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Jew's Muse / A Diaspora Jew's search for the Shavuot of yesteryear
By Uzi Silber
Tags: shavuot 2009, Jew's Muse 

Rummaging recently through an old box of family photos, I spotted a fraying, sepia-colored Mandatory-era photo of Gan Chaya, my mother's kindergarten, as the students gathered on Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard.

Snapped during a Shavuot party, the tiny Israeli-born Sabras sport makeshift keffiyehs and crowns of flowers. A prodigious cornucopia overflowing with the luscious fruits of the Land of Israel adorns the foreground.

I
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t's hard not to compare this plentiful bounty with the sad selection of slightly malodorous tangerines and mushy avocados presently on display at our local fruit stand on Grand Street on the Lower East Side (across the road, as it happens, from where the actress Tatum O'Neal was arrested in 2008 for a crack purchase).

Gazing at the smiling, suntanned children in the photo, I'm transported to another Sivan of yesteryear, to a wooden bench inside my fifth grade classroom at Hamatmid elementary school in Ramat Gan. It's an astoundingly hot hamsin day in the socialist Israeli utopia of 1975, leavened by the intoxicating fragrance of chocolate and bubble gum wafting from the Elite candy factory on Arlozorov Street.

For the umpteenth time, an accordion in the distant background plays the same old Bolshevik tune performed every single year at the school's Shavuot outing at Ben Shemen forest.

There was little doubt in my mind that many more hours of practice were required. Yet I didn't mind; it was an integral component of the sultry ambiance of a Ramat Gan Sivan.

Israeli Jews are as familiar with Shavuot as they are with Rosh Hashana, Pesach or Sukkot. Yet this isn't the case in the Diaspora - secular American Jews acquainted with, let alone observant of Shavuot are increasingly hard to come by.

That's because in Israel, unlike in the Diaspora, Jewish and national holidays are one and the same.

School vacations on Sukkot, Hanukkah, Pesach and Shavuot inculcate in childhood a distinctive Jewish national identity that's impossible to replicate among secular children in the Diaspora - even those with a yeshiva education.

I was lucky enough to enjoy my formative years in a country that universally employs the Hebrew calendar - a schedule I miss, particularly on days like the 25th of December.

Or for that matter, the sixth of Sivan. Take the far-off land of Manhattan, where Jews are far more likely to associate bagels and cream cheese, blintzes, pirogi, and omelets with Sunday brunch than they would with Shavuot.

In truth, Shavuot was never considered quite as important as its two weeklong sister festivals of Pesach and Sukkot. This two-day holiday boasted few distinctive rituals or symbols as defining as a Seder or Sukkah.

The fact that one of its biblical names is Atzeret, meaning 'terminus', implies that it was viewed even in antiquity as more of a closing celebration of the spring harvest season that begins on Pesach, rather than a full-fledged festival in its own right. Sukkot, the autumnal harvest festival, has its own season closing terminus - Shemini Atzeret.

Three Sivans after returning to the Upper West Side from Ramat Gan, I participated with my fellow eighth graders in our yeshiva's annual all-night 'Tikkun leil Shavout'. This is a pre-holiday rite of passage when freshly minted bar mitzvah boys diligently study Torah with their rebbes from dusk to dawn.

But as evening dissolved into the wee hours, diligent study gave way to distraction and idle amusement. In search of excitement, I escaped with two other brilliant scholars through the yeshiva's emergency exit and scurried the two blocks to Broadway.

Wandering the ominously threatening pre-dawn streets of Manhattan was what passed for tough urban adventure in 1978. Mysteriously, a rotund homeless man, of Nubian extraction perhaps, suddenly emerged from the shadows to inquire if we knew what 'Mitzrayim' was.

As the sun rose over Central Park, and with Shavuot only hours away, we found ourselves on a Broadway bench, gorging on freshly boiled H&H onion bagels with cream cheese.

In the Diaspora, Shavuot simply doesn't get any more delicious than that
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