The portion of the sedra that we read this week details the holidays in a very strange and anachronistic fashion. Pesach is not described as the holiday of freedom and Shavuoth is not defined as the time that our ancestors received the Torah. Our festivals and holidays are only described in terms of the sacrifices that we are obligated to bring to the Temple.
Today such an explanation of the holidays is rather out of date. We do not have a Temple where we sacrifice, and we are thousands of years beyond the time when we used to sacrifice. The only relevance of these verses seems to be that tie which binds us together with ancestors who lived 100 or so generations ago. And the strongest aspect of that relevance is language. What was described 100 generations ago in Hebrew is still fully understandable by the Jewish people. Citizens from Israel can read and understand the Torah with the ease that they can read the morning paper.
All of the peoples who lived at that time and spoke languages different than Hebrew or wrote in languages different from Hebrew spoke and wrote in languages that are now dead, languages that perhaps a few hundred people in the world today can understand.
Even people who spoke in Latin saw their language die, and Greek speakers saw their language morph. Those who lived when Beowulf was the national tale spoke an English that hardly anyone can understand today. And those few people who live in Iraq and speak a modern day version of Aramaic cannot begin to understand the Aramaic of the Talmud or of early translations of the Bible.
Hebrew, however, never died. For thousands of years there were some who could always speak the language and the Jewish people as a whole always prayed and studied in the holy tongue. For thousands of years, even after the destruction of the Temple, we understood what our ancestors used to do at the Temple. We never lost the connection that binds us to them. We did not create our relationship to them on myth and legend, but upon living words of a document that has always been at the center of our faith.
Just to understand that Hebrew has always been the national language teaches us as much about our people as does the idea of freedom or giving of the law, which are the main themes of Pesach and Shavuoth. We have a link to ancient times that is rare and wonderful and so ideas that seem out of date take upon themselves a richness because they explain how we lived so that we can continue living as Jews today.
Pesah, Shavuoth, and especially Hebrew have given us the strength to survive persecution and terror, and to dream of the kind of world that is described by the End of Days, a utopia defined in messianic terms.