Happy Shavuot!

[dorchadas]

Or, as the guy I overheard on the bus called it, SHWOO-as. I have no idea why he was pronouncing the vav as a W. Maybe he was a time-traveler from the Kingdom of Judah who followed Ashkenazi minhag.

Anyway, Sunday and Monday were Shavuot, the holiday where we received the Torah a the foot of Mt. Sinai and where nowadays we study all night and eat dairy food. The legend is that on the day that the Children of Israel were to receive the Torah, they slept in and had to be woken up by G-d, so now we stay up learning all night to commemorate our previous laziness. Eating cheesecake is because with the Torah came the laws of kashrut, so the Children of Israel returned to camp knowing that their previously-prepared meat meal was treif, thus obliging them to eat dairy in celebration instead. Or maybe it's because the promised land was full of "milk and honey" and they were looking forward to their new home. Or maybe it's gematria related, since the Hebrew חלב (ḥalav, "milk") equals forty, the number of days Moses spent on the mountain. Or maybe-

Anyway, Judaism is like that.

I went early for the learning portion, since the rabbis were teaching three classes:

• The Book of Ezekiel — Judaism and Psychedelics w/ R’Lizzi


• The Ten Commandments — Is This The Best We Could Do? w/ R’Steven


• The Book of Ruth — Comfort in Times of Sorrow, and Joy in Chosen Family w/ R’Deena

I went with the Ten Commandments one, and the most interesting thing that came from that is when the rabbi made the point that the Ten Commandments are accorded a lot of importance in American culture when people think about Abrahamic religions, but if you ask a Jew to tell you about Judaism, we probably won't mention the Ten Commandments even once, even if we talk for a while. We talked about what is distinctively Jewish about the commandments--really not that much other than remembering and sanctifying Shabbat, unless the first commandment counts--whether there's anything special we should have added in that case, like dietary laws or any of the festivals, the distinction between the more famous first set of commandments and the second set in Exodus 34 which are much more obviously Jewish, and so on.

I also learned that Judaism has a word for infidels--עובדי כוכבים ומזלות (avdei koḥavim u'mazalot, "worshippers of the stars and the constellations [of the Zodiac]"). Despite this seemingly-obvious pointer, Judaism is actually mostly fine with astrology.

After the study sessions were over, Rabbi Deena read the Ten Commandments from a Torah, shofars were blown--much to the terror of some small kids nearby--and I had a bit of pizza until sashagee and Laila arrived. She came after most of the festivities were already over, but not so late that she couldn't finally meet bunnydelfuego just as she was leaving! After a brief conversation, we sat down with aaronhparker, ate our pizza, and he invited us to a Moroccan Shabbat dinner he's hosting in two weeks and told us about a bakery just down the street. Since we didn't want to keep Laila there for too long, and since sashagee is still in ill-health, we left pretty soon afterward, stopping by the bakery for some English muffins and cheesecake for Shavuot.

I didn't stay up all night this time--maybe in future years--but it was still a lovely holiday.

Comments

[conuly]

Are you sure you don't just eat cheesecake because why wouldn't you eat cheesecake if cheesecake is an option? Not to be too terribly flippant, but that's certainly the reason *I* eat cheesecake.

[dorchadas]

I think it's certainly true that that's the reason we took a custom to eat dairy and went "Right, eat cheesecake, got it"!