This website is all about celebrating Torah, and there is no holiday more focused on Torah than Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai. So, with that in mind, this week I am interrupting our regularly scheduled programming to bring you some Shavuot themed activities and recipes to do with your kids.

When my husband and I were engaged, we enjoyed playing around with potential mash-ups of our last names to create a new “family name” that we would both take once we were married. While we did not end up actually doing this, the exercise eventually evolved into imagining what our family crest would look like, if we were somehow the kind of landed gentry that had such things (we are not). We eventually came up with a very vivid image, which I hold in my mind’s eye to this day, of a brown bear downhill skiing, a red scarf flying behind him.

This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, opens with one of the most persistent but challenging ideas in the Torah: the idea that God rewards the faithful and punishes those who transgress. This idea is, in many ways, the bedrock of covenantal theology. And yet, while not problematic in and of itself, this conception of reward and punishment easily slides towards another, more difficult theological conclusion: those who suffer must have done something to deserve it, while those who flourish must be good people.

This week’s Torah portion, Behar, introduces the economic and agricultural laws of the sabbatical and Jubilee years. These different cycles introduce a period of rest for the land, an interval during which the land is not cultivated and the fields lie fallow, but they also introduce ways to free people from cycles of debt and indentured servitude.

The opening of this week’s Torah portion, Emor, describes the special expectations that pertain only to the members of the priesthood. In many ways, it continues to elaborate on the themes of holiness that we explored last week, but with a new twist: the priesthood must be holy because they are the ones who offer the sacrifices, which are explicitly likened to food.

This week’s Torah portion, Kedoshim, articulates the central theme of the book of Leviticus: what does it mean to be holy? In Judaism, holiness or sacredness centers around the idea of making distinctions, of marking certain things as separate and thereby marking them as important.