On Sunday night, June 8th, Jews across the world will celebrate Shavuot, one of the most beautiful and most neglected of our holidays.  In contrast to Passover—a holiday that is loved and celebrated by even the least observant Jews—Shavuot is a holiday that many Jews haven’t even heard of, let alone celebrated.  Yet it is the day on which we commemorate revelation, the receiving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.  All Jews certainly know how important the Torah is.  So how did we, as a people, lose our connection to the day on which it was given to us?

On Passover we celebrate our passage through the narrow confinement of slavery into freedom.  We recount the story in intricate detail, reliving the pain and rejoicing in the victory.  But our story does not end there.  When we made it through the sea of reeds, God did not give us the Torah.  We had to wait and struggle through 40 years of travel in the desert, having our faith tested time and again, before we were ready to receive the holy instructions for how to survive as a people.

We chronicle this journey, this maturing of the Jewish people, in the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot.  Not surprisingly, these two holidays do not exist independent of each other.  Without one, you would not have the other.  Indeed, none of the Jewish holidays are observed in exclusion of the others.  Our year is a cycle, each holiday preparing us for the next, gently pushing us towards the growth and self-discovery hidden behind all of our traditions.

So what are we meant to learn from Shavuot?  If Passover is about exploring the ways in which we are still enslaved in our own lives, then Shavuot is about learning from those discoveries and working to free ourselves so that we can be ready to make a commitment to God and to the Torah on Shavuot.  We count the omer each night both as a symbol of the sheaves of barley that were brought to the Temple in Jerusalem during this period, but also as a tangible reminder that we are still supposed to be thinking about the discoveries we made during Passover.

On Shavuot, it is traditional to study all night, as a symbol of the lifetime of learning we received when we were given the Torah.  We chant the 10 Commandments and the dramatic story surrounding them, and we read the Book of Ruth.  The story of Ruth describes what we believe to be the first Jewish conversion in our history, the first time someone recognized how the beauty of Judaism and our laws could enhance her life, and chose to take on those laws as her own.  Ruth says to Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you.  For wherever you go, I will go.  Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  (Ruth 1:16)  It makes perfect sense that we read this beautiful story after we reenact our own commitment to our laws and traditions in the reading of the 10 Commandments.

If you have never celebrated Shavuot, then maybe this is the year to consider spending the evening of June 8th studying one of your favorite passages of Torah.  In fact, if you have never sat down with someone you love and studied Torah together, then you are missing out on such a beautiful way of connecting with both the Torah and with the people in your life.  At B’nai Tikvah, we celebrate Shavuot along with the 7th grade graduation ceremony.  We chant Torah and the book of Ruth, and we watch as another class of young Jewish people begins their lifetime of commitment to Judaism.  The congregation is always invited to join us at this ceremony, but you can also just celebrate Shavuot at home, with a chumash and a study partner, and the willingness to discover any one of the endless treasures that the Torah has to offer us if we just open it up and start searching.