By Howard Feldman

I have been told that this year Shavuot is “back-to-back-to-back.” Which sounds less like a Jewish festival and more like an unusually punishing team-building exercise designed by an overenthusiastic rabbi with access to cheesecake.

For those keeping score at home: Chag begins on Thursday night, runs through Friday, segues seamlessly into Shabbat, and only releases us into the wild on Saturday night. Two days of Yom Tov. Almost three days of meals. Somewhere during the second late-night coffee and fourth slice of cheesecake, you begin to suspect that dairy may not, in fact, have been intended for human consumption in these quantities.

Shavuot is the strangest of the chagim. Pesach has a script. Sukkot has a building project. Chanukah has a fire risk. Yom Kippur has very clear instructions, mostly involving what not to do.

But Shavuot? Shavuot says: stay up all night studying Torah. And while you are at it, consume enough blintzes to make your cardiologist and gastroenterologist open a joint practice.

It feels slightly improvised. Which, oddly enough, is part of its charm.

Because unlike every other major Jewish festival, the Torah never actually gives Shavuot a date. Pesach is on the fifteenth of Nissan. Yom Kippur is the tenth of Tishrei.

Shavuot, however, is simply described as taking place fifty days after Passover. Which means that in ancient times, before there was a fixed Jewish calendar, nobody could know precisely when Shavuot would occur until the new moon had been officially declared.

Witnesses would arrive before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem and testify that they had seen the new moon. If their testimony was accepted, the new month would be declared. Judaism, at least historically, did not begin with astronomy apps. It began with people squinting upward and saying, “I think that’s it.”

The problem, of course, was communication.

Today, if there is a communal announcement, we see it simultaneously on WhatsApp, Telegram, email, Instagram, Facebook and from three different mother-in-laws who “just wanted to make sure you saw it.”

Back then, they used fire.

Signal fires were lit on mountaintops stretching outward from Jerusalem. One mountain would light a flame, the next mountain would see it and respond, and the message would travel across vast distances through the night sky. There is something magnificent about that image. Jews standing on distant hills waiting for the signal that would tell them where they stood in sacred time.

And then, because Jews cannot have nice uncomplicated things for very long, the system was sabotaged.

According to the Talmud, the Samaritans, referred to in rabbinic literature as the Kutim, began lighting false signal fires to confuse people about the correct festival dates.  

And so, the rabbis abandoned the fire system and switched to messengers physically travelling to distant communities. But Jews living outside Israel often would not receive the message in time. And so diaspora communities began observing two possible days of Yom Tov just in case.

Which is why, thousands of years later, Jews in Johannesburg are still eating a second day of cheesecake because somebody on a mountain once spread fake news with a torch.

Frankly, it may be the most Jewish sentence ever written.

And somehow that feels deeply appropriate for Shavuot itself. A festival built around uncertainty, communication, interpretation and transmission. Around the fragile but stubborn attempt to carry meaning across time and distance.

The genius of Shavuot is that we receive the Torah not in comfort, but in mild exhaustion. By 3 a.m. of the all night learning, you are no longer asking what the text means. You are asking what you mean.  

And then, on Friday morning, blinking painfully in the cool sunlight, you begin the walk home while the rest of the city is only just beginning its day.

It is on that walk that you realise something extraordinary.

For thousands of years Jews have carried Sinai exactly this way. Imperfectly. Sleepily. Sometimes confused about the date. Sometimes arguing about the details. Sometimes overwhelmed by the weight of tradition and sometimes distracted by the cheesecake.

And yet the signal still travels.

From mountain to mountain.
From parent to child.
From teacher to student.
From one exhausted Jew walking home at dawn to another.

You realise that in your pocket you are carrying a tiny private piece of Sinai that nobody else around you can see.

That, I think, is the point.

So if you find yourself this weekend somewhere between the kugel and the cheesecake, between the Book of Ruth and the headlines, between awake and asleep, that may be precisely where Jews have always been meant to stand.

Three days of meals. Kinda. Two days of Chag. One Torah.

And the unequivocal certainty that this is what it is all about. 

Chag Sameach