Shavuot: One Night, Four Synagogues

As I prepare to celebrate my first Shavuot as a Jew, I look back on my earlier experiences during this holiday. For 10 years, as a Christian, I regularly attended synagogue and studied with Jewish groups, as well as celebrating most holidays.

As a new Jew, I have a special relationship to Shavuot. After all, the holiday could be described as the commemoration of the conversion of the entire people of Israel, because it marks the day on which Jewish tradition tells us that Moses received the Torah from God on Mount Sinai.

Because the holiday centers around Torah, observant Jews stay up all night in marathon study sessions known as

(literally "Shavuot night repair," alluding to the Jewish goal of "tikkun olam," or repair of the world). Some Jews spend time at a number of different synagogues throughout the night, engaging in a variety of studies.

I've found Shavuot to be an incredible amount of fun, as I do virtually all Jewish holidays. Jewish study sessions rarely spit out facts; rather, they raise endless questions and leave you with a sense of wonder at all there is yet to discover about sacred texts, life, and God. Holiday study sessions dig even deeper, and they're almost always filled with laughter, joy, and camaraderie.

Some years back, I decided to spend my first Shavuot going from synagogue to synagogue, beginning at 9 p.m. and ending with the Shacharit service the next morning, which began just after dawn.

My friend, Karen Prager, and I began the evening at Temple Emanu-El, the synagogue to which I now belong. Rabbi Mark Kaiserman led the first study group. Quips and humor flow from Mark's lips as quickly and readily as seconds pass through a day, and his energy rivals the combined enthusiasm of a room full of second-graders.

That evening, Mark informed us, tongue-in-cheek, that we were going to read the entire Torah. After handing out pieces of paper with the name of each of the parshot (weekly Torah portions) written on them, Mark asked that we silently read the parsha we'd been assigned, then stand and read a single sentence from it in the order they appear in the Torah. One woman sang her portion with gusto, making up her own melody. Some chose verses that plunged the room into laughter; others chose passages that spoke in meaningful ways to many of us.

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