Shavuos

Shavuos is the festival commemorating the Jewish people’s acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. In the narrator’s family, its observances turn that founding commitment into a vivid domestic occasion, while the narrator begins to question whether inherited religious obligation is the same as a choice freely made.

Calendar and Seasonal Setting

After the eight days of Passover, Zeidy begins counting the omer, the forty-nine-day interval leading to Shavuos. During this period, called sefirah, the household observes restrictions on listening to music, cutting hair, and wearing new clothes. The season is described as somber despite the beautiful spring weather, placing restraint against the visible renewal of the world around it.

In June, Zeidy cuts flowers from the garden for Shavuos. The custom recalls the tradition that Mount Sinai, otherwise barren, was adorned with blossoms when the Torah was given. Bubby watches from the porch and worries over the flowers being cut, since she values their beauty while growing in the garden. Zeidy understands their use differently: to him, gathering them is a way to honor the Torah. Their contrasting responses make the preparation itself a small negotiation between ritual purpose and attachment to living things.

Food and Household Observance

The festival meal gives religious memory a domestic form. The family eats cheesecake with a cookie-crumb crust and triangular kreplach filled with farmer cheese, which Bubby fries in butter. After waiting half an hour, they eat a separate meat meal: smoked turkey with red cocktail sauce, chicken legs cooked with caramelized onions, and chopped liver.

The separation of dairy and meat recalls the Jews’ acceptance of the Torah’s commandments at Mount Sinai, including the requirement to keep milk and meat apart. Zeidy presents the practice as an example of accepting the obligation before fully knowing what it will require. The meal therefore connects an ancient religious commitment to the household’s present habits, making observance something enacted through preparation, waiting, and eating together.

Covenant and Inherited Responsibility

After the meal, Zeidy teaches that, according to the Midrash, every Jewish soul was present when the Torah was handed down and accepted responsibility as one of the chosen people. In his account, that presence makes the commandments binding even for descendants who do not remember the event: rejecting a law would contradict a commitment already made, and no Jewish soul is exempt from it.

The narrator turns this teaching inward rather than simply accepting its conclusion. She wonders how old her soul would have to be to have been at Mount Sinai and whether it agreed merely to fit in, because she recognizes a fear of thinking differently aloud. The festival’s account of collective consent thus becomes an occasion for private doubt about the difference between belonging and choosing.

The Festival’s Wider Significance

The narrator distinguishes the covenant associated with Mount Sinai from Zeidy’s later pledge of allegiance to the Satmar Rebbe. When the Rebbe announced plans for a community in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged himself before knowing what the commitment would entail, binding his family and future generations to that community. The narrator notes that the family had lived differently in Europe, where Zeidy’s relatives were educated and traveled freely. Set beside the Shavuos teaching, this history complicates the idea of inherited obligation: a sacred covenant and a later communal allegiance may both be described as binding, but they arise from different circumstances.

Shavuos consequently functions as more than a calendar observance. Its flowers and carefully separated festival foods give the inherited tradition an intimate, repeatable shape, while Zeidy’s teaching raises the stakes of obedience and the narrator’s questions expose its personal cost. The festival’s central claim—that responsibility was accepted before the present generation was born—becomes both a source of continuity and a question the narrator cannot easily silence.