Did We Oversleep at Sinai? The Psychological Lessons of Shavuot

Being a Jewish psychologist these past few years has involved some of the hardest professional experiences of my life. A sense of betrayal. Incredulity at watching a field I love move away from nuance and toward myopic binaries. A feeling that the psychological community, which is supposed to hold complexity, was itself collapsing it.

What ultimately helped me was recognizing how deeply Jewish ritual and communal frameworks overlap with established psychological principles of trauma recovery, resilience, and post-traumatic growth. At a moment when many Jews experienced profound relational and institutional rupture after October 7th, these traditions became not merely symbolic, but psychologically organizing. Tonight, I want to explore that overlap — and leave you with something practical you can carry forward.

As humans, we often make meaning through history and story, so I found myself turning to Jewish ritual as a framework for understanding this moment. I began thinking about Shavuot — the holiday commemorating the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai — and came across an essay by Dr. Leslie M. Gutman highlighting how deeply the holiday reflects the psychology of transition, vulnerability, and transformation.

Shavuot is a holiday filled with contradiction.

Despite counting eagerly toward the revelation at Sinai, the Jewish people famously overslept on the very morning they were meant to receive the Torah. God, according to the tradition, found them sleeping.

I’ve always been fascinated by that image. How does an entire people oversleep on the day that defines them? Was it fear? Ambivalence? The anxiety that comes before profound change?

Psychologically, avoidance is often a response to uncertainty.

Human beings frequently retreat from what feels overwhelming, even when the change before them is meaningful. And in retrospect, many Jews experienced October 7th and its aftermath not only as catastrophe, but also as an awakening: a painful reconnection to Jewish peoplehood, vulnerability, and mutual responsibility.

Many of us had felt secure in our communities, professional spaces, and social identities. We believed that our commitment to pluralism, dialogue, and respect for difference would be reciprocated. The aftermath of October 7th shattered many of those assumptions. What emerged for many Jews was not only grief, but also clarity — about belonging, about fragility, and about the importance of communal connection.

Part of the contemporary observance of Shavuot involves staying up all night studying Torah, symbolically correcting our ancestors’ failure to remain awake. Psychologically, I think this ritual also speaks to vigilance after rupture: the desire to remain alert, conscious, and morally awake after collective trauma.

Shavuot is also a story of renewal. We eat dairy foods to symbolize rebirth and spiritual infancy — the beginning of learning how to live according to a new framework of values and obligations. The Book of Ruth, read on Shavuot, centers on belonging and covenant. Ruth is not born Jewish; she chooses connection, loyalty, and shared destiny. The holiday ultimately becomes a meditation on identity, responsibility, and peoplehood.

Like many Jewish rituals, Shavuot ties together memory, land, spirituality, morality, and communal belonging into a single integrated structure. From a psychological perspective, these rituals function as organizing frameworks in times of uncertainty. Trauma destabilizes meaning. Ritual helps restore continuity.

Trauma, however, does not automatically produce growth or wisdom.

Many people emerge from traumatic experiences wounded, destabilized, grieving, or psychologically overwhelmed. But research on post-traumatic growth, particularly the work of psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, suggests that some individuals experience meaningful psychological transformation through the struggle to integrate trauma into their worldview. This can include a deepening of relationships, greater clarity about priorities, spiritual change, increased appreciation for life, and a stronger sense of purpose.

For additional guidance, I often look to those who endured the unimaginable and survived: the former hostages.

Inside the tunnels, under conditions designed to strip away identity, agency, and hope, many hostages found ways to preserve their humanity.

Agam Berger spoke about maintaining her Jewish identity even in captivity: “You can’t take away my free will — and you can’t take away my Judaism.” She continued observing Shabbat and Jewish holidays as best she could, using ritual to orient herself psychologically to a world beyond captivity. In trauma psychology, rituals often function as stabilizing anchors that preserve continuity of self under extreme stress.

Eli Sharabi described how connection to family, community, and shared responsibility sustained him psychologically. He spoke about surviving not only for himself, but for others who depended on him. His reflections echo Viktor Frankl’s observation that meaning and responsibility can help human beings endure extraordinary suffering.

And then there was imagination.

