Two years ago, today, on Shavuos, I walked into Chabad for the first time. Two years ago I started a journey that I would never expected to lead me here. On the day the Gd gave the Jewish people the Torah, the symbolic ring in the marriage between Gd and His people, I too stood at Sinai to receive that very same gift.
Shavuos is the holiday we received Torah. But why is it named Shavuos? "Shavuah" means "week," "shavuos" being the plural for "weeks." Why is does the greatest day of the Jewish peoples' lives called weeks? If anything it should be "THE day" or something commemorating the momentous event. We have an idea that Shabbos (the weekend) was given to us to transcend the physical and connect to the spiritual. But what about the rest of the week? Torah is our guidebook for living a spiritual life through the mundane week. The day we commemorate receiving Torah we also celebrate getting the ability to transcend the physical during everyday life. This limitless idea of Torah is also said to explain why Hashem had to "wake up" the Jewish people.
Beyond the pashut (simple) of Hashem waking us up so that we, the Jewish people, could hear his lightning and see his thunder and accept his Torah forever, we realize sleeping comes with the idea of limitlessness as well. We not only got Shabbos and the ability to transcend physicality during the week, but additionally, we got the ability to do so while awake. Before recieveing Torah the Jewish nation went to sleep to let their minds slip into a limitless reality. After matan Torah (the giving of he Torah), we could do so while awake.
The ideas of our souls standing on Mt. Sinai, but having first, to be awoken, sit particularly well with me. And not because I have a nice image in my head of Hashem gently waking us up and giving us a gift. In fact, it must of been terrifying to here the word of Gd (apparently we died a few times after hearing him speak)! The reason I so strongly identify with this imagery, of every Jewish soul (was and will be) being awoken to receive Torah, is because I literally was given Torah on Shavuos half-asleep.
On Shavuos, I walked into Chabad, for my very first time, and received this Torah "half-asleep." I was yearning to learn about my people and heritage, but I had no idea what I was doing. On that very same day, two thousand years prior, my people found themselves in that very same predicament: needing to be awoken.
Woah. Two years, ten months, and ten days. Woah.
Two years ago, I walked into Chabad the first time. Ten months ago, I came to Israel to awaken my soul and learn all I could about my Judaism. Today, on Shavuos, I was in the West Bank on a settlement learning all night preparing to receive Torah while awake and alert. And in ten days, I go back to America to see what has happened to me since I first heard of the story of Gd and the Jewish people falling in love.
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