A few days ago, we celebrated the giving of the Torah, our most sacred text, at Mount Sinai.

Paradoxically, this legal, ethical, and spiritual covenant is what makes us free, since without law there is no freedom. Law provides a framework, and that framework is what allows human beings to live in society.

The Torah is that text whose influence became universal, pioneering the systematization and democratization of moral and ethical principles and values, as well as fundamental rights essential for the construction of society, at a time when such ideas were reserved for elite minorities or left to the discretion — and often the whims — of rulers.

Perhaps the Torah’s greatest innovation was transforming morality into a sacred covenant, in which justice is not merely a political prerogative and compassion is not simply kindness, but an obligation. Ethics itself becomes sacred.

The protection of strangers, widows, and orphans, together with the mandatory rest granted to all living beings — free or enslaved, human or animal — every seventh day through Shabbat, are only some examples of this vision.

In this democratic spirit, in which nothing is left entirely to chance, even if explicit answers are not always provided, the Torah was given in the desert: a land that belongs to no one and, therefore, to everyone at the same time.

The desert is a place without a fixed political power, where, despite temporary and circumstantial hierarchies that may have existed to maintain order, everyone ultimately depended on one another in order to survive.

But how do we know that this event actually occurred on the 6th or 7th day of the month of Sivan, which is when we celebrate it?

The truth is that nowhere in the Torah does it explicitly state that the revelation took place on that date, much less that it occurred on Shavuot. And yet, Shavuot is one of the three pilgrimage festivals explicitly mentioned in several places throughout the biblical text, albeit in different contexts and with different rituals — none directly connected to the giving of the Torah.

This association was a later rabbinic construction, linking the festival to the counting of the Omer, perhaps for reasons of liturgical convenience and the organization of a calendar that was still evolving.

One of the central........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)