How long has it been since your last all-nighter?
With the holiday of Shavuot coming up Thursday, June 1, Jews have a golden opportunity to go on a dusk-’til-dawn bender, only this one is all about Torah.
The tikkun, or all-night community study session held on the first night of Shavuot, is one of the more creative — and fun — traditions in our culture of Jewish learning.
As we note in this week’s paper, tikkuns are taking place all over the Bay Area, from Berkeley to Los Altos Hills to Lafayette. Usually, they involve mini-workshops and discussions led by rabbis, scholars and lay persons. It’s educational democracy at its finest.
Why on Shavuot? The holiday marks God’s giving of the Torah to the Jewish people. What better way to honor that than by cracking open the Chumash and looking around.
As wonderful as the holiday and the tradition of tikkun may be, Jews should not kid themselves that one night of study doth a Jewish education make. We have an obligation to engage in study throughout life.
And that effort begins early with a solid Jewish education, something that should be available to every Jewish child.
As this week’s op-ed by Yosef I. Abramowitz notes, the technology and the resources already exist to provide that education to all. What may be lacking is the unified communal will to make it happen.
Abramowitz isn’t the first to exhort the Jewish community to make education a priority. Three years ago, philanthropist Michael Steinhardt challenged American Jewry to create a mechanism — similar to the Birthright program that provides Jewish youth with a free trip to Israel — that would give every Jewish child a free Jewish education.
While Steinhardt and Abramowitz have won the respect of the community, their ideas have not yet been fully implemented.
We don’t mean to suggest that these two leaders alone have all the answers. To stem the tide of assimilation, to bolster the American Jewish educational system, will require an earnest dialogue from many quarters in the Jewish world.
But we have no time to waste. Our population is not growing appreciably. We need to retain and increase our numbers. A solid Jewish education is one of the best ways to inoculate our community against future attrition.
While we collectively ponder all that, let’s start with a joyous night of Torah. So pack up that thermos of coffee (or Red Bull), and make your way to a local tikkun. You might miss a night of sleep, but what you gain will more than make up for it.