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Shavuot Shavuot One of the three great agricultural festivals of ancient Israel, Shavuot is originally the feast of the first fruits. The holiday begins the day after our ancestors had finished the counting of the omer, a period of 49 days during which the grain ripened, 49 days of hope and anxiety, and counted from the night marking the second day of Pesach. Rabbinic tradition however, connects this harvest festival with the giving of the Torah on Sinai and calls it the Season of the Giving of our Torah. It is this shift in the emphasis of the holiday's meaning that we shall explore. Shavuot is the only one of the great festivals that is described by its agricultural connections alone. The Torah commands that Israel shall hold a festival for the feast of harvest, "the first fruits of your labor, that you sowed in the field" (Exodus 23:16) the Torah later commands..."on that same day you shall hold a celebration, a holy assembly, you shall do no work". (Leviticus 23:17-23) "You shall observe the Feast of Weeks, offering your freewill contribution as the Eternal Your God has blessed you. You shall rejoice before the Eternal Your God with your son and daughter, your male and female servants, the Levite within your gates, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow among you, at the place where the Eternal Your God will choose to have his name dwell. (Deut. 16:10-12) The distinctive aspects of the sacrifices of Shavuot are two loaves of bread offered by the priests for all Israel and the freewill offering of first fruits, brought by every family according to their own means, according to how God had blessed them. The two loaves of bread are explicitly the results of human labor and this offering not only celebrates the partnership of human with God in the feeding of the world, but also provides a connection with the transformation of the meaning of Shavuot initiated by the Pharisees and their successors, the rabbis. It is believed that the struggle between a waning sacrificial system and the teachings of the rabbinic tradition produced this transformation. For the rabbis, Sinai was the marriage of God and Israel and Torah the contract or Ketubah of the holy covenant. Everyone in every generation must stand at Sinai so that Torah would be heard anew. How to inculcate this sense of being at Sinai? There had to be a holy day to commemorate standing and receiving the Torah! But its exact date is not made clear. The rabbis took the festival away from its agricultural origins by deducing that the liberation from Egypt was not an end in itself, it was to make possible the Revelation at Sinai. Since Pesach clearly celebrates that freedom, the next great festival of Shavuot must have been the time of the giving of the Torah at Sinai! The celebration of Shavuot begins at home with the lighting of the candles after the blessing "Baruch atah Adonai, eloheynu melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav, vitzivanu l'hadlik ner shel yom tov. " "Who makes us holy and commands us to light the candles for this holy day". A Festival Kiddush is also said over wine and with it "sheh hechianu" the blessing "who has kept us alive, sustained us and allow us to reach this time". It is the tradition to serve dairy foods during Shavuot, and cheese blintzes and noodle puddings are the inevitable fare in the Ashkenazi household. Perhaps because Shavuot is a spring festival of renewal, the emphasis on dairy products is connected with the spring birth of cattle, goats and lambs. In the synagogue services, Psalms of Praise (Nos.113-118) are chanted as part of the service. It is also a tradition to read the Book of Ruth during this holiday, which describes not only the harvest practices of ancient Israel, but Ruth's love and loyalty, the qualities needed to assure the continuation of the covenant made at Sinai. The Reform movement has adopted the custom of the confirmation of 16 year olds in Judaism at the Shavuot evening service. As this group receives Torah together, leading the worship service, chanting from the scroll and demonstrating that they will hear and remember, they and the congregation gathered to worship with them are standing at Sinai together. It is a mitzvah to stand at Sinai and we invite the whole congregation to be there! The evening service at Temple Israel, as in many other synagogues around the world is followed by the custom of staying awake all night to study and discuss our sacred texts and the writings of our greatest thinkers. Called Tikkun Leyl Shavuot-the Repair of the Night of Shavuot, its intent is to make each person present directly and personally encounter Torah, as if he or she were actually at Sinai. In a way Shavuot allows us to commemorate and renew that partnership at Sinai which offered all Israel the opportunity to be a "Kingdom of Priests, a holy nation".
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