Shavuoth

Pentecost, The Feast of Weeks and the giving of the Ruach HaKadesh (Holy Spirit).
Seven weeks after the second day of Passover is the festival called Shavuoth, Feast of Weeks, day of First Fruits, or Pentecost. Shavuot is the Hebrew word for ‘weeks’, Pentecost is a Greek word literally means ‘50th day’. Shavuot celebrates the first fruits of the wheat harvest seven weeks after Omer.
If observance were a function of theology, Shavuot would be the most widely observed of Jewish holidays. But precisely the opposite is the case among modern Jews. No major festival suffers from greater neglect. Yet Shavuot, which caps the period of seven weeks since the second Passover Seder and simply means "weeks," is rife with gravity. As the liturgy for the day constantly reminds us, Shavuot commemorates the divine gift of Torah received at Mt. Sinai, in consequence of which Judaism spawned a text-centered religious community, possibly the first in human history. Shavuot, then, is about the essential and unique nature of Judaism, a portable religion based on a canon susceptible to unending interpretation. At Sinai, freedom from slavery was recast into fidelity to Law and literacy. But that defining content is not enough to imbue Shavuot with power or popularity. And the reason tells us something about the workings of Judaism. Shavuot is ritually bereft. Unlike Pesach or Sukkot, it lacks a set of distinctive practices that would convey experientially its meaning and message. There is nothing comparable to the Seder or Sukkah for Shavuot, no absorbing home ritual that might unite family and friends in preparation and observance. With the first crack of dawn, group study turns to communal prayer, conclude in the reading of the Ten Commandments given at Sinai in the unnamed third month of Sivan after the exodus (Exodus 19:1). The combination of extraordinary acts - an all-nighter followed by a sunrise service - created exactly the kind of experiential ritual able to express the particularity of Shavuot. In the last decade both in Israel and America, the ritual in one form or another has caught on among non-Orthodox Jews in ever widening circles. Many synagogues are now lit throughout the night and have multiple services in the morning for early birds and regulars. According to one Midrash (commentary), the latter slept nonchalantly through the night preceding the event and had to be roused by lightning and thunder. Forcing ourselves to go sleepless the night before the commemoration of that momentous event thus constitutes an act of rectification (hence Tikkun). Another Zoharic explanation suggests the image of marriage. At Sinai, the Torah as bride and Israel as groom were joined in eternal union. To recall the feverish preparation of the night before the wedding, pietists reenacted the vigil and labor by studying through the night.