By the time you read this, Shavuot may have passed, and I will hopefully still be asleep recovering from it.

Shavuot may honestly be the only holiday I hands-down like better in Israel than in America, with one minor exception I’ll get to shortly. Most chagim come with tradeoffs. Israel does some things better, America has an edge in others, and aliyah means constantly deciding which absences you can tolerate depending on which country you’re celebrating in. But Shavuot? Shavuot in Israel wins almost completely.

For me, Shavuot has always had two main attractions: all-night learning (and, more importantly, all-night schmoozing) and fancy dairy food. Both technically exist in America. Israel just does both so much better.

The tikkun leil here is incomparable. Growing up in America, I would arrive at shul every year fully determined to stay up all night learning Torah. Each year, until I moved, this meant me and maybe five people I knew from middle school sitting around the social hall at 2 a.m., pretending to learn Gemara while slowly falling asleep. The shiurim were not really geared toward us, and........

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