Alter Yisroel Shimon Feuerman
Tablet Magazine, May 11, 2021
“The evening had begun with the Babylonian Talmud and as the hours wore on, we moved into the medieval heavyweights: the Rosh (Germany), the Rambam (Maimonides, from Spain and Morocco), the Ran of Catalonia Rashi (Troyes, France). At 3 a.m. we decided to break for watermelon and grapes and cheesecake.”
I was a young boy when I first started to observe the custom of staying up to learn Torah the whole night of Shavuot. My first memories are of a few people who drank black coffee and ate cheesecake to fight back sleep in shul. In between trips to the refreshment stand, the learned would horeve over a blatt Gemara—a page of Talmud—with a study partner through the night. But the rank and file, many of them survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust, the plumbers and wallpaper hangers and tailors and grocery men of the shul, listened to Torah lectures from earnest, suited rabbis, before they nodded off early or went home.
Legend has it that this custom of late-night Shavuot learning arose to atone for a faux pas, a “sin” committed by our forefathers over 4,000 years ago. A midrash states that on the morning of the Revelation at Sinai, the Jewish people overslept.
Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman, a psychotherapist in New Jersey, is director of The New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies. He is also author of the Yiddish novel Yankel and Leah.
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