Torah Study: Shabbat Shavuot 5783/2023

SPEAK UNTO THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL, AND SAY UNTO THEM: WHEN YE ARE COME INTO THE LAND. Since He establishes a new commandment here in connection with each of the festivals, in addition to their being days of rest and holy convocation, therefore He singled out for each festival a special section, which begins with the charge, Speak unto the children of Israel. And since the time of the Festival of Weeks is dependent upon the omer, *Literally: “a measure.” This refers to the meal-offering of the new barley brought on the second day of Passover, which is the sixteenth day of Nisan. From that day on we count the forty-nine “days of the omer,” and on the fiftieth day is the Festival of Weeks. Thus it is clear that the time of this festival is dependent upon the omer.
-Ramban on Lev. 23:10

Our sages also explain that the word בקמה, “in the standing corn,” may be read as בקומה, ‘that the counting of the days and weeks has to be performed while one is standing. [Presumably the word בקמה was considered redundant otherwise as one always cuts standing corn, not “lying” corn. Ed.]
There are a total of four commandments which have to be performed while standing: עומר, ציצית, מילה, לולב. [The common denominator of these four commandments is the unnecessary word לכם. Seeing that we derive “standing” from the commandment of עומר, the Rabbis applied that rule to other commandments featuring that word לכם.]
-Deut. 16:9, Rabbenu Bahya

In rabbinic times a remarkable transformation of the festival took place. Based on the verse: "In the third month after the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai" (Ex. 19:1), the festival became the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The description of the feast in the liturgy is "zeman mattan toratenu" ("the time of the giving of our Torah"). The transformation was in accord with a process to be observed in the Bible in which the ancient agricultural feasts were transformed into festivals marking the anniversaries of significant historical events in the life of the people. Both Passover and Sukkot are connected with the Exodus; it was natural to link Shavuot with this event.
It is possible that the Pharisees insisted that Shavuot be observed on a fixed day because they wished to affirm that the festival commemorated the Sinaitic theophany which occurred on the 50^th day after the Exodus (following the general Pharisaic belief in an oral Torah reaching back to Moses which the Sadducees denied), and because a purely agricultural festival had little meaning for the town dwellers who made up the Pharisaic party (L. Finkelstein, Pharisees (1962³), 115–8, 641–54). If this is correct, the transformation into a historical feast took place before the present era. However, neither Josephus nor Philo refers to Shavuot as "the time of the giving of our Torah," and none of the references in the rabbinic literature to the Torah being given on this day (e.g., Shab. 86b) is earlier than the second century C.E., though there may well have been a tradition far earlier than this. The earliest clear references to Shavuot as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah are from the third century, e.g., the saying of R. Eleazar that all authorities agree that it is necessary to rejoice with good food and wine on Aẓeret because it is the day on which the Torah was given (Pes. 68b).
Jacobs, Louis. "Shavuot." Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 18, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007, pp. 422-423. Encyclopedia Judaica, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2587518244/GVRL.judaica?u=grjc&sid=bookmark-GVRL.judaica&xid=e63a1fc1. Accessed 22 May 2023.

Also from EJ - Shavuot customs developed later due to the fact there were no specific rituals tied to giving of Torah in the Torah and the harvest connection falls away after the destruction of the Temple.
"Under the influence of the Kabbalah it became customary to spend the whole of the first night as a vigil in which selected passages from all the Jewish religious classics are read (tikkun leil Shavuot). A less observed custom is to recite the whole of the Book of Psalms on the second night because of the association of the festival with David...
It is customary to adorn the synagogue with plants and flowers on Shavuot because, tradition has it, Sinai was a green mountain; and with trees, because Shavuot is judgment day for the fruit of the tree (RH 1:2). Some authorities disapproved of the custom because of its similarity to certain church rites (see *Ḥukkat ha-Goi ). It is a home custom to eat dairy products on Shavuot because the Torah is compared to milk (Song 4:11) and because the law of the first fruits is placed in juxtaposition to a law concerning milk (Ex. 23:19). In some communities it is customary to eat triangular pancakes stuffed with meat or cheese because the Torah is of three parts (Pentateuch, Prophets, and Hagiographa) and was given to a people of three parts (priests, levites, and Israelites) on the third month through Moses who was the third child of his parents."

Let's watch a short video of what it looked like when our ancestors brought first-fruits of the harvest at Shavuot time (Go to 3:57 on video)