The Sweetness of Torah: Shavuot in Kazakhstan

Philosopher, professor, and now JDC client, Liliya Shilyaeva has spent decades exploring life’s most complex and important questions. Through the years, she has found strength and insight through reading the Torah and engaged with it closely when she connected to the JDC-supported Hesed Polina social service center in her native Almaty, Kazakhstan.

As we celebrate Shavuot, Liliya, 87, takes a step back and considers the central role the Torah has played in her life and how JDC puts its teachings into practice. 

If there’s one truth a person must know to live well, it’s that life is complex. Life is a diamond, with everyone seeing their own facet. You see one facet, while I see another, and we might even argue about it. No one can see the entire diamond. 

As a trained philosopher, I like to think I’ve examined more of this diamond than the average person. “Cognition is my craft” — that’s been my motto for years, and for much of my adult life, philosophy was how I put that motto into practice. 

I was born in 1939, right before the Second World War. My mother gave birth to me all alone, while journeying from Almaty to an outpost near the Chinese border where my grandmother lived, called Shelek. My father had gone to the front and never returned; today, I have a paper that confirms he was missing in action. 

My grandmother had been forced to move to Shelek because she was Jewish. At the time, the Russian Empire had decided to relocate its Jewish population, a process that uprooted and destroyed entire communities. Jews had long been subject to restrictions on where they could live, and Stalin only continued this damaging and limiting policy during the days of the Soviet Union.

Though I grew up in these antisemitic conditions, I always had a thirst for knowledge, and nothing could stop me from achieving my dreams. I accomplished what I’d set out to do: I went to university, defended my dissertation, and earned my PhD in philosophy. 

My academic career spanned half a century. For more than 50 years, I taught philosophy to doctors and paramedics. Medical work can be ethically complex, and I encouraged my students to navigate these complexities with grace, humility, and wisdom. 

In the 1990s, I took my love of learning to the JDC-supported Hesed Polina social service center here in Almaty. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and Jews were finally able to openly express their identities. That’s why we aimed to form a community. 

I managed Hesed Polina’s library. Today, they have an expansive library, but it isn’t just a room filled with books — it’s also a community space. All kinds of conferences and meetings happen there. I helped make the library into the wealth of Jewish knowledge it is today. 

All I know about Jewish life  — our music, food, history, and holidays —  is because of Hesed Polina. I used to go there all the time, and for decades it was my second home. We’d have such delicious feasts there, and our Shabbat celebrations were especially meaningful to me. As the librarian, I had all the necessary literature to conduct the service.

Today, I’m homebound and it’s difficult for me to volunteer because I can’t see anything. I’m 87 years old and have trouble orienting myself. The hardest thing about getting older is illness and physical disability. If you don’t exercise for two hours a day, aging will suffocate you. 

It would be a lie to say I’m happy. Almost all of my pension goes to eye medication that costs an arm and a leg. 

The only place I know I can depend on is JDC. They deliver the food and homecare I need as well as medication, like the drops that improve my eyesight. And if I hadn’t connected with Hesed Polina, I wouldn’t have come to know the world’s most precious book — the Torah. I wouldn’t have spent hours in the library poring through its pages. 

The Torah is a miracle, and reading it is a special kind of sweetness. That’s why Shavuot is so meaningful to me. It’s a holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, not just when we received the law, but when our people accepted responsibility for our freedom. After the Exodus, this freedom could’ve remained freedom “from.” After receiving the Torah, it becomes freedom “for” — an opportunity to commit to ethics, memory, community, and the future.

There’s an interesting paradox here: The revelation takes place not in the land of Israel, but in the desert. In Jewish thought, the desert is a space without ownership or status. No one owns the desert, and therefore the Torah is given, as it were, beyond all borders. 

But after we’re freed from Egypt, liberation doesn’t happen instantly. A person needs time to learn how to live without that sense of inner slavery. That’s how I see the counting of the Omer, which happens in the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot, as a spiritual discipline — freedom requires preparation.

There is also the beautiful tradition of studying throughout the night — Tikkun Leil Shavuot. There’s an almost philosophical gesture in this practice; a person doesn’t wait passively for enlightenment, but stays awake in pursuit of knowledge. It’s no coincidence that the holiday is often associated with milk, honey, and dairy foods. Here, knowledge is understood not as cold information, but as something nourishing.

In this sense, Shavuot is not only a religious holiday, but also a reflection on the coming of age of a people. Freedom without an inner law easily turns into chaos, while law without freedom turns into tyranny.

Order and freedom — these are two things JDC also gives us each and every day. In this turbulent world, we know we can depend on our JDC homecare workers and the reliable, consistent delivery of food, medicine, and other essentials. But they give us the freedom to embrace our sacred traditions.

“What you give away, you gain,” a Georgian proverb states. “And what you keep, you lose.” On this day, when we celebrate our sacred Jewish teachings, I’m grateful to those who have gained so much by what they’ve given to us Jews here and around the world. 

Liliya Shilyaeva, 87, is a JDC client in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

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