Shavuot: Feeling Chosen Yet?

Jewish culture has big traditions and small traditions. Big traditions are overarching, fundamental religious principles and rituals -they do not differ all that much across various Jewish communities. Example? Eating kosher food. Sure, not everybody eats kosher, but whoever eats kosher in the UK does it in a way that is very similar to how it is done in Israel, or Morocco, or Belgium, or Armenia. Small traditions are local adjustments and modifications which surround the big tradition but, in contrast to them, are dictated by the specifics of time and place in which big tradition is embedded. Example? Jews of Europe are very fond of fish. In the context of UK smoked salmon comes to mind but this is true also of the 17-19th century Ukraine and Poland where a dish known as ‘gefilte fish’ was invented. How did fish get popular? Keeping laws of kashrut is demanding. Think of it: meat is an expensive product in the first place, then the ritual slaughter of an animal has to be carried out, the strict separation of milk and meat should be adhered to, amounting to keeping two sets of cutlery and crockery. The desire to avoid expense, mess and worry accounts for the rise of the substitute of meat: fish. That is how certain fish dishes, and ‘gefilte fish’ made of carp is an iconic one, become ‘Jewish foods’. The distinction between the big and small traditions is not mine, it belongs to Carmel Chiswick, who published an insightful book on economics of Judaism. Despite how it sounds, the book is not a ‘heavy read’, it gives several examples of big and small traditions and, essentially, explains how certain things, foods and social rituals, became ‘Jewish’ – without there ever being anything inherently Jewish about them.

When European secularization kicked in (19th century?) religion (and the big traditions) retreated but the social customs surrounding it (small traditions) continued. Some even grew in importance and visibility. Religious vacuum had to be filled in by something. Small traditions lacked the laborousness, the mindfulness, the hard work of religious observance. They retained the fun and the mundane, even mindless, elements. The less of the religion remained the more small traditions asserted themselves as ‘what it means to be Jewish’. When secularisation process was very advanced, and especially when it was forced (as it was in the Soviet Union), Jewishness was reshaped in the form of small traditions, almost exclusively. Those Jewish religious festivals and rituals rich in small traditions fared better than the rituals ‘thin’ on small traditions. Soviet Jewry of the 1970s and 1980s, especially the provincial segments of it, have lost the big tradition in its entirety. Nothing remained. Grandmothers and grandfathers, those whose native tongue was Yiddish, were still around but even in them the big tradition was thin. Galina Zelenina, a Russian speaking Jewish historian, characterised Soviet Jewry as ‘Jewry in the state of degradation’ and compares it to Jews of medieval Spain. This is a very precise, albeit unflattering, characterisation. Degradation it was. Knowledge of Judaism was going down between generations and somehow also within generations as well. Where there was some sort of ‘sticky’ small tradition, it was preserved, but no one could remember what the purpose of that was, and the religious meaning of any tradition or festival vanished. And big traditions became small. The legendary clandestine baking of Passover matzos is something that the Soviet Jewry became known for in the West. True, that was happening, but nobody knew in particular that regular bread cannot be consumed at the same time, that the whole set of dishes should be changed, that it all lasts for a week, and that foods other than bread (anything affected by fermentation) should not be consumed either. All of that was mostly lost. The 9th of Av was lost as a day of fasting in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple but got rebranded in the Soviet realities as a day of visits to the cemeteries.

Shavuot was one thing that disappeared completely. I learned about its existence, meaning, rituals from the scratch when I left the USSR and came to live in Israel in the early 1990s. The Soviet Jewish calendar really featured Passover (and matzos), the Jewish New Year (you ought to have some sort of way to mark a new year) and Yom Kippur, quickly coming after the New Year and forever being confused with it. And Yom Kippur meant you had to fast-we knew that, but we did not know that the fast starts on the evening preceding Yom Kippur, not in the morning of it. And Shavuot was not part of the calendar. There was not some sort of small and pleasant secular undemanding tradition surrounding it so it went down the tubes with ‘sovietisation’ of the Jewish culture. The religious core of Shavuot in modern times is that it is a festival marking the giving of Torah to Jews. It is easy to see why it lost importance under the Soviets. The core religious ritual of Shavuot is staying up all night studying Torah-an ultimate way of acknowledging the giving of Torah. For that to happen, one needs a book of Torah as a minimum-I have not seen a single copy in any Jewish house I visited in the USSR. I just saw them in the synagogue, some very old and fragile copies. Further, it would not hurt if one knew how to read it in Hebrew-and acquisition and maintenance of a language, any language, is a difficult task for anyone I ever spoke to in my lifetime. Plus, you would need textbooks for that-which, in Soviet times, would make it a dangerous enterprise. Such books could get you ‘far North’. Finally, to be willing to go as far as learning a religious text at night in a language that is not your first language (or even in your first language), facing the risks on the way, one had to believe in importance of doing so. In short, no matter how one looks at it-Shavuot was doomed. I also suspect that even going back before the Soviet times Russian Jewry never had a ‘small tradition’ of consuming milk products on Shavuot-a tradition that is so developed in contemporary Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Such a tradition would be a good candidate for preservation, however, that did not happen, nothing resembling Shavuot cheesecake was ever prepared by the Soviet Jewish mothers, not that I can recall.

Looking at today’s observance of Shavuot in Israel reveals that the core Shavuot’s ritual -an all night study of religious texts -is the least observed when compared to the rituals surrounding Passover, Hanukka and Purim. Surveys of Israeli Jews tell this story convincingly. About 90% of Jews in Israel mark Passover by holding a Seder, 80% light Hanukkah candles, 70% avoid forbidden food during the entire Passover, also about 70% fast on Yom Kippur. About 40% hear the public reading of Megilat Esther during Purim time. And only 20% attend an all night study session during Shavuot. That is despite the fact that over 65-70% maintain that Torah is given to Jews by G-D and that the study of Tanakh, Talmud and other Jewish religious texts is important. Judging by all this, Shavuot appears the most intellectual and demanding of Jewish festivals. Committing to an all-night study, one is justified in feeling special. Maybe even chosen.