Leap of faith: Shavuot offers us another possibility

Last week I sat in a cinema watching trailer after trailer and realised I already knew every story waiting for me. Another Star Wars film. Another return to The Hunger Games. Another sequel to something that was already a sequel. I do not even mean that critically. Some of them I will probably go and see. But sitting there in the dark I found myself wondering how much contemporary culture now depends on familiarity. We seem less willing to imagine genuinely new worlds. We return instead to inherited ones because at least we already know how they work.

Maybe imagination feels harder than it used to. I have been thinking about that as Shavuot approaches.

Shavuot is the moment the Israelites arrive at Sinai. We often tell it as though a nation suddenly appears fully formed at the foot of the mountain. But the Torah itself paints something messier and more human than that. These are still frightened people carrying the habits of slavery with them. They complain. They panic. They look backwards constantly. They are bound together by shared vulnerability more than shared certainty.

But from that fractured group comes covenant. This year that feels painfully relevant. British Jews are tired. There is an exhaustion running through Jewish life that is difficult to describe to people outside it. The low-level calculations before sending children to walk the dog wearing something Jewish. The constant scanning of crowds and slogans. The feeling that every conversation eventually circles back to October 7, Gaza, antisemitism or fear.

It would be easy for a community under pressure to become smaller in spirit. To narrow. To trust fewer people. To decide that safety can only ever come from retreating behind higher walls. Some voices in public life actively encourage that instinct now. They offer Jews solidarity wrapped inside a wider politics of anger and exclusion. But Jews should always be wary when fear becomes somebody else’s recruitment strategy.

Shavuot offers another possibility. The rabbis imagined revelation at Sinai happening in 70 languages simultaneously. Not one voice flattening everybody into agreement, but many people hearing something sacred in ways they could each receive. Judaism never really imagined unity as sameness. The argument begins almost immediately after revelation and never really stops.

That matters now because Jewish unity cannot mean pretending we all think identically about Israel, protest, security or politics. We do not. Nor should we. But there still has to be something deeper that binds us together. A refusal to normalise antisemitism. A refusal to allow Jewish fear to be dismissed. A refusal too to abandon the values that Judaism asks of us in the process.

The Israelites arrive at Sinai as a crowd of anxious former slaves. They leave with the beginnings of responsibility for one another. This year this is what Shavuot asks from us. Not certainty nor unanimity. Just the difficult work of remaining a people even when the world keeps trying to pull everyone into smaller and smaller camps.

Rabbi Charley Baginsky is co-lead, The Movement for Progressive Judaism