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Shavuot in the SynagogueShavuot marks the end of the period of counting the omer, which takes us from Pesach to Shavuot. At Pesach we celebrate our deliverance from slavery, the first seminal event in the creation of the Jewish people. Shavuot celebrates the next step -- the giving of the Law to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. There is very little additional synagogue ritual associated with this holiday. Many congregations will decorate with flowers and other greenery. At our current synagogue, we place special "crowns" made of flowers on our Torah scrolls. This custom was brought to us by one of our members, a Holocaust survivor, who first saw it in his home town in Eastern Europe. There are two major passages of Scipture read on Shavuot that we at Beit HaChatulim want to share. The first is the passage in the book of Exodus during which the children of Israel (and we, their descendants) are given the Ten Commandments. There are some beautiful midrashim describing and explaining this pivotal event in Jewish history. One of our favorite stories is that all Jews in every generation past, present, and future came to Mt. Sinai and stood together with our ancestors to be given the Torah. Therefore, each year when the Ten Commandments are read from the Torah, we stand together in the synagogue and are given the Torah again. Another, which you can read elsewhere, describes future generations as the guarantors of their ancestor's acceptance of Torah. We also read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot. Ruth is a young woman who follows her dead husband's mother to Israel and accepts the laws of the Jewish people. Ruth's story is read for a variety of reasons. It has strong agricultural themes - harvesting grain, etc. But also, and perhaps most important, Ruth is a Jew-by-choice, a convert. One explanation why this story has been chosen for Shavuot then becomes that before hearing and accepting the Torah, the children of Israel were not Jews and that they, too, "converted" upon hearing the Torah at Mt. Sinai. It is easy to see that there are powerful themes associated with Shavuot. If you want to know more about them, please check out some of the other web sites that we have explored.
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