(Hebrew: “Weeks,” “Pentecost”) Called “The Season of the Giving of the Torah,” the pilgrimage festival that follows seven weeks after PASSOVER. Shabu‘ot celebrates God’s giving and Israel’s receiving the Torah at Sinai. It is also called Pentecost (“fifty”) because it comes fifty days after Passover, celebrating the Exodus, for “in the third month after the children of Israel had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on that same day they came into the wilderness of Sinai” (Exodus 19:1). The Feast of Weeks adds its own quite distinctive message. For if “ISRAEL” encompasses all those who stand at Sinai, then the community of Israel finds place for anyone who chooses to accept the Torah at Sinai—by choice, not only by birth. In the natural calendar of the Holy Land, Shabu‘ot marks the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest, so that another name for it is ag HaBikkinim, the Festival of First Fruits.
Shabu‘ot is celebrated primarily in public worship in the synagogue, in the declamation of the Torah and the study of the Torah. The stage is set by the custom of the faithful to spend the entire night of the festival, from the sundown that marks the beginning, to sunrise, in community Torah-study under synagogue auspices (Tiqqun Leil Shabu‘ot). That is followed by morning services. So the congregation has reenacted Israel’s action at Sinai, receiving and meditating on the revealed Torah.
But at the morning worship, the congregation then is given a jarring message, a reminder that Israel is Israel not by reason of inheritance alone but by an act of choice. Scripture records that a “mixed multitude” assembled for the Exodus and presented themselves at Sinai. That means people not at Sinai by birth choose to become Israel by accepting the Torah. How is that message made articulate? It is not by what is said in so many words but by a portion of the Torah that is added to the obligatory declamation of the Pentateuch and the prophets. And that is the book of Ruth, which tells the story of how a woman deriving from Moab, which abused Israel at they wandered in the wilderness, and the male heirs of which are excluded from Israel by reason of its churlishness, chose to make herself part of Israel by accepting the yoke of the Torah and the dominion of God.
The chanting of the book of Ruth in celebration of the Festival of the Giving of the Torah, defines what Shabu‘ot contributes to the definition of the Jewish people. The message of the book of Ruth contains the critical point of insistence: “Israel” is defined by other-than-this-worldly, ethnic facts. Someone of ethnically-dubious origin, from outside Israel-by-birth, by accepting the Torah, not only adheres to Israel but becomes the ancestress of the Messiah. In the patriarchal and genealogical framework of the narrative, privileging men and favoring family ties, one cannot identify an outsider more sharply than as gentile, woman, and widow. The message of Shabu‘ot conveyed by the climactic inclusion of the book of Ruth is, Israel is Israel by reason of the Torah, and Israel will be saved at the end of time by the Messiah of the house of David, the grandson of the outsider on two counts, the Moabite woman, Ruth.
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ag HaBikkinim, the Festival of First Fruits. 
