Sermon, May 30, 2025: Shavuot: What revelation are you praying for?
As we look forward to celebrating Shavuot on Wednesday (see the flier below!), I wanted to share my sermon from this past Shabbat, discussing the holiday. Wishing you a meaningful season!
By Rabbi Lauren Be-Shoshan
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This week, we celebrate Shavuot—one of the most layered, quietly powerful, and spiritually resonant holidays on the Jewish calendar.
Compared to Passover or Sukkot—the other two pilgrimage festivals—Shavuot arrives with relatively little fanfare. There’s no matzah to hoard or build-your-own-sukkah kits to assemble. No seders. No guest seating arrangements that devolve into diplomatic crises. From the outside, Shavuot seems understated.
But don’t let the quiet fool you. Shavuot is a spiritual summit, one that invites us not just to remember what once was, but to reimagine who we are becoming.
Historically, Shavuot began as an agricultural festival. It was the Festival of the Harvest (Chag HaKatzir), and also Yom HaBikkurim, the Day of First Fruits, when Israelites would bring the first yield of their crops to the Temple in Jerusalem in an act of gratitude. It was earthy, embodied, full of journeys and floral offerings. It was a holiday you could literally hold in your hands.
But like so many things in Jewish life, this holiday evolved.
After the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE—and even more profoundly after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE—Judaism transformed. No longer able to make pilgrimages or bring literal offerings, we began to bring offerings of a different kind: of text, memory, and intention.
Over time, Shavuot became the day we associate with Matan Torah—the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Though the Torah doesn’t state explicitly that it was given on this day, rabbinic tradition connects Shavuot to that climactic moment of revelation. And thus, a harvest festival became a holiday of spiritual harvest—where we don’t bring fruit, but instead ask:
What truth am I ready to receive?
What revelation might change me now?
With these heavy questions, I should also state: Shavuot does not stand alone—it is the culmination of a seven-week spiritual arc that begins with Pesach, called the Counting of the Omer.
On Pesach, we leave Mitzrayim, Egypt—the "narrow places." We throw off the yoke of oppression, stretch limbs unused to freedom, and begin to breathe again. But liberation, while essential, is only the beginning.
We do not leave Egypt just to wander. We are moving toward something.
That something is revelation.
But revelation doesn’t happen in an instant. The Israelites didn’t walk out of Egypt and walk straight into Sinai. They meandered. They doubted. They got blisters. They fought. They thirsted—literally and spiritually. And all of it was necessary. Because you can’t receive holy wisdom with a slave’s heart. You can’t embody Torah if you’re still carrying Pharaoh’s voice in your head.
The tradition of Counting the Omer—the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot—helps us ritualize this transformation. Each day is an invitation to take one more step on the path of spiritual readiness.
The Kabbalists, ever poetic, mapped this period onto a divine anatomy: the Sephirot, ten attributes or emanations of the Divine. During the Omer, we cycle through seven of them—chesed (lovingkindness), gevurah (discipline), tiferet (balance), and so on. It’s not just a calendar countdown—it’s a curriculum for the soul.
In our own community, we’ve deepened this exploration through the Mountain Mussar Omer Journals, reflecting each week on a new middah—a spiritual trait—to cultivate in our lives. (Some of you have even written in yours. We are proud of you. Others of you are...enthusiastically aware that they exist. We see you, too.)
This slow unfolding mirrors insights from modern psychology. Carl Jung described individuation—the lifelong process of becoming more wholly oneself. Psychologist Richard Schwartz speaks of Internal Family Systems—the idea that we’re composed of many inner parts, each with its own story and role. The Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness wasn’t just a physical journey; it was an emotional and communal one, peeling back layers of identity and memory.
Or, in the words of Abraham Maslow: we’re on a path to self-actualization. But there are no shortcuts. You can’t leap from trauma to transcendence. You have to walk the distance.
That is the wisdom of the Omer: the soul ripens slowly.
Which brings us back to this moment.
We may not be standing at Sinai in body, but Shavuot insists that we are always standing at Sinai in spirit. And like our ancestors, we are asked to bring not our grain, but our readiness.
Not, "What do you know?"
But, "What are you open to learning?"
Not, "What are you carrying?"
But, "What are you ready to receive?"
Revelation today may not arrive in thunder and fire. It might come in quieter ways—a sudden clarity about a decision. A deeper sense of peace in your body. A reawakened purpose. A new understanding of what is truly holy in your life.
But it only comes if we prepare for it. If we do the work of wandering.
So let me ask you gently—and let this question sit with you, perhaps through the holiday, perhaps beyond:
What revelation do you hope to receive in this season?
Not someday. Not in theory. This season. What are you ready for?
Wishing you a Chag Sameach. May this Shavuot find you not just remembering the mountain, but climbing your own. And may you receive exactly the revelation your soul is ready to hear.
