The Longer Repair |
There is a midrash that says the Israelites fell asleep the night before they received Torah at Sinai. They had been waiting, and they were tired, and so they slept. In the morning God had to wake them. Tikkun Leil Shavuot is the Jewish tradition that grew up around that story. We stay up through the night of Shavuot, learning until dawn, as a way of correcting what happened at the foot of the mountain. We will not sleep through revelation again. We will be awake when it comes.
I think about what it means to do that with fifty teenagers and tweens in the Bronx at midnight. This year, I watched it happen.
The night began with ice cream sundaes and a question I put to the room: how do you build a container strong enough to hold something that matters, so that some part of it finds you later, on an ordinary day, in a moment you didn’t see coming? Then the learning began — teachers taught about what it means to have a “why” in Jewish life, about ayin tovah and seeing the world generously, about the way Ruth walked toward belonging with her whole body, about why counting the omer is a mitzvah that requires us together. The rooms were just for teachers and kids, no other adults, and at one point I stopped outside a doorway and saw my daughter, who is ten, sitting among the tweens, leaning forward slightly as she answered a question. I could........