When we moved to Israel, I kept Grandmother’s blintz pans. They were a link to the past: to heritage, to history, to family.

Just as the light grows with each night of Hanukkah, so too do our joy and excitement grow as we count the Omer for 49 days on the way to Shavuot.

I know that Shavuot is near when I can hear the fruit vendors in the shuk (open-air market) extolling the virtues of the newly arrived crops of peaches, plums, apricots, and nectarines.

Shavuot provides an ideal Jewish textual grounding for celebrating our diversity, and lifting up various and dissenting voices within our community.

The day the Israelites stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, preparing to encounter God, is understood in midrash as the day of marriage between God and the Jewish people.

On Shavuot we celebrate receiving the Torah. But, how are we truly to understand divine revelation?

On the first day of Shavuot, we are supposed to hear the Ten Commandments read in the synagogue, but the main event is the learning binge the night before.

In the 1940s, two Israeli pioneers created a new Jewish holiday specifically for agricultural settlers who were bringing the Jewish people back to working the land.

As Reform Jews, we are called, like the generations before us, to build partnerships across lines of difference to advocate for and engage with the oppressed of our day.