Why exactly is Shavuot called Shavuot, the festival of weeks? Think about the three pilgrimage festivals: Pesach is named for the “passing over”(pasach) of Israelite homes as God killed the first born Egyptians (Exodus 12:13).  Sukkot is named for the booths (sukkot) we dwell in during that autumn holiday (Leviticus 23:42). What about Shavuot then? It’s not named for the first fruits which it celebrates in the Torah (Leviticus 23:17), but rather for the counting of seven weeks from Pesach (Leviticus 23:15-16). Not quite the direct naming as Pesach and Sukkot enjoy. Why not?

The first clue is that the week of seven days is the only measurement of time in the Torah not based on nature. The day is based on the revolution of the earth on its axis. The month is based on the cycle of the moon’s varied reflection of the sun’s light. The year is the amount of time required for the earth to circle the sun. So while these three time periods are given their due in the Torah, the week appears arbitrary, a measurement imposed on us by the creation account in Genesis.

The week’s end, the seventh day or Shabbat, is marked as significant by the famous passage of Genesis 2:1-3 in which God declares the seventh day as His holy Sabbath. It is significant that the days of the week, determined as they are by nature, are not given names, only numbers, while the last day of the week which delineates the week is given a name, Shabbat. In later Jewish tradition, even the weeks were given names in the form of the weekly Torah portion.

On the primal Pesach of Egypt, the Israelites were commanded to note the month as the first of months (Exodus 12:2) – an unlikely acknowledgement by slaves since one month for a slave is like any other. Here, however, not only will this month (chodesh) be new (chadash), but in fact, the slave will be transformed into a free individual who understands his ability to define time, his own included. But chapter 12 of Exodus not only gives precise instructions for that first Pesach of Egypt, but also for all subsequent Passovers of the generations to come (Exodus 12:14-20). The marking of this first month, which later became Nisan, is the first step of a new autonomous and liberated Israelite.

The trek through the desert begins the act of liberation. Later on, as our tradition has it, the first seven weeks of that trek are designated by God as a time of counting weeks. This too is a lesson in autonomy, since even a slave could note the new month by gazing at the moon, while only a free person can arbitrarily count off seven-day weeks which have no source in nature.

In other words, months are natural, weeks are history. Shavuot, then, is the holiday that teaches us true autonomy. Unlike Pesach, it was not celebrated the first time as the Hebrews were leaving Egypt, but was designed for future generations. It is deeply rooted in nature and celebrates the first fruits of the harvest – the very nature which yields no first fruits without the hard work of human farmers.

So the very name Shavuot hearkens back to the period when we formed our autonomy, our self-esteem. The time when we became masters of our own destiny.

Hence, the Torah metaphorically links Shavuot to the first fruits in the seven weeks when we gained the first fruits of our liberation. No accident then that the rabbis added the giving of the Torah at Sinai to Shavuot, thereby deepening the symbolism of an event also understood as a first fruits experience for the newly liberated Hebrews.