On Shavuot we celebrate an event that has left an impact on the history of the Jewish people and an indelible imprint on world civilization – Matan toratenu – the “Giving of Our Torah” on Mt. Sinai. Passover, which marked our liberation from Egyptian bondage, was the prelude to that historic moment of G-d’s revelation and His divine gift of the Torah (which includes the Ten Commandments) to our ancestors.

On Shavuot we became a people even prior to our entrance into the Promised Land. Unlike other nations, the conventional qualifications of nationhood do not apply to the Jewish people. Without a national territory, national government, a national language, a national army, and even a central sanctuary, that have defined other nations, we have survived all the trials and tribulations of our painful history. From the ashes of the Holocaust we have reemerged miraculously from the dead to claim our place in the sun in our own homeland.

The secret weapon that has kept our people alive lies in one word – Torah. This remarkable code of laws and ethics has been the greatest source of inspiration and the most effective antidote against assimilation and extinction as a distinctive people. As the great Saadyah of the tenth century put it: “Israel exists as a nation only by virtue of the Torah.” To paraphrase a well-known adage: “More than Israel has kept the Torah, the Torah has kept Israel”