Shavuot. Ruth in Boaz’s Field by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, oil on canvas, 1828; National Gallery, London. Photo: Wikipedia.

All Biblical festivals and special days relate to time — whether it is daily, monthly, annually, or seasonally. Awareness of the natural world comes with awareness of oneself, our transience, and the ups and downs of life. Who are we? Where do we belong? All of this is the core of religious life, which helps us to live in the world in the best way that we can.

Shavuot started as a harvest festival. There are three. Pesach is the first, with the earliest barley crop. Shavuot celebrates the beginning of the wheat and fruit harvests. And Sukkot is the culmination of the agricultural year and the celebration of water and rain, which are essential for a successful agricultural year.

But as we became less and less of an agricultural society, other themes emerged to add to the message of Shavuot specifically. The rabbis added the theme of Torah. But why, then, did the rabbis choose the Book of Ruth to be read on Shavuot?

It is set against a background of harvests — and how unpredictable they can be. The failed harvest caused the emigration of Elimelech’s family from Israel. Then the cycle turned, and rich harvests in Israel enabled Naomi to come back. Ruth decides to stay with Naomi and become part of the Israelite people. In Ruth’s magnificent declaration “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people are my people, and your God, my God … only death will separate us.”

The Book of Ruth illustrates the choices people make and their consequences. To leave. To come back. To change one’s religion and nation. To act with love and care. To be charitable and kind. The goodness of a person rather than genealogy or status. It displays the redemptive powers of women. But it also recognizes the drawbacks of societies, class systems, levels of wealth, and the limitations of conventions and rules.

But Naomi and Ruth are destitute. Biblical laws required redemption. When a family fell on hard times, and sold their property, the relatives had a legal obligation to redeem the loss and try to reinstate them. The poor also had legal rights to glean fields as they were being harvested, and landowners had to leave corners of fields to the poor, all the poor, even foreigners.

The Torah set the tone for a just society, one that guaranteed that the weakest and most disadvantaged would be helped. If the Torah imposed commandments that connected humanity with God, it also required, just as much, that humans connect with each other. As the Prophet Yeshayah said repeatedly, God wants kindness more than sacrifices or hypocritical prayers.

The most popular explanation of the link between Shavuot and Ruth is that Ruth actually chose to live a life according to Naomi’s Israelite customs and ideals. She made the commitment that the Israelites made at Sinai. As Boaz said to her when he met her, “May the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to trust, reward you.”

It does not matter where you come from as much as who you are. And this challenges us to think about what our commitments are today, and what we value and spend our time on.

Ruth’s story is of how life is unpredictable and often tragic. And yet, through human kindness — which the Bible stresses — we can find redemption and build a better world.

That’s true no matter what is happening around us; the Torah’s messages for us and our people are as important today as ever.

Happy Shavuot and Chag Sameach.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.

University of East Anglia in Norwich.. Photo Credit: .Martin./ Flickr

Student activism on university campuses often presents itself as part of a broader global struggle for human rights and liberation. Students organize campaigns and protests under the belief that they are standing on the side of justice. Universities themselves have also long been spaces where political movements grow, and where students engage with wider global issues.

But if campus activism is truly rooted in the goal of human rights, it is worth asking why some movements receive enormous attention while others receive little to none.

Activist movements often present themselves as universal movements for justice, but in practice they are shaped by ideology and institutional campaigns. This does not necessarily invalidate these movements, but it does challenge the idea that campus activism is merely a neutral response to injustice.

An example of this contrast can be seen through the differences between campus mobilization around Gaza, and the relative absence of sustained activism in support of issues like the situation in places like Sudan — and also in Iran, including supporting Iranian students who actively protest their own government.

At the University of East Anglia (UEA), as at campuses across the UK, the past number of years has brought visible and sustained pro-Palestine organizing with protests, encampments, and marches of more than 400 students calling for divestment. It also involves motions brought before the Students’ Union resulting in a longstanding institutional boycott policy against Israel.

