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The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted so much of how we engage Jewishly, but Shavuot is a fantastic holiday for families to celebrate from the safety of their homes. Here are a few ways you and your family can observe this rich, festive Jewish holiday this year.

As fulfilling as it was to engage in Shavuot programs, a lot weighs on me. With COVID-19 continuing to ravage Black communities and racist violence all over the news, I almost feel like it’s Yom Kippur instead – the time when Jews are supposed to be most aware of their own mortality.

We see everything around us through a coronavirus-colored lens these days, searching the past for clues about what is to come. This month, I'm using the rhyme about April showers and May flowers as an occasion for hope, seeing every holiday in May as part of this unfolding pandemic.

Is this happening because the future is now so uncertain? Am I more aware that every day might be my last? Such questions give us pause and make us take serious stock of our lives.

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.

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

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.

 

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.

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.