From this Saturday night until Monday night., Jews worldwide will be celebrating the major Biblical holiday known as Shavuot. On Shavuot there is the custom to stay up the entire night (many spend it learning Torah or listening to classes at synagogue.) So what's exactly up with this strange custom?
The source for the custom of staying up comes from the Midrash, which details how the Jewish People slept in on the morning of the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai (celebrated as the holiday of Shavuot). Say What!? How does someone sleep if he knows that the next morning he’ll be meeting & hearing from G-d Himself! I can’t even sleep well when I know I have a flight to catch the next morning!So to understand how the Jewish People could have slept so soundly the night before this momentous event, let's back up & take a look at what sleep really consists of froma Jewish perspective. What happens when we go to sleep? Jewish Mysticism explains that during sleep, our souls leave our bodies and ascend to heavenly realms, leaving the sleeping body below. A bit of soul energy is left to maintain the body in its seemingly dead state, while the soul - free of the constraints of the body - leaves to enjoy a greater feeling of closeness to G-d while learning greater Torah wisdom. So now we can look back to the Jewish people's plan to sleep in the night before the giving of the Torah.
They had a seemingly great plan! “We’re right before the holiest event in history. We’ve spiritually prepared for the last 49 days since leaving Egypt, refining ourselves to the most humanly possible degree. The last thing we can do is sleep! To let our souls go beyond our bodies for a little bit, and get as close to G-d as possible before the giving of the Torah!” Sounds good right? So then we can ask the other way: why do we stay up every year on the night of Shavuot to make up for the fact that the Jewish People slept? It was a good idea!
In this question & answer lies a very fundamental concept of the Torah. The giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai to the Jewish People, was that the spiritual & physical - heaven & earth - should meet; G-dliness could now be infused into physicality. When a mitzvah is done, the physical object and body of the person doing it could now become infused with G-dliness.
A unique and beautiful aspect of Judaism, a revolutionary concept in fact, however counter intuitive, is that true spirituality - true G-dliness, can ultimately be found only in the physical. The Torah argues that the oneness of G-d is expressed when He is found down here in the physical world. It’s very important to be spiritual and transcend the body sometimes to connect to G-d, but ultimately He desires that materiality be elevated and made a vessel for His Dwelling. And that’s why we stay up on Shavuot night, avoiding the sleep that our ancestors thought a correct preparation. Because sleeping, having the soul leave this world for more loftier places, is not the ultimate G-dly intention. The intention of G-d in creating us & this amazing world, is that we "stay up" - that we engage the physical, fixing ourselves and the world around us, soul in body.
Happy Shavuot!
-Daniel
P.S. It's a mitzvah to hear the 10 commandments read from the Torah in synagogue on Wednesday. [For more Shavuot info., go to: Shavuot]
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