shavuot greens

In Europe, Jews decorated their homes and synagogues with greens in honor of the holiday of Shavuot. They trimmed boughs from the woods and trees around them and strung them from their rafters and railings and walls. Temporarily redolent with nature's sweet rawness, our domesticated places are transformed into outposts of Sinai. The scent of desert blossoms fill the air with subtle smells.

This late and all-but-lost tradition of greening on Shavuot would be most wonderful to recapture today. It helps us break the bifurcation we moderns construct between civilization (our buildings) and nature (the greenery). It helps remind us that religion, spirituality, is often most profoundly experienced in the presence of God's majestic creation. It teaches us that while nature is not God, neither is God found in nature (we are not pagans), nature does serve as a witness, an expression, a demonstration of, and a path to God in this physical world.

And, thus, as we celebrate the place of nature in nurturing the spirit, we become even more motivated to preserve, teach, and appreciate the majesty of creation. So much more would be lost through careless "progress" than the very real losses of biodiversity, potential medicinal discoveries, recreational space, untold resources. What also would be lost would be the power of nature to fire our imagination, to connect us to the boundless vastness beyond all our bounded concerns, to comfort us and calm us in our moments of panic, and to inspire us and connect us to the grand mystery of life and universe.

Shavuot, then, speaks on two eternal realms: Torah and creation. But as the mystics among us would be quick to point out, they are one and the same.