From childhood I remember mostly the weariness. To this day, when I encounter the wonderful text of the Book of Ruth, I feel infinitely tired and my eyes close. Every time a scroll is read in the synagogue, a force is struck on the reading stage to divert the audience. In the Book of Ruth, which is read during prayer on the morning of Shavuot, we strike after. to comment.
Because Shavuot night is the night when you stay awake and study Torah. The Seder is also a night of canning, but at the end of the ceremony - we go to sleep. Shavuot is canned goods. After the feast on the eve of the holiday, the men march to the synagogue and study until morning prayers. These study the Mishna, these study the Talmud carefully, those who memorize the "Tikkun Lil Shavuot" - the original book after which this whole operation is named, which is synopsis chapters from all parts of the written Torah and the oral Torah (three verses from the beginning and end of each chapter).
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For us children, the experience was tremendous and one-of-a-kind. In the less ultra-Orthodox parts of the neighborhood, the attraction of the holiday was water wars, but for us the theme was to stay up at night. Very quickly, a survival competition developed between us, similar to the competition on Yom Kippur – who would survive more without sleep.
At this point I must confess, for the first time in a newspaper, that having to be up all night terrified me, depressed my spirit and made me very nervous. Even then, the seeds were sown for the bed pedalat I am today, the one who refuses parties that go on too long and deeply scorns those who are late to abandon weddings.
I've almost never had a night without the necessary General Staff number, and when it does, it's good that you don't meet me the next day. And what was also born in me then was the phenomenal ability, the one that serves me to this day in various social tasks, to establish loud presence noises in the first part of the event, so that not one ear is left around that does not know that Arieli is in the picture, and then disappear with feline elegance in a moment of distraction and paddle to bed.
The next time we meet it will be at morning prayers. They are dead and plucked, and your servant is alert and fresh. So I carry the memory of that school night with me only as a result of once or twice experiencing it. Everything else - from the stories.
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Then we got to the meeting. Already on the first day of school, on Rosh Chodesh Elul, there were those who spoke with sparkling eyes about the Shavuot experience that awaits us. More precisely, about the Shavuot night experience. Have to say it's really big.
The singing and dancing of the beginning of the night, and then - a beit midrash filled with a thousand students who contemplate the Torah all night. And when a third custody begins to emerge, they all march together toward the Western Wall, including the sweaty stop on the steps in front of the Western Wall and the joint chant, "And behold our eyes when you return to Zion with mercy." It was powerful and it was memorable and it was mostly very talked about. Here, too, I must confess that I had this experience once and enough. One year of never-ending fatigue and repression and curiosity - and enough.
In the other years, the friendship worked out without me, and so did the Western Wall without me. What is more, I know the stories well, and so I adapted to the ability to recall this truly impressive event in the first person, but into my own personal holiday experience, it never came. And so - the beautiful and uplifting Shavuot holiday was always accompanied by a little secret, hidden under a duvet.
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Shavuot is many things. The festival of the harvest, in which the harvest of wheat is completed and the sacrifice of the two breads is brought. The festival of the first fruits, named after the mitzvah of bringing the firstfruits, is also an "assembly" and completes the counting of the Omer. But for me it was above all a holiday of giving the Torah, celebrating the centrality of Torah in the Jewish experience. For years I thought it was a unique experience for us, and I looked with some disappointment at the difference between my holiday experience and the Israeli experience of Shavuot, the one that puts the agricultural celebration at the center and ignores "On Shavuot we received a gift, God sent us the Torah with Moses."
But then a great correction came and brought with it a great redemption. In the following lines I will reveal to you the existence of the largest spontaneous cultural festival in Israel, Tikun Lil Shavuot. It begins a few days before the holiday, with lectures, classes and festivals all over the country. It expands the scope a bit from net Torah study to many different avenues of knowledge, but the basis is the giving of Torah and the commandment to study it.
The peak takes place, of course, on the night of Shavuot, and especially in Jerusalem. Thousands crowd the streets of the city center and flock from class to class, lecture to lecture and fellowship to fellowship. Bulletin boards collapse from information overload and printers crash from the number of source pages.
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For years I myself have been storming this wealth and gnawing away at it with great lust. As you read these lines, I stand on the podium of the Begin Center and hear a scholarly analysis by Rabbi Chaim of Brest on the significance of a majority decision in the court (and also conclude from this some surprising things about the here and now).
I have been participating in this event for many years and for several years now I have been opening with the story of the miracle that happened in this exact place. One year I came to a lecture, and I encountered many people waiting to enter and being refused by the gatekeepers due to space restrictions. And here a young woman comes up to me with a disappointed face and whispers to me that she has come from far away to hear me and the other lecturers, and they won't let her in. Come with me, I told her. The lecturer is allowed to bring a family member with him, and no one will stop him.
A few minutes later, however, a young man came to me with the exact same problem, and of course I said the exact same thing to him. And so I entered the hall delicacy, flanked by my happy family members, whom I knew exactly five minutes ago, whose names I didn't even know. I went up to the lecturers' podium, they found a place for them on the side of the hall, and you probably guessed that the following year I met them legally married, she gnawed between her teeth and they both thank me for the match.
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Big fix, big fix. A correction to the place and essence of this holiday in the Israeli experience and a correction to me personally. And don't ask what: I'm already less panicked from sleep and alertness. And at the end of the lectures, I even put on the benches of the seminary for self-study. A little yawning here and there, but no panic.
And one more fix, one last, which how can you do without it, has to do with the cheesecakes. Remember them, yes? The wonderful taste, which, however you make it, has a small suffocating sensation at its end, right in the corner? So that, too, has been resolved, thank God. It happened on the day that the Basque cheesecake came into our lives, and from the moment you taste it, everything that witnessed it is null and void and erased from memory as if it never existed. I appreciate that everyone already knows. But if not, search for "Basque cheesecake," follow the instructions, and start a new life. Happy holiday.
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