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Jayne, at age five, with Mom, at the
Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, New York.
They posed while Dad played gin.

Highlighted Holiday

Shavuot

The symbols of Shavuot’s ancient agricultural origins are sweet with the perfumes of deep spring: soft-skinned fruits and sun-warm berries, decorative branches of fresh greens and fragrant flowers. One of the three pilgrimage festivals, the holiday, beginning at sunset on Thursday, May 28th this year, started out as a joyous harvest celebration. Seven weeks after Passover (“Shavuot” means weeks, and the festival is sometimes known as the Feast of Weeks), the last of the barley harvest was ready to be gathered and the first fruits and new spring wheat were beginning to ripen. Together these comprised the Seven Species, the choice crops mentioned in Deuteronomy with which the ancient land was blessed: in addition to barley and wheat, dates, figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates.

The most beautiful fruits were set in baskets fashioned sometimes of silver and gold, and carried to the Temple in long processions accompanied by music and song. Grateful for the new grain they had reaped, families brought two loaves of bread made from their finest flour that season to the altar.

Later, after the Temple was destroyed, Shavuot, like Passover and Sukkot, was linked to the Exodus, acquiring a more religious significance as it came to commemorate the anniversary of the covenant made between God and Israel on Mt. Sinai, when Moses received the Ten Commandments and the Torah. If Passover celebrates the Israelites’ release from slavery and their rebirth as a free people, their acceptance of God’s Laws at Shavuot marks their spiritual liberation, the rebirth of their souls.

This covenant is expressed in two different metaphors. For the kabbalists, Shavuot marks the marriage of God and the Jewish people, and the Torah stands as their ketubah, the written wedding contract between them.

The other is the image of all Jews that ever were and that ever will be, standing together as one at Sinai. By tradition, that moment dates their conversion to Judaism: by accepting the covenant, they became Jews by choice.

And on Shavuot, we read about another convert who became a Jew by choice centuries after Sinai. This is the beautifully written Book of Ruth, like Shavuot set during the grain harvest: the story of a Moab widow whose embrace of her mother-in-law Naomi’s Hebrew God parallels the Israelites’ acceptance of the Torah.

Celebrating Shavuot Today

The word Torah means teaching, and many Jews stay up the entire first night of the holiday in study sessions. Reflecting the wide tent that contemporary Judaic thought and practice covers, these sessions now range from all-male groups who study traditional selections of the Torah and the Talmud, to feminists focusing on issues of friendship and female bonding as exemplified in the Book of Ruth, to coed havurahs (informal worship and study groups) who explore the personal commandments the community lives by and what it means to be a Jew today. Some of the participants bring special Shavuot foods to sustain the group as they discuss and learn throughout the night.

In the Book of Ruth, the biblical practice of gleaning--that is, leaving a portion of one’s harvested fields for the poor to gather--sustained Ruth and Naomi when they came to Bethlehem penniless. In some Jewish communities, Shavuot has become a time to donate gleanings from home and wallet to those in need.

A midrash explains that as each of the Ten Commandments was given, the whole world filled with the fragrance of spices. On Shavuot today Jews adorn their homes and synagogues with leaves and branches, potted plants and fresh-cut flowers, just as during the Middle Ages they strewed spices and rose petals on the synagogue floor for the holiday. Iranian Jews know the holiday as Feast of the Flowers, Italians as Feast of the Roses. The sweet-smelling blossoms and greens recall the beautiful processions through Jerusalem, as well as verdant, rose-covered Mt. Sinai and the aroma of Paradise the Torah offers us.

The fragrant new fruits appear in any--or every--part of the meal, from soup to dessert. Special holiday breads remind us of the Temple grain offerings.

But it is with dairy dishes that Shavuot is most closely associated. It is difficult to believe that this tradition is nowhere mandated, so strong is the tradition.

One explanation, of course, is found in nature: this is the season when animals, grazing on the fresh, new pasturage, produce an abundance of milk. But there are many spiritual interpretations too, relating the holiday to the revelation on Sinai. Because Moses brought them the laws of kashrut when he descended the mountain, the Israelites were permitted hereafter to eat only meat that was kosher. By the time he returned, however, they were famished and had no time to prepare a meat meal according to ritual. So they rejoiced with festive dairy foods--including, perhaps, cheese formed from milk that had soured during their long vigil. The Torah and Israel have both been compared to milk and honey, nourishing and sweet, while the whiteness of milk and of rice--another popular Shavuot food--evokes the purity of the Laws and the Commandments. And there are still a host of other exegeses based on the numerical equivalents of various words.

Whatever the reason, dairy is a highlight of the Jewish kitchen. This is the time to savor an array of lavish all-time Hall-of-Famers, presented in Jewish Holiday Cooking in sublime variations: from shav with salmon kreplach to a sensuous honey-ricotta cheese cake, from a richly textured cold fruit soup to luscious cheese blintzes coupled with a fresh berry compote.

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