Over the same period, Iranian students and civilians have protested against the political repression and government-sponsored violence in Iran, most noticeably during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. This past January, it’s reported that tens of thousands of innocent protestors were murdered by the regime, and many more were jailed.

Yet at UEA, as at most British universities, this did not translate into encampments, sustained protest weeks, or motions to the Students’ Union. The same is true for many other conflict areas around the world — and the contrast is difficult to ignore.

The point here is not that students should protest every global issue equally. That would be unrealistic. Student movements naturally focus on certain causes more than others. But this contrast does raise an important question: what determines which global issues become campus movements and which do not?

I believe part of the answer lies in activist infrastructure. Some causes already have established student organizations and national campaigns with clear institutional mechanisms. At UEA, campaigns related to Palestine, for example, often involve established movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which provide students with clear actions to take, such as lobbying student government and hosting annual protest weeks where official language is promoted. There are funding networks and experienced organizers behind the scenes who help translate political concerns into sustained campus activism.

By contrast, Iranian dissident movements do not have the same level of organized support. There are fewer established student campaigns, fewer institutional demands directed at universities and fewer organized networks translating concern into campus activism. A student at UEA who wanted to organize meaningfully around Iran would find considerably less infrastructure available to them than one organizing around the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Another factor may be related to how students interpret global politics more broadly. On many campuses, political activism tends to be framed through narrow ideas like decolonial theory and the history of Western imperialism. Within this framework student activists tend to focus on issues where Western powers are seen as solely responsible for global injustice. Whether this is introduced or sustained in classrooms or in college group meetings is a subject for another piece, but in this context it doesn’t really matter.

What this contrast suggests is that campus activism is not guided by moral principles alone, but is instead shaped in large part by the existing political frameworks.

Recognizing this does not require assuming bad intentions on the part of student activists. Many student movements are motivated by genuine concern. But like all political movements, individuals must be wary of manipulation and groupthink.

Individual action and anger become tools for someone else’s ideas, so it’s important that we are all responsible with what we choose to put our energy towards. If campus activists at UEA claim to stand for universal human rights, then they must also be willing to ask the difficult question of why some struggles seem more important than others.

Skye Phillips is a final year International Relations and Modern History student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She is a 2025/6 fellow for CAMERA. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA. 

A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

“People don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it.” This famous observation by the self-described “unshakeable optimist” Simon Sinek has become a mantra in the corporate world.

Big-brand companies spend fortunes trying to define their “mission,” CEOs obsess over “core values,” while branding consultants build entire careers around helping organizations discover their “purpose.”

But here’s the funny thing: most people already know that purpose matters. The real problem is not discovering purpose — it’s remembering it.

Human beings forget. We forget why we started relationships. We forget why we took jobs. We forget why we moved somewhere, joined something, believed in something, fought for something. Over time, routine takes over, and purpose fades into the background like wallpaper you no longer notice.

Psychologists sometimes refer to this as “habituation.” The extraordinary becomes ordinary simply because it is repeated often enough. You get so used to something that you stop noticing it. The first time you hear a piece of music, you notice every note. By the hundredth time, it has become elevator music.

And guess what? The same thing happens with ideals. In 1973, researchers at Princeton conducted what became one of the most famous psychological experiments in modern psychology. Seminary students were asked to prepare talks on religious and ethical themes — many of them centered on kindness, compassion, and helping others.

On their way to deliver the lecture, they passed a man slumped in a doorway, coughing and clearly in distress. Astonishingly, many simply stepped over him and hurried on. Why? Because they thought they were late.

What the researchers discovered was something deeply uncomfortable about human nature: even people immersed in morality and spirituality can lose sight of their most treasured values when distracted by pressure, deadlines, and routine.

And when it comes to religion, this challenge may be hardest of all. Religious observance can become treacherously mechanical, turning into ritual without meaning and practice without passion.

