flickrThis is a heads up that the holiday of Shavuot (שבועות) starts tonight and ends late Thursday night. I wont be reachable or blogging those days. Tamar and I do have several posts scheduled to go live at the Search Engine Roundtable tomorrow and the day after, but they won't be live posts. Ben will be managing the blog and deleting any comment spam.

So why am I off? Well, the holiday of Shavuot (שבועות). It is the day we were given the Torah תורה or chumash חוּמָשׁ on Mount Sinai.

Tonight, it is customary for us to stay up all night learning Torah. So that means, no sleep. We stay up until the sun comes out. So technically, I will be up for well over 24 hours straight now. We start morning prayers at around 4:30am, so that we time it so when we say a certain portion of the prayers, we begin it at sunrise.

The rest of the holiday, it is customary to eat dairy meals. Cheesecakes, lasagna, cheese-filled blintzes and more. I personally prefer meat. The synagogues and homes are dressed up with green plants and nice flowers. We read Megillat Ruth (מגילת רות) in syanagogue. And more...

What is with the image above, well a Flickr search on shavuot returned results for that. Why? Well, the image was taken on an Israeli kibbutz (קיבוץ), aka a place where a community goes to live off the land. So what does this have to do with Shavuot? It shows the Bikkurim, giving of the first fruit, which was brought the first day of Shavuot to Bet HaMikdash (בית המקדש) aka Holy Temple.

Some good resources at Wikipedia, Holidays, JewFaq.org and Chabad.org.

Note that I covered a new feature at Google Trends named hot trends. It basically shows the hottest keywords being search on today at Google. Number 36 is the word shavuot - kinda neat!