Shavuot & Cheesecake

Good morning.

Today the Jewish community marks the festival of Shavuot when we celebrate the receiving of the 10 Commandments at Sinai. It’s the culmination of a 7-week spiritual journey from Passover, during which we work on refining our character traits to prepare us for the day, traits such as respect, humility, and gratitude. We also eat a lot of cheesecake because, among other reasons, words of Torah such as the 10 Commandments are seen as sweet spiritual sustenance—milk and honey.

So, as part of the celebrations, I once offered a virtual cheesecake-making session, guiding the others through the measuring and mixing until we reached whipping the cream and soft cheese, at which point I removed the hand blender from the drawer and discovered it had no plug. Don’t ask! I could panic, act like nothing was wrong, which also wouldn’t have worked; or share what happened. So, the participants heard offscreen, “oh, there’s no plug”. And then I showed them and said, “well, we’ll do this the old-fashioned way” and proceeded to use a wire whisk to whip the mixture. The cheesecake turned out great!

What does this story of baking near-disaster have to do with refining character traits for Shavuot? Actually, quite a lot. I respected my audience enough to let them in on the mishap, I responded with humility rather than covering it up, and I thanked everyone for their patience with the extra time we had to take.

May we all strive to develop respect, humility and gratitude toward each other, even when dealing with those pesky mishaps in life.