Seven weeks after the Jewish people escaped slavery in Egypt, they arrived at the foot of a mountain called Mount Sinai. In this moment, the formerly enslaved Israelits become a “holy people” by receiving the Ten Commandments, one of the Torah’s great teachings.
Shavuot is not just about receiving the Torah but also a time for learning Torah. The Hebrew word Torah literally means “teaching,” and the term refers both to the first five books of the Bible and to the entire gamut of Jewish teachings.
It’s traditional on Shavuot to pull an all-nighter and do different sorts of Jewish learning all through the night. Why nighttime? First, because learning Jewish texts and bringing your own questions and experiences to those texts is so important and stimulating, it’s worth staying up for. Also, it’s as if we’re reenacting the Sinai experience, when the sky darkened, sounds grew so loud you could almost “see” them, and people were in some sort of altered and receptive state, which is what one feels when staying up past one’s bedtime.
A passage in the Torah invites us to join the Sinai scene: “God says, ‘I make this covenant not with you alone ... but also with all those who are not standing here today.’” The custom of learning through the night appears in the Zohar (a traditional mystical text) and was practiced by the 16th-centurymystics of the Israeli city of Tzfat. It became widespread soon after that (in part, some scholars say, due to mass production of coffee) and remains a popular custom in many communities today. (There is even a midrash that says the Israelites overslept on the morning of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, so now we stay up all night to “repair” that ancient mistake.)
What do we learn on Shavuot? Whatever sources speak to us in a Jewish way: Bible, Talmud, commentaries, midrash, Hasidic stories, folktales, modern philosophy, poetry, song lyrics, and… PJ Library books!
More
(For Grown-ups) All About Tikkun Leil Shavuot via myJewishlearning.com
Why Kids Love Shavuot (and You Will Too)