It’s the day the Israelites got the Torah. As you may recall, they left Egypt in a bit of a hurry, and therefore it took some weeks until they were ready to attend to the business of receiving the word of God and become the official Chosen People. How many weeks? Seven, the Hebrew word for which, sheva, shares a root with the word Shavuot, which means weeks. To mark the occasion of having received the divine laws, we do what Jewish mothers everywhere would have us do year-round: study all night long.

Together with Passover and Sukkot, the holiday is also one of the Three Pilgrimages (or shalosh regalim, if you want to rock the Hebrew), annual occasions for the ancient Israelites to bring their harvest and livestock over to the Temple in Jerusalem for festivities and ritualistic slaughter. And while the pilgrimage part was abandoned—you know, exile and all—we still mark these three major holidays with special recitations of the joyous Hallel prayer.

ANY BAD GUYS?

Surprisingly, none. It’s one of those Jewish holidays without an awesome villain. Which is also why it’s one of those Jewish holidays not yet turned into a major Hollywood motion picture.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

Delicious dairy products. Cheesecakes are big. If your ancestors hail from the Tri-State area—Poland, Russia, Ukraine—so are blintzes.

WHY?

The rational explanation is that the Torah was given on the Sabbath, and as no animals could be slaughtered to celebrate the happy occasion, the Israelites likely shrugged their shoulders and collectively agreed to nosh on some brie. More mystical Jews—you know, Madonna—believe that the numbers speak for themselves: Dairy in Hebrew is chalav, and if you sum up the numerical value of the three Hebrew letters that make up that word you get 40. Which is a number you’d remember if you had to wander in the desert for as many years.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

First up, be happy. Why? It says so in Deuteronomy: “And you shall rejoice in your festival … and you shall only be happy.” Done rejoicing? Get ready for Yom Tov, which is a kind of Holiday Lite: You’re not allowed to work, use electrical appliances, handle money, or do any of the other stuff you can’t do on the Sabbath, but you are allowed to cook and bake, provided you use a pre-existing flame for lighting your fire and avoid that Kitchenaid. You can also carry stuff in public, another Sabbath no-no.

But Yom Tov’s less about the nays and more about the yays. Because we have to be happy, we’re obligated to prepare obscene amounts of food and invite the less fortunate to partake. Men are also expected to buy new clothes or jewelry for their wives, candy or toys for the wee ones, and flowers for the home, as Shavuot, celebrated in the spring, is also known as the Festival of Harvest.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

You bet. Traditionally, we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot. It’s like the Desperate Housewives of Canaan—Dead husbands! Levirate marriages! Sexy harvest scenes!—whose heroine is a Moabite who converts to Judaism and becomes the great-great-grandmother of King David (symbolism alert: Just as the Israelites accept the Torah and become Jews, Ruth embraces the Torah and becomes a Jew herself). King David, by the way, is said to have been born and died on Shavuot, which makes the book apropos, as do said harvest scenes.

And then, of course, there’s the matter of all-night learning. We weren’t kidding about that: It’s called a tikkun, Hebrew for correction, and tradition has it that since the Jews didn’t rise early enough to receive the Torah in Sinai—some accounts have God himself nudging them from their sleep, in what must have been the most terrifying wake-up call ever—they have resolved to stay up all night and study the Torah, commemorate the day it was given, and make up for the drowsiness of their ancestors. While religious Jews still adhere to Torah study, many less observant ones choose to spend the night studying anything from Jewish history, poetry, and art to contemporary Israeli television shows.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Watch Mel Brooks’s interpretation of Moses on the mount.
• Check out Alma’s awesome NYC Shavuot all-nighter.
• Go to DAWN, an all-night Shavuot celebration brought to you by Tablet Magazine.
• Read Slate’s take on the Book of Ruth.
• Listen to our Shavuot-themed podcasts here and here.

