Study, eat, repeat: Tikkun Leil Shavuot returns for night of communal learning and cheesecake

A 500-year-old practice will continue on May 21 at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.

Starting at 10 p.m., community members will gather and study Torah in celebration of Shavuot.

Since the 16th century, Jewish communities have marked the holiday, which commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, by staying up late and studying Jewish texts. In Pittsburgh, Tikkun Leil Shavuot, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, has enabled community members to congregate and learn from local educators representing various streams of Jewish life.

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Over the course of three 50-minute slots, Pittsburghers will have the chance to hear a “range of speakers from really every facet of Jewish thought on topics that are related to the Torah and to matters of significant Jewish study,” organizer Rabbi Danny Schiff said.

Speaking with the Chronicle as a lead-up to the program, Schiff, the Federation’s Gefsky Community Scholar, called the program an “intensely Jewish Torah-based communal experience that is really a distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh community.”

“We’re one of the very few places that can bring the entire community together under one roof for a night of learning, where people will respectfully rub shoulders with those who have very different ideas about Judaism from their own ideas, and to be able to not only rub shoulders but sit together in classrooms and learn from people that they really don’t have a an opportunity to learn from the rest of the year,” he said.

The program, which has long operated in Pittsburgh, attracts hundreds each year because it “bespeaks the nature of the Pittsburgh Jewish community and its cooperative style,” Schiff added.

This year, joining the fold of familiar teachers are Community Day School’s Casey Weiss and the Kollel Jewish Learning Center’s Rabbi Moshe Levy.

Schiff said the two public figures are “clearly in very different parts of the community spectrum, so it’s terrific to have them both, and they will bring a richness of Torah and their own approach to that material.”

With a program touting nearly 20 educators, an abundance of kosher cheesecake, coffee and a few urns of hot water, Tikkun Leil Shavuot will look familiar to past iterations.

Replication is a deliberate choice, Schiff said.

Through the years, various proposals have been raised to “change things or to somehow alter the structure or introduce innovations, and for the most part, with few exceptions, I have resisted those particular suggestions because I am of the view that it works precisely because of the simplicity and the elegance and the deep communal interactions that go on in the structure that we have,” he said.

“We’ve been doing this for almost a couple of decades now, and still, people
like you and many others come to me and say this is the night they most look forward to. That says to me that innovation is unlikely to be necessary here.”

In fact, familiarity is often the hallmark of Jewish meaning, he continued.

“I don’t think that you need to innovate in order to have a great seder every year. You have to bring new discussions, but you don’t have to restructure the seder experience,” he said.

Similarly, when it comes to Tikkun Leil Shavuot, “if you make the breadth of teachers and the quality of the teachers really high — as we have — then I don’t think that the actual structure of the program needs to be altered.”

With the program open to the community at-large, Schiff hopes both newcomers and longtime participants heed a hearty invitation.

“If you have never been, this is an experience which you really ought to expose yourself to. And if you’re a regular, you can be assured that all the reasons that make you look forward to this program intensely all year round will still be there this year,” he said. “Get ready. It’s coming.” PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.