Shavuot here and there

By the time you read this, Shavuot may have passed, and I will hopefully still be asleep recovering from it.

Shavuot may honestly be the only holiday I hands-down like better in Israel than in America, with one minor exception I’ll get to shortly. Most chagim come with tradeoffs. Israel does some things better, America has an edge in others, and aliyah means constantly deciding which absences you can tolerate depending on which country you’re celebrating in. But Shavuot? Shavuot in Israel wins almost completely.

For me, Shavuot has always had two main attractions: all-night learning (and, more importantly, all-night schmoozing) and fancy dairy food. Both technically exist in America. Israel just does both so much better.

The tikkun leil here is incomparable. Growing up in America, I would arrive at shul every year fully determined to stay up all night learning Torah. Each year, until I moved, this meant me and maybe five people I knew from middle school sitting around the social hall at 2 a.m., pretending to learn Gemara while slowly falling asleep. The shiurim were not really geared toward us, and there was never much sense that anything larger was happening beyond our particular shul basement. You stayed in your building. Your community celebrated Shavuot. End of story.

In Israel, by contrast, the entire city feels infected by the holiday. There are shiurim happening literally everywhere, and many are on topics that sound like somebody generated them with a random Jewish buzzword machine. Two years ago I somehow ended up at a lecture on nationhood given by Ben Shapiro. Last year I went to one on Kafka, Nietzsche, and the Jewish view of the afterlife, which might be the most Modern Orthodox sentence ever written. This year I’ve already bookmarked one shiur on music as a vehicle for prophecy and another on family therapy through the Torah, and I am as excited for both as I would be for a new Taylor Swift album.

I spend the night wandering from shul to shul with a growing cadre of friends, choosing whichever topic sounds strangest or most interesting at the moment. The wandering itself is part of the experience. And the weather, warm and bright and tipping toward summer but still pleasant enough to walk around all night comfortably, feels exactly as Shavuot should feel. 

(This is not a given with Israeli holidays. For example, Sukkot is supposed to require at least a light jacket. Your fingers are supposed to freeze slightly while eating soup in the sukkah. That is part of the ambiance. Instead, Israeli Sukkot often involves sweating through beautiful clothing that was clearly designed for a very different hemisphere. Shavuot, however, is the rare chag where the climate matches my expectations.) 

Somewhere around 4:30 a.m., everyone starts gradually migrating toward the Old City to daven vatikin with their eyes half closed but collectively determined to make it to the end. Jerusalem at dawn on Shavuot may actually be one of the great underrated spectacles of Jewish life. 

Eventually I meander home, crash into bed, and wake up around lunchtime with an overcharged social battery and usually (hopefully) the comforting feeling that I learned something meaningful at some point during the night.

Now, the exception I promised. American shuls still win decisively in one category: the snacks. I have yet to encounter an Israeli Shavuot spread capable of competing with the absolute excesses of suburban American Judaism. Sushi. Pizza. Ice cream. Cheesecake. Coffee strong enough to make learning Gemara Chulin interesting at 4 a.m. In this one respect, the diaspora retains its crown

Which brings me to mention the second great pillar of Shavuot: the food. I know many readers may disagree, but I am deeply committed to the position that dairy is overall more delicious than meat. Shavuot is therefore my personal culinary wonderland. 

I grew up with an intense annual assortment of blintzes, pasta, salmon, quiche, ice cream and cheesecake. This year, for the first time, I get to make all of those things myself and host my own meal here in Israel. I fully intend to use Shavuot as an opportunity to prove to my guests that dairy deserves far more respect in the hierarchy of Jewish food. They will leave converted or they will not be invited back.

All said, Shavuot in Israel is, at least for me, superior to Shavuot in America. 

The only thing missing, of course, is my family. But I am actively working on solving that problem too.