SHAVUOT 5786
School ends in two weeks and our summer is entirely up in the air. My daughter is supposed to play basketball for the 17U Team USA (proud mama!), but I’m not convinced the games will actually happen. Last year was the first time the Maccabiah ever cancelled, and I’m hoping it won’t be a two year hiccup. Every booking feels provisional and the low-grade suspension is its own kind of weight.
Meanwhile, tonight begins Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks that marks fifty days after Passover, when Gd descended on Sinai. In giving us the Torah, he also gave us the gift of study. And the tradition still holds: I’ll go to shul at midnight, with hopefully both of my girls in tow, for Tikkun Leil Shavuot. The old adage is that we stay awake to learn until dawn because our ancestors were asleep when Gd descended on Sinai, and we've been making it up to Him ever since.
Rabbi Sacks said that Torah was the scroll Jews carried wherever they went, and that it also carried us. I've been thinking about that phrase differently this year, more as a ballast than for comfort.
Because honestly, the news is what it is. Stabbings in London. Harassment in New York. And in Texas, a congressional candidate named Maureen Galindo advanced to a Democratic primary runoff after proposing to convert a federal detention center into an internment camp for American Zionists, while claiming a Jewish cabal runs Hollywood and the media. The runoff is today. She probably won't win. That is, somehow, supposed to be the reassuring part.
Two days ago the DOJ also announced a 15-city national tour, led by Leo Terrell, specifically to combat antisemitism, meeting with local communities and law enforcement to build practical responses on the ground. I read about it and felt two things at once: genuine gratitude that this administration has treated this as a real emergency, and a quiet dread about what happens when it ends. It is both heartening and a measure of exactly how bad things have gotten that we need federal task forces touring American cities to tell people not to hate Jews. And don’t get me started on the Kapo’s like Brad Lander.
What I keep thinking about is not the fear, which is real and present, but the particular exhaustion of watching something ancient and recognizable put on new clothes and dare you to call it by its name.
Rabbi Sacks also wrote that the covenant at Sinai created a politics of responsibility. That even with no land, or state, or civil rights, Jews built schools and cared for the poor and didn't wait for someone else to do it. The Torah wasn't a shield. It was a framework for living inside the uncertainty without being destroyed by it. So, that's what I'm reaching for this Shavuot. Not resolution, rather the reassurance that the thing underneath any plan will hold when things fall through. That’s the whole point of the covenant: it isn’t conditional, it’s eternal.
Chag Sameach and Am Yisrael Chai