Shavuot – a festival with many names

SUZANNE BELLING

Part of the reason might be that Shavuot lacks a central unifying activity which is present in every other festival. Pesach has the seder, Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the 10 days of repentance, culminating in the fast of Yom Kippur, and Succot is marked by the requirement to live in rickety booths for eight days.

By contrast, Shavuot has no prescribed mitzvot, other than refraining from manual labour – a mitzvah that applies equally to Pesach, Succot and Rosh Hashanah.

Many customs have developed over the years, such as eating dairy foods. Food, of course, plays a major role in most Jewish holidays and, on Shavuot, the eating of dairy products is part of the tradition. Dishes include cheesecake, cheese blintzes and cheese kreplach.

Other traditions include the reading of the Book of Ruth and studying the entire first night of Shavuot, known in Hebrew as Tikkun Leil Shavuot.

A feature of Shavuot and the other two pilgrimage festivals in later years has been the recital of the memorial Yizkor prayer.

Yet the variety of names of the festival testifies to its centrality in Judaism.

Its significance is also rooted in the ancient tradition of it being one of the three pilgrimage festivals, when masses of Jews went up to Jerusalem for the occasion – the other two being Pesach and Succot.

Shavuot is primarily zman matan Torateinu, the time of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the foundational event of the Jewish religion. The Torah makes Judaism what it is and the commemoration of this event makes Shavuot a uniquely significant festival.

Shavuot literally mean “weeks”- the festival of weeks, marking the end of seven weeks from Pesach, during which the Omer is counted to mark the passing of every day of that period.

Chag Habikkurim, the third name, means the festival of the first fruits. It was an important time in an agricultural society, when the first fruits of the harvest came in and when all seven species mentioned in the Bible – wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates – were brought to the Temple.

The next name follows from this, Chag Hakatzir, the harvest festival, showing once again that Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival. A sample of the first wheat crop was baked into two loaves of bread and waved before the Temple altar as the concluding rite of the season.

It is also sometimes referred to in English as Pentecost, a term derived from the Greek, meaning 50^th day, the day after the end of the 49-day counting of the Omer.