That danger is especially real in Judaism because Judaism is so structured and so detailed. We pray the same prayers every day. We keep Shabbat every week. We observe the same festivals every year. The rhythm may be beautiful and give us stability, but rhythm can also turn into autopilot.

And perhaps this is precisely why the Jewish calendar contains a festival whose entire purpose is to return us to the moment when we first discovered who we were and why we exist.

Of all the Jewish festivals, Shavuot is the least understood. And that’s a shame, because Shavuot commemorates the single most transformative moment in Jewish history: the giving of the Torah by God at Mount Sinai.

It’s not about redemption, or survival, or victory – instead, it’s about purpose. At Sinai, the Jewish people discovered why they existed. Until that moment, the Israelites were essentially a refugee nation wandering through the wilderness. Yes, they had experienced miracles and escaped slavery in Egypt. But freedom alone is not enough. A people cannot survive without direction.

In fact, one of the great ironies of history is that freedom itself can become destructive when it lacks moral purpose. History is full of movements that successfully threw off oppression, only to descend into chaos because they had no shared moral framework to replace what they had destroyed.

The French Revolution began with soaring rhetoric about liberty, equality, and fraternity, but quickly spiraled into the Reign of Terror, public executions, mob violence, and eventually dictatorship under Napoleon.

In the twentieth century, many newly independent post-colonial states in Africa and Asia won liberation from European rule amid enormous optimism, only to fall victim to corruption, tribal conflict, military coups, or authoritarian strongmen.

Freedom alone was not enough. Throwing off chains is easy compared to building a society guided by responsibility, restraint, and shared values. Without those things, liberty can become unstable, self-destructive, and even violent.

Interestingly, the American experience 250 years ago was very different. The United States emerged from the revolution without collapsing into anarchy or terror, and the reason is not hard to identify.

Although the Founding Fathers insisted on the separation of church and state, they did not believe in separating morality from public life. On the contrary, the American republic was deeply tethered to biblical ethics and religious morality. The founders consistently spoke about virtue, accountability, Providence, and the moral obligations necessary for freedom to survive.

John Adams famously wrote that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people,” warning that it was inadequate for any other kind of society. In other words, American liberty was never intended to mean limitless personal autonomy.

Freedom was meant to operate within a framework of responsibility, ethics, self-restraint, and belief in higher values. That biblical moral underpinning became the invisible architecture holding the republic together, even in a society committed to religious freedom and institutional secularism.

It’s an idea that feels especially urgent right now. We are living through a cultural moment in which freedom is increasingly defined as the absence of restraint, the removal of obligation, and the rejection of any authority beyond the self.

The modern Western world celebrates autonomy almost as an absolute virtue — “my truth,” “my choice,” “my reality.” But a society built entirely around individual appetite eventually begins to lose its cohesion. Shared values erode. Institutions weaken. Public discourse becomes toxic. People become simultaneously more liberated and more lost.

Which is precisely why Shavuot matters so profoundly. Because Shavuot celebrates the moment the Jewish people discovered that freedom alone is not enough. Leaving Egypt was only the beginning. At Sinai, the newly liberated Israelites learned that true freedom requires structure, responsibility, discipline, and moral purpose.

The Torah was not given to restrict human flourishing, but to enable it. Without a moral framework, liberty eventually collapses into confusion and conflict. Sinai transformed a collection of freed slaves into a covenantal nation bound together by shared obligations, shared ideals, and a shared sense of higher purpose.

Because in the end, Judaism was never meant to be a collection of empty rituals or inherited habits performed on autopilot. Shavuot comes every year to remind us that beneath every mitzvah, every tradition, every prayer, and every Jewish commitment lies a deeper question: why are we doing this in the first place?

And perhaps that is the enduring genius of Sinai. It did not merely give the Jewish people laws to obey; it gave them a reason to exist. Because ultimately, it is not what you do that matters most — it is why you do it.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.