Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever

Beginning Tuesday evening, June 11, Jews all over the world celebrate Shavuot and commemorate the day they received the Torah...

The post Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Beginning Tuesday evening, June 11, Jews all over the world celebrate Shavuot and commemorate the day they received the Torah and its commandments at Sinai.

The Talmudic Sages, apparently familiar with Alan King’s classic summary of the Jewish holiday — they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat — recognized that some may not consider the reams of obligations placed on the Jewish people as cause for celebration. The Sages were especially insistent that Jews demonstrate otherwise and eat really well on this day.

Particularly now, this celebration is essential for two reasons. First, this year has headlined the experience of Jewish suffering, reviving the harsh reality that for millennia, the Jewish people have been despised, harassed, and persecuted. Still, rather than drive Jews away, the disorienting isolation that American Jews are experiencing has brought them closer together and awakened their desire for connection to Judaism and Jewish community. Jews are craving to celebrate their Jewishness, not just their survival.

Second, the Jewish people are a nation, a religion, and a family — but most significantly, they are a community of values. Their mission since Abraham has been to teach and to model both faith in God and loving kindness towards others. That story continues to this day, as despite the centuries of persecution, the Holocaust, and the constant existential threats that Israel has faced since its rebirth, the Jewish people refuse to turn bitterly inward and remain committed to being a source of blessing to the world.

Nevertheless, the twisted narrative promoted in academia, the media, progressive and far-right spaces, and international forums, has cast the Jewish people everywhere as genocidal, oppressive, and hateful, radically increasing the physical threats of antisemitic violence facing Jews everywhere. But — even more perniciously — this also makes Jews embarrassed of their Jewish identity. The celebration of Shavuot is an opportunity to proudly reaffirm the Jewish people’s core identity and mission as a community of values dedicated to faith and goodness.

The current nightmare began on October 7, Simchat Torah — a holiday when Jews everywhere gather in synagogues in joyous celebration of the completion of the annual cycle of Torah reading. Carrying their children on their shoulders and Torah scrolls in their arms, participants sing and dance in a joyous celebration of family and faith, and — most of all — the values that define them as a community.

The words — the value statements — sung repeatedly on that day express deep appreciation for the blessings of true Jewish identity, and for the good fortune to continue the mission of Abraham and the Jewish people to do good, to be good, to study, to live by God’s word, and to bring light to the world. They sing, they dance, they conclude the reading of the Torah, and then they immediately begin studying it again, demonstrating their true character as the People of the Book.

Eight months ago, that day was shattered as darkness was brought upon the world by the Hamas terrorists and their supporters, who continue to seek to physically destroy the Jewish people. That darkness has since significantly intensified thanks to those defending and even celebrating the attacks, and has been further deepened by those who speak in the name of justice, humanitarianism, and civil rights while denying the morality of Jews and of the very existence of Israel. Antisemitism is alive and well.

But so are the Jewish people — committed as ever to their values, to their goodness, to their faith, to their purpose, to each other, and to the light that they will never stop working to bring to the world.

Happy Shavuot. Let’s eat.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer is the Executive Vice President at the Orthodox Union.

The post Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever first appeared on Algemeiner.com.