Jewish Holiday Shavuot Marks Revelation at Mount Sinai

Next Thursday evening, Jews will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. This holiday, which occurs seven weeks and one day after Passover, commemorates the revelation of the Word of God to the ancient Israelite nation. It was at Mount Sinai, congregated at the base of the smoking and trembling mountain, that God promised the Israelites they would be a "kingdom of princes and a holy nation" if they accepted and maintained fidelity to His covenant.

The Divine Revelation at Sinai changed the relationship between mankind and truth. Before Sinai, mankind had understood truth as inherently subjective, subject to the ever-changing whims of the volatile gods. Now, after Sinai, there could be no such moral confusion.

The one, true God -- He who had created the universe and fashioned mankind in His image -- had revealed His Will. Moral relativism and idolatry were now out. Moral objectivity and monotheism were now in.

For the first time, there was a fixed barometer by which to judge man's moral conduct, devise laws and political institutions, and live one's day-to-day life more generally. Because of the breadth and depth of its impact and lasting influence, the Divine Revelation at Sinai was the logical starting point for what we now call Western civilization.

Writing thousands of years later at another inflection point in human history, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No.

In the United States specifically, and in Western civilization more generally, it was long obvious what those "primary truths" and "first principles" actually meant: the Word of God Himself. Such a properly anchored and oriented society is uniquely suited to improve mankind's lot and advance human flourishing.

Crucially, only such a properly anchored society can claim to comprehend the truth -- let alone assert that certain truths are "self-evident," as we recall every Independence Day.

Because when God falls by the wayside, truth does as well. Recent events underscore the point. In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month, Gregory Conti, a politics professor at Princeton University, lamented: "Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech.

The talk didn't seem to be landing with the students. " Conti noted that Princeton students are often smart and driven, but they lack basic religious literacy -- even the difference between the Old and New Testaments. In short, many of America's future leaders do not even recognize the "primary truths" and "first principles" upon which our civilization rests.

There is a clear casualty of this ignorance: our ability to accept reality and the truth. Consider, for example, the shocking inability to do precisely that among far too many members of America's more avowedly secularist political party, the Democrats. A whopping 42% of Democrats believe the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024 was staged.

C. There is, of course, zero evidence to support either belief. One might as well believe in Bigfoot, or that Neil Armstrong's moon landing was fake.

Nor is this merely a left-leaning sociological phenomenon. There are plenty of Americans who have heterodox or perhaps even nominally right-leaning political views who have also lost touch with basic reality, allowing their brains to be rotted by mass consumption of delusional conspiracies and AI-driven online slop. We call them Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson fans.

There can be nothing good down this road. Only a society that is rooted in, and oriented toward, the eternal and the transcendental can ever hope to cultivate decent, truth-seeking citizens. When a free people loses the ability to discern between truth and fiction, rightness and wrongness, justice and injustice, there can only be only misery, despair and destruction.

We're losing that because, for far too long, we've been missing God. There is no better time than the run-up to America's semiquincentennial -- when we will celebrate the assertion of the self-evident truths that birthed the nation -- to find Him once again. Frankly, America's survival for another 250 years depends on it.