In our prayers, which typically employ the phraseology of the Bible, we call the holiday of Shavuos the “day of the giving of our Torah”. Maimonides, who expounds on the reasons for the commandments according to their biblical parameters, teaches us that we count the Omer to express our eagerness and loving anticipation for receiving the Torah on Shavuos. The explicit text of the Bible never states that Shavuos is the day celebrating the giving of the Torah, and instead links the Omer and Shavuos to offerings of grain and barley and to cycles of agriculture. Yet the Torah teaches us, quite explicitly and at its very beginning, that there is a deep link between the arboreal, and knowledge and truth. Join us as we examine this link, and sketch how the counting of the Omer and its culmination on Shavuos may be a reentry point to the Edenic state.
