Shavuot, 6 Sivan

Shavuot falls on the sixth of Sivan, a date this rule records as one day in the Land of Israel and among Reform communities and two days through much of the traditional Diaspora, the same split pattern that separates Passover's seven and eight day observance. Unlike most Hebrew festivals, Shavuot's date is not stated directly in the Torah as a fixed day of a fixed month. Instead it is counted, fixed at fifty days after the start of Passover through the practice known as the Counting of the Omer, so its Gregorian equivalent moves with Passover's own lunar date each year while its position in the counted cycle stays constant.

The Torah's own description of the festival, in Exodus and Deuteronomy, names it as an agricultural first fruits celebration tied to the wheat harvest, with no mention of the revelation at Sinai. The now dominant association of Shavuot with the giving of the Torah to Moses is a rabbinic identification, reasoning from the chronology of the Exodus narrative to place the Sinai revelation at roughly this point in the calendar, layered onto the harvest festival the Torah's own text actually describes. The counted rather than fixed date also gives Shavuot a distinctive relationship to Passover among the three pilgrimage festivals, since the Counting of the Omer that connects them is itself observed as a period of measured anticipation, with specific customs of mourning restraint kept during parts of the count in many communities, leading up to the festival it finally reaches.