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah

On the third day, Rosa Olivares, an editor of Exit, a Madrid-based quarterly, took the podium. Spanish art, she commented, is more invisible than Latin American art, not just at MoMA, but in the art world in general. But she doesn’t “give a shit!” Why does everyone else? she asked. What’s with this obsession about the way others see and define them?

Some of this was sounding awfully familiar, probably since I had recently read the responses to my last column, about defining Jewish art. Still, I couldn’t remember reading anything about Jewish artists in the new MoMA—I guess because at this point, the presence of Jews in a survey of 20th-century modernism is, as we say in the journalism world, a case of dog bites man.

The Islamic story at MoMA started more recently: basically, with “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking,” which just ended. The exhibition showcased artists in exile from Muslim countries whose work is “revising, subverting, and challenging” Islamic traditions, as curator Fereshteh Daftari put it. In this respect, at least, the show followed the template of Thelma Golden’s “Black Male” at the Whitney in 1994 and Norman Kleeblatt’s “Too Jewish” at the Jewish Museum, in 1996–busting stereotypes and all that. But times have changed since the heyday of multiculturalism. Hence the stern explanation on MoMA’s Web site: the “exhibition seeks to emphasize diversity by questioning the use of artists’ origins as the sole determining factor in the consideration of their art.” Not quite a disclaimer, but carefully worded fine print. It seems to indicate that these days, the very concept of an exhibition devoted to artists from a culturally specific group must itself be challenged, even if their work confounds expectations. The museum included work by two Americans, Bill Viola and Mike Kelley, in order to “prevent simplistic conclusions.”

The British Museum currently has a show called “Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East,” which includes Christian and Jewish artists. But it has a celebratory focus rather than the postmodern ambivalence of “Without Boundary.” To really emphasize diversity, as it were, perhaps the next exhibition in the Subvert Your Cultural Heritage genre should integrate, not segregate. Throw together artists like Lebanese-born Mona Hatoum, whose prayer mat made of pointed pins was in “Without Boundary,” and Helene Aylon, whose piece “The Liberation of God,” which highlighted sexism and misogyny in the Bible, was in “Too Jewish?” Now that could create an identity crisis.

I got to wondering about what “Without Boundary” would be if its curator applied that show’s premise to Jewish artists. Consider that in Jewish art, our long history of revising, subverting, and challenging goes back to the Golden Calf, which could be interpreted as Aaron’s artistic response to the proscription against representing divinity, which later became codified as the Second Commandment.  Contemporary descendents of Aaron include Deborah Kass, who updates Warhol’s famous Jews, and the Russian art duo Komar and Melamid, ”the ultimate Jewish artists,” Anthony Julius argued in his book “Idolizing Pictures,” because their mock heroic images of Stalin subvert idolatry and thus fulfill the spirit of the Second Commandment.

But there is another strain of Jewish art that also goes back to Exodus. If you change the cubits to inches, the rules for the construction of the tabernacle sound uncannily like Sol Lewitt’s instructions for a wall drawing.  This makes Bezalel, the man the Lord endowed with the divine spirit to get the job done, the first in a long line of Jewish Conceptual artists that runs through Lawrence Weiner and Sophie Calle, among others. Words matter a lot in this kind of art. It engages the brain as much as — if not more than — the eye. It is obsessively process-oriented, theatrically intellectual. In many cases it consists of instructions that can be performed by anyone, anywhere. Indeed, Weiner stressed in ARTnews back in 1968, it wasn’t even necessary for his instructions to be carried out.

This is an artist who stencils “us” and “them” on bathroom doors. That’s subversive, isn’t it? Clearly, most artists channel Aaron as well as Bezalel. After all, let us recall what became of Aaron’s controversial sculpture. In Exodus, right after Moses smashed his tablets in fury, “He took the calf that they had made and burned it: he grounded it to powder and strewed it upon the water and still made the Israelites drink it.” All the Israelites — not just the ones who worshiped it. (They were killed later in a plague.) That’s why, you might say, there’s a little bit of the Golden Calf in all of us.