Shavuot: “We Are One Person, One Heart”
While sirens wail, rockets fall from the sky, and Israelis hunker down in bomb shelters, also called safe rooms, or “”miklat” in Hebrew, and the world is quick to place blame on one side or the other, a Jewish holiday of Shavuot is coming up– because nothing deters the Jewish people from their steadfast faith in God perhaps even more so in times of crisis. When Israel is under attack, a fire is lit deep inside us, a strength, a calling to come together in prayer and in action of mitzvot helping one another.
Shavuot is the holiday that commemorates when the Jewish nation stood as one at Mount Sinai and received the Torah. We first received the ten commandments (The Luchot), a microcosm of the Torah, and then slowly Moses taught us the lessons inside bit by bit, and we are still learning every day. For the Jewish people, the Torah is a blueprint for living in and provides insight into every aspect of modern life—ideals, ethics, values, laws, our history. Shavuot marks a moment in Jewish history as the single most important event because on this day we were unified as the Jewish nation and solidified as the chosen people.
