Sometimes, for some people, that is. You read the text from the Torah and start thinking about it. Maybe you read a few commentaries written by learned men and women from the past and the present. As you continue to think, other things get mixed in. Maybe something going on in your life; maybe something going on in the world around you. And before you know it, you have a different perspective on what the Torah is teaching.

I suppose that is why we read the Torah over and over again. Each year we read the end of the Torah, the death of Moses, and immediately start again with Creation. Each year, we find that something different speaks to us, or that where we are in our lives brings a different understanding of what we have read so many times before.

Behar/Bechukotai is what we call a double parshah -- two for the price of one. This happens because Jews run on a lunar calendar and the rest of the world runs on a solar calendar. Because Jewish months are not quite the same length, every so often we toss in an extra month so that our fall holidays continue to occur in the fall and our spring holidays in the spring. No biggie -- there are whole books (and web sites) devoted to keeping track of these things.

Behar means "on the mountain". In this case, the mountain is Mt. Sinai, where the Law was given to Moses and accepted by b'nai Israel. As you might expect, Behar contains many laws. Bechukotai continues this theme -- it means "by/about My laws". These parshiot are the last two readings in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) and, as just about anyone who leyns Torah would say, about time. There's not a lot of story in this book and parts of it are hard to slog through.

Behar starts with laws concerning the shmittah year, the seventh year in which land must be given a rest with no planting or harvesting going on. Then there's a discussion of the Jubilee, the 50th year, in which a variety of things happen. Both the shmittah years and the Jubilee years apply only to the land of Israel. After that, there are a number of laws about dealing with your "brother" or "fellow" -- in either case, these laws refer to how we are to treat fellow Jews.

Bechukotai is known primarily for a long list of rather gruesome curses, though some blessings bracket the curses and there are more laws about vows and assessments toward the end of the parshah.

Now that we've laid the ground work, here's what happens.

Two news stories caught my attention over the past week. In one, a homeless man came to the defense of a woman who was being attacked and ended up being stabbed himself. He lay on the sidewalk, bleeding, for over an hour while people walked past him. Some stopped to look; one even took a picture with a cell phone. By the time someone called 911 and EMTs responded, this man had died.

The second story is even more chilling for me. An off-shore drilling rig, which exploded while killing at least 11 people, is now spewing oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. This story is very personal for me. I used to work in the Oil & Gas division of the Department of Interior in New Orleans, reviewing permits for offshore drilling rigs. I was there far too long ago for this particular rig to have been something I would have had any responsibility for, but I know a lot about offshore drilling rigs and the life that the workers on these rigs lead. The Gulf Coast waters were my back yard for a significant portion of my life. I know just how fragile the ecology of the Gulf coast is and my heart aches every time I see the pictures from the Gulf. When I read the place names, I can picture each. And I can imagine the devastation coming to places I have known and loved.

So what do these two stories have to do with this week's Torah reading? Good question.

Shmittah is practice of leaving the land to its own devices every seventh year -- neither planting crops nor harvesting perennial crops such as fruit trees. These laws were given, at least in part, to teach the nomadic Jews about stewardship of the land they would one day live upon. Not only were they being taught respect for the land, but also respect for the owner of the land -- who is not any individual, but God. God gives us the use of the land.... and it is our responsibility to take care of God's land. If we extend this notion of God's ownership of the land to the entire world, what do oil spills say about our use of the gift of God's Creation?

Ethical treatment is primarily geared at treatment of fellow Jews. Many of the laws in parshah Bechukotai deal with how we are to treat our "brothers", meaning other Jews. We must not cheat them in business affairs, or charge them interest, or -- should a fellow Jew become indebted to us and give us service to pay off that debt -- treat him like we treat our slaves. We don't, as a rule, own slaves these days, but the principle stands -- we should respect and uphold the community of fellow Jews.

First ourselves and our families, then the Jews in our local community, then Jews as a worldwide community, and only after that do we have a responsibility to non-Jews. But what does it say about us if we can ignore any person in need?

What I am taking away from my study of Behar/Bechukotai this week, this year, is something that I already know, but which perhaps I need to reminded of. I have a responsibility toward the Earth. I have a responsibility toward other people. As Hillel says in Mishnah Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 1:14:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am for myself alone, what am I?
And if not now, when?