The giving of the Torah, which we celebrate on Shavuot (the 6^th of Sivan), was a one-time event. As the Rambam (Maimonides) states in the ninth of his Thirteen Principles of Faith: "I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be exchanged nor will there be another Torah from the Creator, Blessed is His Name." However the receiving of the Torah - our acceptance of the Torah as the guiding principle in our lives - is something that we must make happen every day.

As we know, giving does not automatically result in receiving. A teacher can give over information in a class, a parent can give over a lesson in etiquette and a child can give a schoolmate a favorite book to read. However, students can refuse to pay attention, children can rebel and even a friend can be unable to see what's so special in the book that we find so enthralling. In these cases, the flow of give and take is cut off.

But when the intended recipient enthusiastically receives that which is given, a further cycle of giving and receiving is created. For instance, when a teacher knows that her lessons are being eagerly listened to, she will be inspired to give even more to her students.

Although the Torah was given to the world only once, when we make a commitment to receive its teachings and incorporate them into our daily lives God responds by giving us a new and deeper level of understanding. Once we successfully incorporate this deeper understanding, we are given even more insights.

There is, however, a prerequisite for climbing up this spiritual ladder. We must first firmly believe that God is the Creator and the Sustainer of the world and that the Torah is the true expression of His will. We must be willing to be God's servants and accept the yoke of His Torah - we must be willing to "do" His will - before we can receive (or "hear") the rich spiritual insights that making the doing meaningful.

When Moses informed the Children of Israel that God wanted to give them the Torah, they replied: "We will do and we will hear" (Na'aseh ve'nishmah, Exodus, 24:7).

As commentators on the Torah have pointed out, the Jewish people appear to have gotten things mixed up. Usually before a person is willing to embark on a course of action, she wants to first hear the details and read the fine print: what is she expected to give and what can she expect to get in return, how much will it cost, what are the guarantees, etc., etc. Only when she is assured that this is, indeed, a "good deal" will she sign on the dotted line.

But the Jewish people did the exact opposite. First, they told God that they were committed to doing everything written in the Torah - they trusted that any "deal" He wanted to give them was, indeed, a "good deal." Only after they signed on the dotted line at Mount Sinai and the contract was already in effect did they ask to be told what was involved.

How could they have been so rash?

For one thing, God was not exactly an unknown entity to them. They had seen with their own eyes the plagues that devastated Egypt and the destruction of the Egyptian army at the Reed Sea. Because they had seen what happens when a nation willfully goes against God's will, they were probably hesitant to do the same. And, in fact, according to one Medrash (allegorical commentary on the Torah), God held a mountain over the Children of Israel and told them that if they didn't accept the Torah He would drop the mountain on them and they would die. Therefore, according to this Medrash, the Jewish people accepted the Torah out of fear.

However, it is also written that the Jewish people accepted the Torah with their own free will and that it was a "knowledgeable" decision. According to the Maggid Meisharim (a kabbalistic commentary on the Torah based upon the diary of Joseph Caro, published in Amsterdam, 1708), the generation of Jews who stood at Mount Sinai were on an extremely exalted spiritual level. Before their souls came down into this world, they were made familiar with everything written in the Torah.

Therefore, the Torah was not an unknown entity and their willing acceptance of it was not based upon "blind faith." When they said, "We will do," they were saying "We will do everything that we learned in Heaven." And when they said, "We will hear," they were saying, "We will hear and study the words of Torah again in this world so that our bodies will be able to do all that is commanded."

But whether the acceptance of the Torah was done freely, out of fear or out of some combination of the two, one thing is clear: When the Jews responded, "We will do and we will hear," they raised themselves to a spiritual level that was previously unknown in this world - and which has not been replicated since.

According to the Talmud, when Israel said, "We will do and we will hear," a heavenly voice proclaimed: "Who has revealed to My children this secret, which the ministering angels use, as it is written, 'Bless the Lord, O His angels, mighty creatures who do His bidding, ever listening to His word' (Psalms 103:20) - first doing, then listening?" (Shabbat 88a).

It is a great accomplishment for people made of flesh and blood to reach the spiritual levels of angels who always do God's will. And yet there is a paradox here, for even though angels are on a very high spiritual level, they are there because they have no free will. They are programmed, so to speak, to perform God's will and they act only when they hear God's instructions. In addition, they can only do that which God has instructed them to do - they can neither change His instructions nor refrain from doing His will.

People, on the other hand, have free will - and they were given this gift of free will by God Himself. Is it therefore such a good thing for human beings to cast aside this gift?

Most of the nations of the world think not. God offered His Torah to all the nations of the world, but the vast majority of them refused to accept it. They insisted on looking over the Torah first and when they came to a part they didn't like (don't murder, don't steal, don't commit adultery, etc.) they politely said to God, "No thanks."

Only one people understood that what God wanted people to do with His gift of free will was to subjugate their will to the will of God - to accept all of His Torah without any reservations - the Jewish people.

