The word Shavuot is, yes, the name of an important Jewish holiday. A chag in the original meaning of the word — a pilgrimage festival, when all work ceased and Jews would ascend to Jerusalem and the Temple. It is one of the three pilgrimage festivals ordained in Torah, alongside Passover and Sukkot.
And Shavuot literally means “weeks” — the Festival of Weeks — marking the seven-week journey from Passover to this moment. This counting season, the omer concludes as we have moved from liberation toward revelation.
But shavuot also means “oaths.”
A shavua — שבועה — is a binding oath in Jewish tradition. It is one of the categories of vows we reckon with on Kol Nidre as the haunting prayer begins: kol nidrei v’esarei u’sh’vuei… all the vows, prohibitions, and oaths we may have made…
The rabbis noticed this connection too. In the Talmud (Shevuot 39a), the Jewish people are described as “mushba v’omed me’Har Sinai” — already standing under oath from Sinai. Revelation was not only inspiration; it was covenant, obligation, and mutual binding.
So as we move through this Festival of Weeks, perhaps we might also experience it as a season of oaths: a time to celebrate, create, reaffirm, deepen, and sometimes reconsider the commitments we have made — or know we need to make but have not yet.
Especially as a community traversing wilderness together — sometimes echoing the journeys of our ancestors and sometimes charting entirely new terrain — this moment of reacknowledging our commitments can help us stay the course, reevaluate, or perhaps even turn around and choose a different path altogether.
We do not often speak of oaths in 2026. The language can sound ancient or overly formal. I mostly associate it now with taking public office: a ritual acknowledgment that power and responsibility should be tethered to accountability and shared principles.
But perhaps it would be useful to recover the language of oaths more broadly. To speak more openly about the covenant we have that holds community together:
the obligations of friendship,
the promises embedded in family,
the responsibilities of leadership,
the covenant between neighbors,
the duties we owe to vulnerable people,
the commitments we make simply by showing up for one another again and again.
Because modern liberal culture often tells us that we are primarily individuals — self-contained, self-determining, fundamentally unbound.
But I think many of us at Kadima know otherwise. We are bound to one another by care, by consequence, by memory, by responsibility, by the ways our choices ripple through each other’s lives. The covenant at Sinai, in this way, is timeless and unending: we are interdependent beings at our core and we need one another.
Now is a time to renew that oath and to lean on in.
Chag same’ach and shabbat shalom,
R’ David
And Shavuot literally means “weeks” — the Festival of Weeks — marking the seven-week journey from Passover to this moment. This counting season, the omer concludes as we have moved from liberation toward revelation.
But shavuot also means “oaths.”
A shavua — שבועה — is a binding oath in Jewish tradition. It is one of the categories of vows we reckon with on Kol Nidre as the haunting prayer begins: kol nidrei v’esarei u’sh’vuei… all the vows, prohibitions, and oaths we may have made…
The rabbis noticed this connection too. In the Talmud (Shevuot 39a), the Jewish people are described as “mushba v’omed me’Har Sinai” — already standing under oath from Sinai. Revelation was not only inspiration; it was covenant, obligation, and mutual binding.
So as we move through this Festival of Weeks, perhaps we might also experience it as a season of oaths: a time to celebrate, create, reaffirm, deepen, and sometimes reconsider the commitments we have made — or know we need to make but have not yet.
Especially as a community traversing wilderness together — sometimes echoing the journeys of our ancestors and sometimes charting entirely new terrain — this moment of reacknowledging our commitments can help us stay the course, reevaluate, or perhaps even turn around and choose a different path altogether.
We do not often speak of oaths in 2026. The language can sound ancient or overly formal. I mostly associate it now with taking public office: a ritual acknowledgment that power and responsibility should be tethered to accountability and shared principles.
But perhaps it would be useful to recover the language of oaths more broadly. To speak more openly about the covenant we have that holds community together:
the obligations of friendship,
the promises embedded in family,
the responsibilities of leadership,
the covenant between neighbors,
the duties we owe to vulnerable people,
the commitments we make simply by showing up for one another again and again.
Because modern liberal culture often tells us that we are primarily individuals — self-contained, self-determining, fundamentally unbound.
But I think many of us at Kadima know otherwise. We are bound to one another by care, by consequence, by memory, by responsibility, by the ways our choices ripple through each other’s lives. The covenant at Sinai, in this way, is timeless and unending: we are interdependent beings at our core and we need one another.
Now is a time to renew that oath and to lean on in.
Chag same’ach and shabbat shalom,
R’ David
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