Shvuot & the Cause of Antisemitism
This coming week, Jews around the world will gather to celebrate Shavuot—a relatively little-known holiday outside the Jewish community. It marks what tradition calls the most defining moment of moral and spiritual history: the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.
According to the Talmud, this happened precisely 2,448 years ago. At that moment, the Jewish people entered into an eternal covenant with God—charged to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). A mystical teaching adds that every Jewish soul—past, present, and future—stood at Sinai and bore witness to this mission.
But there’s something else Shavuot may explain—something more disturbing and tragically more urgent. It may help us understand why Jews, from that day to this, have been the target of an unparalleled and persistent hatred. Why antisemitism, ancient and modern, rational and irrational, continues to metastasize in every corner of society, including now in the very heart of elite academia.
William Norman Ewer’s couplet—“How odd of God / to choose the Jews”—has become something of a historical riddle. But the deeper answer, as humorist Leo Rosten once quipped, is even more telling: “Not so odd—the Jews chose God.”
And in choosing God, the Jewish people chose to be a reminder to the world of something very uncomfortable: conscience.
This explains what logic cannot. Jews are the spiritual ancestors of the world’s great monotheistic faiths. They gave the world the Sabbath, ethical monotheism, and justice as a divine imperative. Yet instead of gratitude, history has repaid them with pogroms, blood libels, the Holocaust, and now—once again—with mass global hatred, inflamed by lies and legitimized by silence.
Consider the events of October 7, when Hamas terrorists committed atrocities so barbaric that they shocked even those accustomed to war. Women were raped, children were burned alive, families were tortured and butchered. And the world’s response? To turn on the victims. Israel, the one country attacked, now finds itself accused of genocide.
Even more stunning is the chorus of support for this inversion of good and evil coming from American university campuses. Students at Harvard, Columbia, and dozens of other institutions rushed not to condemn Hamas but to endorse it—some celebrating “resistance,” others chanting for “intifada,” a word that glorifies violence.
Donors began pulling billions. But that wasn’t enough to stop the madness. Because this isn’t about politics. It’s about the unbearable moral weight that Judaism brings to the table. It’s the same reason the UN Human Rights Council has made Israel the only country subject to a permanent condemnation item—Agenda Item 7. Not North Korea. Not Iran. Not Syria. Just the one Jewish state.
Why this relentless obsession with Jews and Israel?
We find a chilling answer in the words of Adolf Hitler, who once confessed: “Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision. The Jews have inflicted two wounds on the world—circumcision for the body and conscience for the soul. I come to free mankind from their shackles.”
There it is. At the heart of antisemitism lies a rejection of moral restraint, of ethical obligation, of Sinai.
Were it not for Shavuot, the world could breathe easier—freed from the burden of a higher calling. And that is precisely what some find so intolerable.
But the price of rejecting moral truth is not liberation. It is chaos.
As the prophet Isaiah warned: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). Today, those words ring out with painful clarity.
This Shavuot, we would do well to remember that the Ten Commandments were not a burden placed on humanity, but a gift. A light. And a warning.
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Rabbi Benjamin Blech is a professor of Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University and the author of 20 books, including The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican, a bestseller in 26 countries.
