Shavuot!

I've been to many different study sessions in the last 48 hours or so. I started out last night at a friends house who I hadn't seen in more than a year where we talked about sustainable living. She had a bunch of people over, and we all talked about drawing connections between our current lifestyles, available resources, communal living, personal accountability and a passage from Isaiah. We then veered off onto education inequalities (most of the people there were teachers or students), and how education gaps are created. It was fascinating, and much fun.

Then I biked off to my shul. It was raining, which is only relevant because my sister had taken my raincoat and sneakers on this camping trip that she was on, so I got exceedingly wet. My shul was doing an all-night tikkun with different sessions every hour or so. I went to: a discussion on sleep and Jewish tradition, dvar of next week's parsha, discussion on kosher laws, half of a talk on the mikveh (when it became apparent that I would spend the entire time talking with a friend who I hadn't seen in long time, I thought it would be better to leave), how to do hagbah workshop, and a discussion on halakha and copyright laws. I loved catching up with my friend, but the rest of the stuff was not so relevant. It was interesting, yes, but felt rather obscure (arguing about how long you need to wait between eating meat and dairy, with the answer being that there is no answer, was the epitome of this.) I loved learning how to do hagbah, but I didn't end up practicing because my arms were really hurting due to all the shots I just got for college and Israel. I also got to meet and chat with a lot of people who I had seen before, but never really met, which I'm really grateful for.

Around 4:30am the classes ended and we all did shacharit (albeit in egalitarian and traditional minyans.) I somehow thought that we'd be done around 5:15am, maybe 5:30am. I was so wrong. Even with everyone racing through the service (and we were really going fast), we didn't end until 6:50am. At 6:50am I assessed my mental state, and realized it would be a really bad idea to bike home, because I wasn't functioning at even half my normal capacity. So I called my dad and he came and picked me up at 7:15am, but it meant that I was the last one left at the shul (all 40 people who had made it to the end of the night cleared out impressively fast.)

One very strange thing that happened last night was that at least 5 people asked me about the Gallaudet University shirt I was wearing. I thought it was pretty obvious that I hadn't gone to Gallaudet, but apparently it wasn't. I was also surpirsed because I generally assume no one has heard of Gallaudet, and I didn't know that ASL was such a popular language among Jews. Except, reflecting on that several hours later, I realized that almost everyone who had asked me about the shirt was also queer, and ASL is a very popular language amongst the queer people I know.

I slept from 8am-3pm, and then quasi-slept until 6pm. Then I baked really yummy chocolate chocolate chip cookies. And then my mom, on of my neighbors, and I showed a film on white people's experiences with race, and led a conversation on race, racism, and white privilege in the community where we live. It is the first one in a series that we'd like to do, and it was the culmination of months of planning on our parts. I think it was a total success, because in the words of my mom "anything that got these people to talk about race is a mini-miracle." I thought it fell very nicely into the theme of learning and sharing knowledge on Shavuot.

And, I ate A LOT of cheesecake. I think I'm all set until next year.