Shavuot, a two-day holiday, commemorates the moment when God, through Moses, gave the Tablets of the Law to the Jewish people and made a covenant of obedience with them.
As one of the three most important biblical festivals in the Jewish calendar, it was one of the occasions during which, when the Temple in Jerusalem still stood, Jews would go up to the Temple to offer the first fruits of their harvests to the priests.
These tablets contained none other than the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, which today form the foundation of Western ethics and morality—both religious and secular—and are incorporated in various forms into the civil and criminal laws of modern nations.
This is clearly reflected in six commandments:
- Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
- Thou shalt not kill.
- You shall not commit adultery.
- You shall not steal.
- You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
- You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, or his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
But even among those who might be considered more religious, we find a direct influence from basic elements of social interaction. For example, the fourth, which states:
- Remember the Sabbath day, keeping it holy.
This means that today is the weekly day off that every worker is entitled to.
And perhaps even more significant is the first of the Ten Commandments, which states:
- I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
It is a clear reference to the most fundamental value that democratic societies must uphold: freedom.
All these factors contribute to the relevance and significance of the Shavuot festival, which is, in essence, Judaism’s first major contribution to civilization as a whole.