Eli Kavon
Jerusalem Post, May 31, 2022
“By focusing on the value of studying Torah and carrying out the commandments, the early rabbis transformed Judaism into a religion of the Book.”
On the festival of Shavuot, Jews all over the world celebrate God’s revealing of the Torah to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai. Whether a Jew believes that this revelation is a one-time event that occurred more than 3,000 years ago or chooses to see the composition of the Torah as a divinely inspired human endeavor that took place over many centuries, the message of Shavuot is that the Jewish people have a responsibility to accept the Torah anew in each generation.
If the Jew abdicates the mission of assuming the yoke of Torah, Jewish faith and tradition will atrophy and disappear. In each generation, the Jew has an obligation to follow and interpret the Torah, assuring that the Sinaic tradition will endure and never die out.
Breaking the mold of idol worship: revolution
Yet, Shavuot is not only a holiday concerned with maintaining millennia-old tradition. God’s revelation of Torah, whether as an event in Jewish history or as an imaginative component of Jewish memory, was and still is truly revolutionary. The ancient world of the Israelites was one of idolatry and polytheism. Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Canaanites worshiped gods of wood and stone, and deities of thunder and fertility, who resembled human beings in many ways.
The gods of the idol worshipers would battle each other, engage in sexual union and destroy man at a whim. Ashtoret, Baal and El were gods who could be manipulated by magic and divination, and who demanded, in some cases, human sacrifice. Such classics of Sumerian literature as The Epic of Gilgamesh, while sharing some common concerns about human mortality reflected in the Hebrew Bible, were mostly concerned with the fate of kings and dictators. The gods of the peoples surrounding the Israelites would have cared little about the fate of a nation born into Egyptian bondage.
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