Every Shavuot, Israel reveals one of its deepest unresolved identity crises.

Religious Jews celebrate the giving of the Torah at Sinai.

But many secular Israelis celebrate something very different: Chag HaBikkurim, the agricultural festival created largely by the kibbutz movement and early secular Zionism.

Until I had children in the secular Israeli school system, I saw these as simply two versions of the same holiday.

They are not, despite the cheesecake.

After listening to historian Elon Gilad describe the origins of the secular Israeli Chag HaBikkurim tradition, I began to understand that secular Zionism was not simply trying to reinterpret Judaism, but to replace it with something new.

The early Zionists did not merely secularize Jewish holidays. In many ways, they attempted to build a new Hebrew-Israeli civilization: rooted in land, labor, agriculture, national revival, and sovereignty.

Shavuot could have become a metaphor: a way of saying that even if God did not literally write the Torah at Sinai, the Torah still remains the foundational civilizational story of the Jewish people.

The rabbis could have........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)