THE CASE OF THE FORGOTTEN HOLIDAY (or, HOW SHAVUOT GOT LEFT BEHIND)

With Shavuot coinciding with Memorial Day Weekend (not to mention my little health issue) we’re skipping our Shavuot service this year.

I’m sure that for Humanistic Jews this statement has all the shock value of announcing that we’re passing on the day-old doughnut sale at the Dollar Store. It’s not our fault, really, though like all products of the internalized Jewish guilt machine, many Very Important Jews think it is. But if I were taking Shavuot out on a date I would not hold back. “No, Shavuot, it isn’t me. It’s you.”

For over 2,000 years, this holiday (which this year begins on Thursday evening and runs through Friday and Shabbat) has sought to regain its lost relevancy. And at one time, Shavuot absolutely had relevancy. Joining Passover and Sukkot, it is one of our oldest and most land- and harvest-oriented holidays. Like those two days it was also deemed a pilgrimage festival, bringing our ancestors to the Temple in Jerusalem. However, unlike the other two holidays, the Torah does not assign it an additional Exodus-related biblical story.

Passover was transformed by the Book of Exodus from an agricultural holiday to the celebration of freedom from slavery. This was done so thoroughly that its agrarian roots are almost impossible to locate. Sukkot also got a story even as it held onto some of its farmland associations (mostly through hanging out in the Sukkah and the traditions of the Lulav and Etrog). Like Passover, its re-positioning could already be found in the Torah story. They did this by re-purposing the Sukkah—quite obviously an ancient harvest hut—as the housing situation of the newly freed and wilderness-wandering Israelites.

Shavuot did not benefit from these kinds of biblical re-writes. There exists no Torah legend with which to pair it. In the Torah, it's clearly just a harvest celebration, and nothing else.

At some point in later Jewish history (by which I mean well over 2,000 years ago) the Jewish economy diversified as it did everywhere. With that, the importance of this solely agricultural holiday probably waned. And after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., there was nothing special calling Jews to the Jerusalem Temple. So when the rabbis took over from the now jobless priesthood, they decided to give Shavuot a little narrative boost of its own. They attached it to nothing less than the Revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

While this gave the holiday a boost, this particular re-purposing still left it with little in the way of rituals, especially with the Temple now in ruins. Over time, however, certain folk customs began to emerge. One of these involves eating dairy on the holiday. (Thus illustrating the dictum that I am completely inventing which teaches that a cheesecake-based holiday is always a good idea.)

Another interesting innovation was the creation of an all-night Torah study session.* Honestly, I think this kind of contradicts the cheesecake tradition as it is well-known that it is practically impossible to stay up all night with a stomach full of cheesecake. Much, much later (some 1,900 years later) early proponents of what became Reform Judaism decided to make up a whole new tradition called Jewish Confirmation. Some of them even saw it as a replacement for the Bar Mitzvah because it included girls and encouraged longer stays in Sunday schools. Of relevance here it that they placed it on Shavuot to give the holiday more life and because it usually arrives right at commencement season.

At least here in the Diaspora, outside of the Orthodox world none of this was enough to  get Shavuot noticed even as much as Sukkot, much less Passover.

Over the past few years some communities in Israel and the Diaspora have modernized the all-night Torah study by introducing cultural elements. Some now take place on Zoom (thanks, COVID!). These are all really nice. But they haven’t exactly revived the average American Jew’s relationship with the holiday. It turns out that most of us are really just not that into it.

Once upon a time in rabbinical school I was taught that it was my job to make Judaism relevant to those who were leaving it behind. Oddly, this included making sure that a holiday like Chanukah (“It’s a MINOR HOLIDAY, damn it!”) was kept in its place even as we were expected to cheerlead lesser-known (and for many, completely unknown) holidays like Shavuot. If we were in Israel that would be much easier because 1) it's a national holiday, and 2) it has harvest and land credibility what with it being in the Jewish homeland, which not so coincidentally led to it becoming a big kibbutz thing.

In any case, as a Humanistic rabbi I believe that Judaism must be the living culture of the Jewish people, not a set of requirements mandated by ever-changing ancestral needs. If Chanukah is now more important to Jews than Shavuot—which is demonstrably so!—then why shouldn’t Jewish leaders put more energy into Chanukah?

I’m certainly not breaking up with Shavuot or I wouldn't be writing about it here. That said, there’s nothing wrong with taking a liturgical break. (It's not like we're attached to the tradition of standing up at our services and chanting the Ten Commandments from the Torah!) I believe that I can accurately say that very few Humanistic Jews thought first about this weekend being Shavuot and only then about Memorial Day.

Rabbi Wine once suggested transforming Shavuot into a holiday celebrating all Jewish literature. In that spirit, I offer you a link to an article I published a few years ago in Humanistic Judaism Magazine. It's called, "Understanding Ancient Texts: The Things That You’re Liable to Think About the Bible Ain’t Necessarily So." It’s a good way to gain a better appreciation of the relevance of the Hebrew Bible to Humanistic Jews. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.

And if you read that—or any other Jewish literature you might enjoy—you will have had your own very appropriate secular and cultural celebration of Shavuot!

Chag Sameach (Happy Holiday)!

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* The reason given for the all-night study session was—as legends later had it—the Israelites were insufficiently excited about the big Torah-Giving Event planned by God and Moses. This, they offered, was evidenced by the fact that they all went to sleep on time. The all-night study is a medieval Jewish invention meant to make up for their insufficient enthusiasm. Hence it is called a Tikkun Layl Shavuot – A Corrective for the Night of Shavuot.