Dorit gave us a nice review of the various names of Shavuot. One custom of the holiday that puzzles many people is our practice of staying up all night in the synagogue and learning Torah instead of turning in after a late start to the holiday and a heavy meal. Both men and women often follow this custom, although in my circle, it is mainly incumbent on the men (and I don’t think I could manage to stay up all night, given the cooking, cleaning I do on Erev Shavuot, in addition to the fact that I have to work on the day before the holiday).
My husband usually goes off to shul after dinner and stays there learning Torah until the wee hours of the morning. I am usually asleep on his return. He often takes a nap before getting up and going to shul in the morning, but many people do not sleep at all until the afternoon, when services are over. What is the reason for this custom of staying up all night?
One reason is we want to show Hashem that we are receiving the Torah (when we listen to the reading of the Ten Commandments in shul) with enthusiasm. By not sleeping the night before, we are demonstrating this excitement. Another reason for staying up is to compensate for an error we made when we first received the Torah on Mount Sinai. After a 49 day countdown following the exodus from Egypt, G-d looked down and saw that we were asleep and had to wake us up. G-d was quite disappointed that we were fast asleep rather than showing our readiness to receive the Torah, so we make sure we are bright and alert and stay up on Shavuos.
But according to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, our error in sleeping that first Shavuos was not due to lack of enthusiasm, but the opposite. According to Jewish mysticism, every night when we go to sleep, our souls rise to Heaven and return in the morning. We were so excited to receive this holy covenant that we went to sleep on purpose to reach a higher spiritual level. Hashem may have appreciated our enthusiasm, but our approach was not the correct one; the purpose of giving the Torah was that holiness should descend above to below. Therefore, we didn’t need to raise our souls up to Heaven, but Hashem wanted the Torah to reach us where we were, on the Earth, in our physical bodies.
So for those of you who are staying up, or not, (as in my case) have a meaningful, peaceful Shavuos!