44 | MAY 25 • 2023 

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

