Shabbat Shavout

Chag sameach, and Shabbat shalom!

Today, as you may know, we don’t just celebrate Shabbat, but also the Festival of Shavuot. Shavuot is the holiday on we commemorate standing at Mount Sinai and receiving Torah.

At that moment, tradition tells us, we all stood together: not just with everyone who was around at the time – all future generations stood there, with us -- our great-great-grandmother, even our descendants who have yet to be born. Time and space....all the forces that separate us...ceased to exist.

But this year, many of us have never felt so alone: we’ve been sequestered our homes, stopped seeing family and friends, bank tellers and hairdressers. Some of us have lost people to COVID ourselves. For others who had lost someone before COVID,  that loss may feel more acute right now.

And we still don’t know what the future holds.

Yet, on Shavuot, we are invited to peel away all these layers of ordinary perception — our sense of space, and time, life and death that separate us from each other and from generations that came before and will come after us to remember the most fundamental ways we are still connected.

The question is: how?

The Torah gives us a clue in the words it uses to describe us gathering at Sinai:

Having journeyed from Rephidim, they entered the wilderness of Sinai and encamped (vayachanu) in the wilderness; Israel encamped (vayichan) there in front of the mountain… (Exodus 19:2).

In this verse, the word “encamp” appears twice, first in plural form (vayachanu), then singular form (vayichan). And in the most sacred text in our tradition, no word is extraneous.

A second century midrash grapples with why this word is repeated in two different forms. To resolve this inconsistency, it proposes these two words describe two different ways of being together:

When the verse says vayachanu — in the plural it describes a moment we were together physically, without actually being aware of our connection to each other. But when we got to Sinai, vayichan, and gathered (in the singular), Torah tells us we came together, balev echad: “in one heart”.

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It makes sense how all of us “encamped” here at Orchard Cove might experience our day to day right now with little sense of connection to each other  — we might make coffee, pick up the phone, attend a fitness class on 918 even go on a walk, or attend a Zoom lecture...feeling alone.

But when we remember we are all connected through the experiences we normally think are ours alone, We can become aware that on a fundamental level, we are at Orchard Cove balev echad: in one heart. With this awareness, even loneliness can connect us with others who we know are feeling the same way.

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Tonight, though we are not physically together, we gather belev echad, in one heart. As we pray these ancient words, we join with all who recited them before us, and all those who, we hope, will recite them after us.

In days ahead, may we be blessed with continued health and safety. And when we feel lonely, may we live with balev echad, in one heart: knowing we are not the only ones experiencing any of this here -- reaching out from that place to care for each other -- as we eagerly await the day we can be together physically, as well.