According to tradition, the Torah was given in love. Today on Shavuot we celebrate that gift—a tradition of learning, questioning, wisdom, and inquiry bequeathed to us through 3,000 years of wandering, hoping, and striving together to answer the fundamental Jewish question: What does God demand of us?

On this holiday, I am feeling a sense of “שפע”—an abundance of emotions due in part to fourteen months of pandemic and now the gradual return to normalcy. But of course, much of what I am feeling—what I am sure all of us are feeling—is related to the terrible violence we see unfolding in Israel. The emotion that is overwhelming me as I write these words on the eve of Shavuot is love.

  • Love for my people
  • Love for a place that captured my heart in 1978 when I visited it for the first time
  • Love for a culture that is vibrant, dynamic, and wholly and uniquely ours
  • Love for a land and an idea that has been central to our People and our prayers for millenia

And more granularly and specifically, a love born of all the little things that add up to שפע—a love that overflows—for MY Israel. Not the complicated, political questions, but the tastes and the smells and the people which make it mine:

  • Fresh pita dipped in warm hummus
  • A mint Artik on the Tel Aviv beach on a warm summer day
  • Meeting my friend for a Cafe Ha’fuch at our favorite spot on Derekh Beit Lechem
  • Sipping a cold beer in Shuk Machaneh Yehudah, sitting outside listening to live music
  • And more than anything else, I am thinking of the people who give meaning to my life: Hadar and Guy, Itzik and Adi, Susan and Yossi, Leon and Bruria, and dozens and dozens of others who, despite a distance of 10,000 miles, are a part of my life everyday.
  • My heart hurts because a culture I love, a place I love, and the people I love are in danger and in pain. And my heart hurts because of the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people as well.

With a mixture of love and fear and anguish, all I have to offer is a text from the tradition I love:

:וּשְׁמור צֵאתֵנוּ וּבואֵנוּ לְחַיִים וּלְשָׁלום מֵעַתָּה וְעַד עולָם

“Guard their going out and coming in so they will live and know peace, now and for forever.”

— Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback