Shavuot: The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of a Holiday

Shavuot is a little bit like the ugly step-child of our Jewish holidays. Ok, that might sound a bit harsh, but I don't think it's undeserved. Let's face it, if you had to list the Top Five Jewish holidays, would

Shavuot make the cut? How about on your Top Ten? It doesn't have a Passover-like family feast, it doesn't have Chanukah-style gift giving, and it doesn't even have the 'fun' fasting and chest-beating of Yom Kippur (and who doesn't love a little self-flagellation?). For those reasons and more, it has kind of fallen to the bottom of the totem pole. But don't count out Shavuot just yet!

One of the things I love about Shavuot, like most of our holidays, is that you can see a fascinating progression and shape-shifting of the festival throughout our history. It has evolved and been reinvented to suit the values of the time, and it gives us an intriguing insight into the

past... and possibly even the future. First off, Shavuot is meant to celebrate the giving (or really the receiving) of the Torah on Mount Sinai. So the holiday really does take us AAALLLL the way back to our very first roots as a people; hanging out with Moses in the desert. Later, Shavuot evolved into one of the three most important holidays (along with Pesach and Sukkot), because of its agricultural connection. While we were in the desert, this wasn't such an important value. However, once we entered the Holy Land and established a nation, our lives revolved around harvest seasons and Shavuot became the Festival of First Fruits. And that's not a mystical or allegorical title; it was literally the holiday when the first yield of your harvest would appear, you would bring that to the Temple as an offering, and you would ask God for a blessed and successful continuation to the harvest.

Yet as we moved away from farming, Shavuot lost some of its meaning. Other holidays were reinvented, while Shavuot began to fall by the wayside. We tried to revive it by refocusing on the whole God-gave-us-the-Torah-today concept, but it still lacked pzazz. 

Sure, we gave it its own book, but Ruth was never as entertaining as Esther. We gave it a holiday food, but I guess cheesecake and blintzes could never really hold a candle to latkes and hamentaschen. Shavuot was still losing traction. In the Middle Ages, the Kabbalists and other Eastern Europe Jews began a new tradition of studying together all night long; a symbolic gesture to remind us of the eagerness of the Israelites on the night before receiving the Torah at Sinai. Still today, this is a popular custom in many congregations (including ours, Saturday night, 5/26 @ 8pm, in case you were interested...).

So where will Shavuot go from here? I really don't know, but I'm excited to find out! We are all part of Jewish history; the next link in an unbroken chain that came long before us and will go on long after us. But for right now, the religion is ours, and we have the right (perhaps even the obligation) to mold it carefully to fit into our lives. 

Will Shavuot one day take on a sustainability theme? Or a greater message of equality and inclusion? Perhaps we'll come up with entirely new practices inspired by the Book of Ruth, or we'll discover the health benefits of cheesecake (I wish...). Our holidays speak volumes about us and our values, and Shavuot is no different. Some day maybe you'll tell your grandchildren about how their favorite holiday, Shavuot, used to be entirely unknown, and they'll respond, "Really? I can't believe it! Now please tell me more about that holiday, Chanukah, that apparently used to be such a big deal..."

Photos in this blog post:

1. CC image courtesy of Gord Bell on Flickr

2. CC image courtesy of Living in Monrovia on Flickr

3. CC image courtesy of www.worththewhisk.com on Flickr

4. CC image courtesy of _rockinfree on Flickr