A Night Awake, and a Book of Loyalty

The best-known custom is the Tikkun Leil Shavuot, staying awake through the first night in study of Torah, a practice popularised by the sixteenth-century kabbalists of Safed and now widespread, in which communities read a set anthology or hear lectures until dawn; it is sometimes explained as making amends for a tradition that Israel overslept on the morning of the Sinai revelation. Synagogues and homes are decorated with greenery and flowers, recalling both the harvest and a tradition that Sinai bloomed, and it is customary to eat dairy foods, for which several symbolic reasons are given.

The synagogue reading includes the Book of Ruth, chosen for its harvest setting and because Ruth's embrace of the God and people of Israel is read as a model of accepting the covenant; some connect it also to King David, traditionally born and died at this season. In many communities Shavuot is when children begin their formal study, and the confirmation of teenagers is a modern addition. Falling fifty days after Passover, it completes the movement from liberation to law: freedom from Egypt reaching its purpose in the receiving of the Torah.