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voice of God and made a covenant
with Him. But that connection is not
made in the Torah itself. To be sure,
the Torah says that “In the third month
after the Israelites had gone forth from
the land of Egypt, on that very day, they
entered the wilderness of Sinai” (Ex.
19:1), and Shavuot is the only festival in
the third month. So, the connection is
implicit; but it is not explicit. For this,
as for the festival’s date, we need the
Oral tradition.
What then was the view of the
Sadducees? It is unlikely that they
linked Shavuot with the giving of the
Torah. For that event had a date, and
for the Sadducees, Shavuot did not have
a date. They kept it on a Sunday — they
observed it on a specific day of the
week, not on a specific date in the year.
How did the Sadducees view Shavuot?
There is a fascinating episode record-
ed in the Rabbinic literature (Menachot
65a) in which a Sadducee explains to R.
Yochanan ben Zakkai why, according to
them, Shavuot is always on a Sunday:
“Moses our teacher was a great lover
of Israel. Knowing that Shavuot lasted
only one day, he therefore fixed it on
the day after the Sabbath so that Israel
might enjoy themselves for two succes-
sive days.” Shavuot gave the Israelites a
long weekend!
From this starting point we can
begin to speculate what Shavuot might
have meant for the Sadducees. The late
Louis Finkelstein argued that they were
landowners and farmers. In general,
they were wealthier than the Pharisees,
and more closely attached to the State
and its institutions: the Temple and
the political elite. They were as near as
Judaism came to a governing class.
For farmers, the agricultural
significance of Shavuot would have
been clear and primary. It was “the
festival of the harvest, of the first fruits
of your work, of what you sow in the
field” (Ex. 23: 16). It came at the end of
a seven-week process that began with
the bringing of the Omer — “a sheaf
of the first grain of your harvest” (Lev.
23: 10), i.e. the first of the barley crop.
This was the busy time of gathering in
the grain (this is the setting of the Book
of Ruth and one of the reasons why we
read it on Shavuot). Farmers would
have a specific reason to give thanks to
God who “brings forth bread from the
ground.” They would also, by the end
of harvesting, be exhausted. Hence the
Sadducee’s remark about needing a long
weekend.
We can now see the outline of a
possible Sadducean argument. Pesach
represents the beginning of the
Israelites’ journey to freedom. Sukkot
recalls the 40 years of wandering in
the desert. But where in the Jewish
year do we recall and celebrate the
end of the journey: the entry into the
promised land? When, in fact, did it
take place? The Book of Joshua (5:
10-12) states: “On the evening of the
14th day of the month, while camped
at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, the
Israelites celebrated the Passover. The
day after the Passover, that very day,
they ate some of the produce of the land:
unleavened bread and roasted grain. The
manna stopped the day after they ate
this food from the land; there was no
longer any manna for the Israelites,
but that year they ate of the produce of
Canaan.”
It is this text that Maimonides takes
as proof that “the day after the Sabbath”
in fact means, as the text states here,
“the day after the Passover.” Seen
through Sadducean eyes, however, this
text might have held a quite different
significance. The Omer recalls the day
the Israelites first ate the produce of
the promised land. It was the end of
the wilderness years — the day they
stopped eating manna (“bread from
heaven” — Exodus 16: 4) and started
eating bread from the land to which
they had been traveling for 40 years.
ENTERING THE LAND OF ISRAEL
The reason Shavuot is given only
agricultural, not historical, content
in the Torah is that, in this case,
agriculture was history. The 50-day
count from the first time they ate
food grown in Israel to the end of
the grain harvest represents the
end of the journey of which Pesach
was the beginning and Sukkot the
middle. Shavuot is a festival of the
land and its produce because it
commemorates the entry into the land
in the days of Joshua. So the Sadducees
may have argued. It was Israel’s first
Yom HaAtzmaut, Independence Day.
It was the festival of entry into the
promised land.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that after
the destruction of the Second Temple,
the Sadducees rapidly disappeared.
How do you celebrate a festival of the
land when you have lost the land? How
do you predicate your religious iden-
tity on the State and its institutions
(Temple, priests, kings) when you have
lost those institutions? Only a move-
ment (the Pharisees) and a festival
(Shavuot) based on the giving of the
Torah, could survive. For the Torah was
not completely dependent on the land.
It had been given “in the wilderness.” It
applied anywhere and everywhere.
To be sure, the Pharisees, no less than
the Sadducees, loved the land. They
knew the Torah in its entirety could
only be kept there. They longed for it,
prayed for it, lived there whenever they
could. But even in exile, they still had
the Torah and the promise it contained
that one day Jews would return and
recover their sovereignty, and rebuild
what they had lost.
The argument about Shavuot turned
out to be fateful for Jewish history.
Those who celebrated it as “the time of
the giving of the Torah” ensured Jewish
survival through nearly 20 centuries of
exile and dispersion. And we, who live
in the era of the return, can rejoice in a
double celebration: of the Torah and the
land.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) was a
global religious leader, philosopher, the author of
more than 25 books and moral voice for our time.
He served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991
to 2013. Rabbi Sacks passed away in November
2020. His series of essays on the weekly Torah
portion, titled “Covenant & Conversation” will
continue to be shared and distributed around
the world. This essay was first published May
29, 2014.
continued from page 43
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH