Up All Night    

On Shavuos, we stay up all night to receive the Torah—a tradition rooted in devotion and anticipation. But not every all-nighter is linked to such joyous expectation, at least not planned. People are awake at 3 a.m. for all kinds of reasons: a crying baby, a looming deadline, a soul-searching conversation with a needy friend, a family trauma, or just frustrating insomnia. Some nights are holy by design; others become holy by surprise.

Coordinated By: Michal Frischman

Keyed Up

Ariella Schiller

I stayed up all night traveling.

IT was me, my husband of two years, his parents, and our one-year-old son. It wasn’t supposed to be an all-nighter, although with the Schillers, I was fast learning, you just never knew. But this was supposed to be an easy one: We’d travel up north on the second day of Chol Hamoed from Ramat Beit Shemesh — where we had all stayed for first days — to visit my sister-in-law in the Pesach program she and her husband run in the Kinar Hotel on the shores of the Kinneret.

You know, they always remind you when you’re dating that you’re not marrying the boy’s family, you’re marrying the boy. And while that’s very true, you’re also kind of marrying his family. I mean, purely circumstantially, you’re probably going to be spending a lot of time with them.

Fortunately, though, the more time I spent with my in-laws, the more I grew to love them.

The drive itself back from the hotel was eventful. Watching my mother-in-law drive at breakneck speed over the roller-coaster hills of the Jordan Valley on the way back to Jerusalem (with no street lights), rounding curves like they were corners, I was pretty sure I was going to lose my matzah. Or my life. But we somehow made it safely back to our cozy apartment — where we’d be spending the second half of Yom Tov — at around three in the morning, tired, hungry, and extremely hyper.