Omer Wenkert described how hostages created Friday night “movie nights” inside the tunnels. One person would retell a favorite film scene by scene, in vivid detail, while the others collectively imagined it together. There was no screen or sound, yet through shared imagination they recreated moments of joy, culture, humor, and emotional connection.

These practices were not simply distraction. They were acts of psychological resistance — efforts to preserve identity, agency, creativity, and human connection under dehumanizing conditions.

Outside the tunnels, many Jews instinctively created rituals of connection as well:
Rallies.
Posters.
Prayer gatherings.
Advocacy.
Communal mourning.
These were not merely symbolic acts. They restored agency in the face of helplessness and reinforced communal belonging during a period of profound uncertainty.

At the same time, many people experienced another layer of trauma: rupture within friendships, professional circles, activist communities, and social spaces that had once felt safe. For queer Jews in particular, many experienced the painful message that aspects of their identities were somehow incompatible with one another.

Psychologically, identity fragmentation creates conditions associated with chronic stress, hypervigilance, shame, and relational mistrust. Human beings organize themselves through coherent belonging. When individuals are forced to separate core aspects of identity from one another in order to maintain acceptance within a community, the injury is not merely political or social — it is deeply psychological.

And yet, Jewish communities have repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for reconstruction after rupture.

People formed new relationships, new support systems, new communal structures, and renewed forms of belonging.

I often think about my grandmother Dora. During a death march from Auschwitz, she broke her ankle. Her two sisters physically carried her so she could continue walking. That is how she survived: not alone, but through relational endurance and mutual responsibility.

There is a teaching in Judaism that a small amount of light can dispel tremendous darkness. Resilience is part of that light. Resilience helps people endure adversity while maintaining core functioning. Post-traumatic growth, however, is something different. It involves transformation through struggle:
A reordering of priorities.
A deepening of meaning.
A shift in identity.
Not returning unchanged, but building forward with greater integration and purpose.

Leading up to Shavuot, Jews count the Omer one day at a time. Psychologically, healing often unfolds similarly: incrementally, relationally, through repeated acts of meaning-making rather than sudden resolution.

What we witnessed — both among the hostages and throughout Jewish communal life after October 7th — was something profoundly human. Even under extraordinary suffering, people turn toward ritual, connection, imagination, meaning, and one another. Not because they are untouched by grief, but because these practices help preserve humanity in the midst of it.

So what does growth actually look like in practice?

First, narrative construction matters. 

Research consistently shows that constructing coherent narratives after trauma can support psychological integration. This is not simply journaling for catharsis, but the process of asking: What happened? What changed? Who am I now? Even brief reflective writing can help transform chaos into meaning.

Second, deliberate gratitude matters.

Not as forced positivity, but as attentional practice. Judaism embeds this psychologically through blessings over ordinary experiences: waking up, eating bread, seeing light. These rituals train attention toward what remains meaningful even amid uncertainty and grief.

Third, growth often requires movement toward discomfort rather than avoidance of it. Difficult conversations, vulnerability, and honest engagement with grief and complexity are psychologically demanding, but they are also conditions under which transformation becomes possible.

Communities matter as well.

People cannot heal in environments where they feel pressured to fragment themselves or conceal core parts of their identities. Psychological safety is not the absence of disagreement; it is the presence of enough trust and dignity for people to remain fully human within community.

Jewish ritual traditions have long understood something modern psychology increasingly confirms: healing is relational. Mourning, celebration, learning, prayer, storytelling, meals, and ritual all function as mechanisms that reinforce connection and continuity during periods of instability.

Growth, ultimately, is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we build — collectively, relationally, and intentionally.

Before closing, I want to leave you with one practical tool grounded both in psychology and Jewish tradition: the breath.

One of the fastest ways to regulate the nervous system during stress is controlled breathing. Practices like box breathing help reduce physiological arousal and restore grounding. In Hebrew, the word for breath — neshima — shares a root with neshama, meaning soul. Breathing becomes not only biological regulation, but also reconnection to self.

Four counts in.
Four counts hold.
Four counts out.
Four counts hold.

Simple. Repeatable. Portable.

A practice you can carry into moments of fear, grief, overwhelm, or rupture.

And perhaps that is part of what Jewish ritual has always offered: not escape from suffering, but structures that help human beings remain connected — to themselves, to one another, and to meaning — while moving through it.

Chazak, chazak v’nitchazek.

Am Yisroel Chai.