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Through the year
A festival with no date of its own, a night nobody sleeps through, an unreasonable quantity of cheesecake, and ten sentences read out loud with the whole community in the room.
This year
Shavuot begins in the evening of
Thursday, June 10, 2027
The night of learning is this night.
First day — the Ten Commandments are read
Friday, June 11, 2027
Second day — Ruth, and Yizkor
Saturday, June 12, 2027
Outside Israel. In Israel Shavuot is one day.
Candle lighting for San Jose is on the times page. On the first night, candles are lit after nightfall rather than before sunset — because the fiftieth day of the Omer must be complete before the festival begins.
Every other Jewish festival is given a day of the month in the Torah. Shavuot is not. It is defined entirely by counting: seven full weeks from the second night of Passover, and the fiftieth day is the festival. Shavuot means “weeks”.
On the fixed calendar we have used since Hillel II, that always works out to the sixth of Sivan. But the structure is worth noticing, because it says something: the day the Torah was given is not marked by a date, it is marked by the fifty days of preparation that get you there. Freedom on its own was not the point of leaving Egypt; the count is what the freedom was for.
In the Temple period this was also a harvest festival — the first wheat, and the bringing of bikkurim, first fruits, carried up to Jerusalem in decorated baskets with music. The rabbis call it simply Atzeret: the conclusion, of Passover.
The best-known custom of Shavuot is staying awake through the first night studying. The source is a midrashic embarrassment: on the morning the Torah was to be given, the Israelites overslept, and Moses had to go and wake them. Staying up is understood as a standing correction of that.
The Zohar describes the practice; the kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed formalised it and gave it a text, the Tikkun Leil Shavuot — an anthology of opening and closing passages of every book of the Bible and Mishnah, plus material from the Zohar. Many communities read it straight through.
Chabad practice is generally less textual and more open: people learn, often chassidus, often in a group, and often with someone teaching. The consistent element in every version is that you are awake and you are learning, with other people, until dawn.
If you have never done this: you do not have to last the whole night. Come for two hours. Come for one class. The night is not an endurance event and nobody keeps a register.
On the first morning, the Torah reading is the account in Exodus of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, including the Ten Commandments themselves. Chabad custom, and widespread Ashkenazi custom, is to stand for that portion of the reading.
The one thing this day genuinely asks of a community is that everybody be there for it. Children included, babies included, people who will not understand a word of it included. The reasoning is straightforward and is stated in the sources: at Sinai the whole nation stood, and the midrash has God accepting the Torah’s guarantors as the children rather than the ancestors or the prophets. So the re-enactment needs the children in the room.
The Rebbe pushed this hard for decades — bring every child to hear the Ten Commandments, wherever they are and whatever the family’s level of observance. It is the reason a Chabad shul on Shavuot morning is louder than on any other festival, and why there is usually ice cream afterwards.
It takes about ten minutes. If you do one thing on Shavuot, this is the thing.
The custom of eating dairy on Shavuot is old and universal, and the reasons given for it are numerous enough that it is clear nobody is certain. The ones usually offered:
Practically it means cheesecake, blintzes, kugels and cheese-heavy everything. Many households eat a dairy meal and then a meat meal later in the day, since a festival meal traditionally includes meat. The interval between them is a real halachic question — after most dairy, a rinse and a short pause; after hard cheese, six hours in Ashkenazi practice. Two separate meals, each starting with bread, is the clean way to do it.
The book of Ruth is read on the second day outside Israel. It is four short chapters and reads in about twenty minutes, and it is one of the few books in the Bible where nobody does anything terrible.
Naomi, an Israelite widow in Moab, loses both sons and starts home to Bethlehem. She tells her two widowed daughters-in-law to go back to their families. One does. Ruth does not, and says the sentence everybody knows: where you go, I will go; your people will be my people, and your God my God. In Bethlehem she gleans in the fields of a relative named Boaz, who marries her. Their great-grandson is David.
Why here:
And an editorial point the book makes quietly: the ancestry of the Jewish monarchy, and of the messiah, runs through an outsider who joined.
Passover is about being taken out of somewhere. Shavuot is about what happened next, and it is the harder of the two ideas: that being free was not the destination, and that the thing which turned a crowd of escaped slaves into a people was accepting an obligation.
The tradition is careful to say the giving is present tense. The Torah was not given once at a mountain three thousand years ago; it is given, and this is the day it is given on. Which is a large claim, and it is one you can test cheaply: pick something up and learn it on the night, and see whether it feels different on that night than it does in November.
Our services, the eve dinner and the year’s arrangements are on the Shavuot page and the calendar. Bring the children in the morning.
A midrash says the Israelites overslept on the morning the Torah was given and had to be woken. Staying up the first night is understood as making up for that — a custom recorded in the Zohar and spread by the kabbalists of Safed in the sixteenth century. Some communities follow a fixed anthology called Tikkun Leil Shavuot; Chabad practice tends toward learning Torah and chassidus through the night without a set text. Either way the point is to be awake and learning.
Several reasons are given and none is the official one. That the Israelites had just received the laws of kosher meat and had no kashered pots yet, so ate dairy that first day. That the Song of Songs describes Torah as “honey and milk under your tongue”. That the Hebrew word for milk has the numerical value of forty, for the forty days Moses spent on the mountain. In practice: cheesecake and blintzes.
Yes, and the custom in many homes is both — a dairy meal and then, later, a meat one. There are real rules about the interval between them: after most dairy a rinse and a short break, after hard cheese a full six hours in Ashkenazi practice. Two separate meals with bread each, rather than one meal that switches, is the tidy way to do it.
They are read from the Torah on the first morning, and the custom is for the entire community to be present — children and infants included. Chabad custom is to stand for the reading. The idea is not that the words are new information but that the community re-enacts standing at the mountain, which requires everybody to be standing there.
It is read on the second day outside Israel. Ruth is a Moabite woman who chooses to join the Jewish people entirely by her own decision — the counterpart to a nation that received the Torah at Sinai collectively. It is set at the barley harvest, which is the season. And Ruth is King David’s great-grandmother, and David is traditionally held to have died on Shavuot.
The Torah gives Shavuot no calendar date at all. It is defined only as the fiftieth day of the Omer count that begins on the second night of Passover — which is why the counting matters. On our fixed calendar that always lands on the sixth of Sivan.
Come and hear the Ten Commandments. That is the one thing the day is built around, and it takes about ten minutes. If you bring children, you have done the whole holiday.
This year’s dates, the eve dinner, and ice cream for the children.
The forty-nine days between Passover and this one.
The memorial prayer, said on the second day.
What to learn on the night, and the rest of the year.
Anything on this page that is a question about your situation — a fast you have been told not to keep, a kitchen you are not sure how to handle, a custom your family does differently — is a question for a person, not a page. Ask the Rabbi, or call the office. Nobody will think less of you for asking; the questions on this list are asked every single year.