Holy Days Archive

Welcome to CLAL Holy Days, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on upcoming Jewish holidays.

SHAVUOT

In the Bible, Shavuot is the festival of first fruits. The rabbis of the talmudic age enhanced its meaning with an historical element, proclaiming it z'man matan toratenu, the time of the giving of the Torah. This new understanding led to the designation of the Ten Commandments as the festival Torah reading, to the custom of eating dairy foods (for the Torah's words are as nourishing as mother's milk), and the custom of tikkun leil Shavuot, an all night Shavuot study marathon.

What is the purpose of this exhausting 'learn-a-thon'? Perhaps its importance is not in its content, but in its method. On Pesach, at our seder, we not only dismiss the Exodus, but in many ways we try to re-experience it. Likewise, the tikkun of Shavuot is experiential. If we read carefully the account of the experience of Sinai, we see confusion, bewilderment and fear among the Israelites.

The idea of an omnipotent, cosmos-creating God revealing the divine self to finite fragile humans is overwhelming. Many philosophers claim that the very notion of revelation defies understanding. The early evening start of the tikkun of Shavuot is ordinary enough. But by the break of dawn hours later, most participants have been enveloped by an exhaustion that (if they fend off sleep) leaves them confused, disoriented, and unable to think logically. To study Torah in such a state would be absurd, if our goal were to absorb information, for our powers of comprehension have long since dissipated. Rather, this altered state of exhausted consciousness may permit us to experience what our logical, structured, well rested minds often reject. In those pre-dawn moments of Torah study under the influence of utter exhaustion, we experience something akin to the cognitive 'overload' that our ancestors felt at Sinai.

(David Nelson)

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