In our prayers and our conception, we speak and think of the recently completed holiday of Shavuot as זמן מתן תורתנו, the time of the giving of our Torah. This misidentification highlights a paradox that should heighten our appreciation of the tragedies of the Three Weeks, the period between the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av.

Shavuot is not, in fact, זמן מתן תורתנו, at least not according to our current practice of Jewish law. In a long discussion starting on פ”ז., 87a, in Massechet Shabbat, the Talmud presents a debate between R. Yose and Rabanan as to whether the Torah was given on the 6th of Sivan (the first day of Shavuot) or the 7th. Based on the rule that יחיד ורבים חלכה כרבים, when an individual and a group have a debate the halacha follows the group, we would ordinarily rule according to Rabanan, which would then put the giving of the Torah on what we celebrate as the first day of Shavuot.

That debate, however, also has ramifications for our practice of the laws of Nidda commonly translated as Family Purity. There, common practice follows the opinion of R. Yose, which would mean that the Giving of the Torah happened on the seventh of Sivan, a day after Shavuot. Hundreds of years of rabbinic discussion of this issue has yielded many solutions to how to reconcile the two, but further problems make clear that the Torah did not originally think of Shavuot as a Giving of the Torah holiday.
For example, the Torah dates Shavuot as forty-nine days after the offering of the Omer. Since by Torah law the calendar was supposed to be set by eyewitness testimony, those forty-nine days could end on either the 5th, 6th, or 7th of Sivan, only one of which is the anniversary of Matan Torah, the Giving of the Torah.

Most problematic, though, is that the Torah itself never connects these two events, a shocking lacuna if the Giving of the Torah was in any way central to the experience of Shavuot. As the phrase in Hebrew goes, עיקר חסר מן הספר, the essential point is missing; if מעמד הר סיני, Standing at Sinai, was part of the fabric of Shavuot, the Torah should have at least alerted us. Whether or not the date was the same, the Torah does not seem to care.

Instead, the Torah speaks of Shavuot as a holiday of שתי הלחם, of the giving of two loaves of bread, a celebration of the offering of new produce in the Temple for that year. We can leave the full exposition of that idea for just before next Shavuot, but it reminds us that the loss of the Temple rendered the holiday itself almost incomprehensible.

That is one example of what we too often fail to realize, but to which the Three Weeks call for us to resensitize ourselves, the extent to which the loss of the Temple has altered the religion God actually gave us. Shavuot serves as one good example, where a holiday focused on renewing our relationship with the Temple has instead been turned into a holiday of renewal in our relationship to Torah. This fits well with the Talmudic dictum that מיום שחרב בית המקדש אין לו לקב”ה בעולמו אלא ד’ אמות של הלכה בלבד, from the day the Temple was destroyed, God only has in this world the four ells of halacha. Accurate as that statement is (and well as it represents what occurred with the holiday of Shavuot), we too often neglect the beginning of the statement—מיום שחרב בית המקדש, from the day the Temple was destroyed. The Talmud implies not only the truth of our current reality but also that the pre-Destruction reality differed, and the reality we long to return to will differ as well.

Some aspects of that pre-Destruction reality worth considering, since it is the first set of those that might soon return in full force, is the set of halachot that come into play only when the Yovel is in force. For that to happen, we would need a majority of world Jewry to be living in Israel, which is demographically likely in the next half-century. According to most authorities, that would also require שבטים במקומם, the various tribes inhabiting their proper sections of the Land of Israel.

With that occurrence, Shemitta would once again apply on a Torah level (removing any question of a היתר מכירה, a sale of the Land for the year, for example), and the possibility of accepting גרי תושב, resident aliens, would return, significantly altering our relationships with non-Jews in the Land of Israel (at least if we operate with halachic categories). In addition, buying and selling real estate in the Land of Israel as well as lending money in general would change.

All that might come to fruition in the near and natural future, without the coming of Mashiach or the rebuilding of the Temple.

Those two events—which we say we long for—would include a return of סמיכה, the original ordination that gives the Sanhedrin broad legislative and judicial powers, including the right to absolutely determine halacha for the entire Jewish people (in contrast to today, where every community follows its particular rabbi) and to administer the death penalty when necessary.

The return of the Temple would bring with it animal sacrifice, which includes the Paschal sacrifice, the Yom Kippur service of the High Priest, and the libation celebrations of the holiday of Sukkot. All of these, almost alien to our imaginations, are part of what we are supposed to mourn during the Three Weeks. Just as we can no longer fully imagine Shavuot in the way the Torah meant it, I fear we can no longer fully imagine these other important aspects of the religion the way God gave it to us. And that itself seems cause enough to mourn.