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THE HOLIDAY OF SHAVUOT
Hag Ha'Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks) is celebrated on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan. This corresponds to Friday, May 21st 1999. The actual holiday begins Thursday evening.
Other than the fact that Shavuot occurs 7 weeks and a day (50 days) after Passover, many people do know know much about this major holiday. Of course, if you ever saw an old rerun of the Cecil B. DeMille movie, "Ten Commandments." then you would know that Shavuot was when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
The festival originally marked the beginning of the wheat harvest. If you have ever driven down to Beersheba just after the end of the winter rains, the fields which used to be desert is green with wheat. It's easy to see why with the beginning of summer, the wheat must be harvested. This is the way it must have been in Biblical times.
Later, in Rabbinic times, Shavuot became the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. This is understandable if we consider that a purely agricultural feast would later have little meaning to Biblical Jewish town dwellers. Curiously, Josephus never refers to the holiday of Shavuot as the time when the Torah was given to the Jews at Mount Sinai. Can it be that this connotation happened only after Josephus' time?
During the Middle Ages, Jewish children first began attending Hebrew school on Shavuot, which was by then firmly established as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah.
In Israel it is customary to read the Book of Ruth in synagogues on Shavuot. This is because the events recorded in the Book of Ruth took place during harvest time. Traditionally, Ruth died on Shavuot.
According to the Book of Ruth, Ruth is the ancester of King David. In some communities, it is the custom to recite the whole Book of Psalms on the second night of Shavuot because of the association of the holiday with King David.
It is customary to adorn the synagogue with plants and flowers on Shavuot. This is because according to tradition, in Biblical times Sinai was a green mountain with trees and other vegetation. It is a fact that the climate in this area of the world was somewhat different in Biblical times and rainfall was more plentiful than now. (For example, Ezekial speaks of the "forest lands of the Negev). The area around Mount Sinai could certainly have been green at this time of year.
As we have said, it is the custom to adorn synagogues with flowers on Shavuot. If you need any advice on Synagogue flower arrangements, then we will be happy to help. Shavuot is just the right type of holiday for FLOWERS AND SYMPATYA.
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