The nations have not forgotten that they once had the chance to be the "Chosen People," but that they refused the role. Which perhaps explains why the nations have assigned to themselves the task of being the watchdogs for the Jewish people. If they cannot play the part themselves, at least they can be the eternal critics of God's Chosen People - critics who are always on the lookout for instances of when the Jews fail to perform God's will and fall from their high level of emulating the angels.

Throughout history, two of Israel's greatest critics have been Esau and Ishmael, and as we shall see, this is no accident.

In Zera Barech, a 17^th century commentary on the Torah by Barachiah Barech Shapira, it is pointed out that there is a connection between the language of "We will do and we will hear" and the names of Esau and Ishmael.

Esau was Abraham's grandson and Jacob's twin brother and he is considered to be the ancestor of the European nations. His name is a cognate of the Hebrew word la'asot, which means "to do."

Ishmael was Abraham's son by the Egyptian concubine Hagar, and he is the ancestor of the Arab nations. (However, because one of Esau's wives was one of Ishmael's daughters, it is hard to know today who is actually a true descendent of Ishmael and who is a genetic mix of the two). The name Ishmael comes from the Hebrew word l'shmoah - "to hear."

Although this linguistic connection was made more than three hundred years ago, we can see how this connection is played out in today's news.

The European nations have taken upon themselves the role of being the moral judges of the world. Being "rational" people, they would never dream of looking into the Torah to "hear" what God says constitutes a moral society. Instead they rely upon their own wisdom, and this wisdom has led them to believe (again!) that the problems of the world are caused by the Jewish people.

It "naturally" follows that it is up to Europe to punish the Jewish people for their wrongdoing (both real and imagined), and in this role they are busy "doing" many things against Israel. For instance, they erect courts in Belgian to try Israel leaders as "war criminals"; they establish boycotts in Norway against Israeli products; they create petitions to oust Israeli professors and doctors from international organizations; they establish United Nations "commissions of inquiry" whose sole purpose is to charge Israel with crimes that Israel didn't commit, etc.

Yes, Europe, the descendants of Esau, is terribly busy these days doing many things. Yet there is one thing that they are emphatically not doing - listening. Because they have already accused, tried and sentenced the Jewish people in their so-called courts of moral justice, the Europeans are unable to hear the truth and listen to reason. They are the people who say, "Don't bother me with the facts because I have already made up mind."

A striking instance of this was the European community's reaction to the so-called massacre in Jenin. Even when their own official agencies confirmed there was no massacre in Jenin - and it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the supposed massacre was an outright lie willfully fed to the media by the Palestinians - the Europeans have adamantly stuck to their guns: the Jews were the bad guys in this battle between two fully armed forces and the Palestinians were the good guys.

Since their moral standards and their system of justice is a reflection of their own distorted notions, the Europeans are not interested in listening to any evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They only use their faculty of hearing when they are presented with more lies that confirm what they already believe.

The Arabs, on the other hand, are good listeners. They have learned from their prophets that there is a God. And by listening to the Jews, they know that the tiny sliver of land called Israel is holy. They have also heard about the Holocaust, the American Revolution, the siege of Leningrad and many other things. The Arabs are good students who hear everything that is going on in the "world history" class. But what do they "do" with what they have heard? Do they take these lessons and use them to create a good and just society for their people? Unfortunately, they do not. Instead they use what they have heard to create a tangle of lies that makes a mockery of the concepts of holiness, justice and human rights.

They turn the God Who asks us to "choose life" into a God Who applauds the suicide bomber for the death and destruction he causes. They liken their own corrupt gang of terrorists and thieves who mercilessly oppress their own people to the American leaders who drafted the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They claim that the explosive population growth their people have experienced during the last few decades is actually a "holocaust."

When Europe's "We will do" is joined to the Arab's "We will hear," the result is a farce with tragic consequences. The Arab "freedom fighters" - a conceptual mirage created from a motley compilation of all the victors and victims in world history - are kept going by a steady stream of European money and weapons. The result is more carnage and destruction for the sake of carnage and destruction - something that Europe, with two world wars to its credit, does very well. But thanks to the public relations spin manufactured by the ever-glib Arabs, carnage and the willful destruction of innocent human life becomes transformed into actions that lead to peace and the protection of human rights. Which in turn gives the Europe the green light to fund even more acts of terror.

Although one might think that combining Europe's "We will do" with the Arabs "We will hear" would equal Sinai, in truth their unholy alliance is a far cry from the "We will do and we will hear" spoken by the Jewish people.

How does Israel fit into this linguistic equation? The name "Israel" is often translated as "He who struggles with God." On the surface the name seems rather uncomplimentary. Wouldn't it be better to be named "He who accepts God" or "He who loves God"? Yet in some cases, a little moral struggling can be a good thing.

At Mount Sinai, the Jewish people accepted upon themselves the notion of accountability. We cannot just take the Torah and then "do" whatever we feel is right. Our actions have to be checked and double-checked against the teachings we have "heard" in the Torah. On the other hand, we cannot just passively receive the Torah - hear its words when we sit in synagogue or in the classroom and then go out and do whatever we please in "the real world." We are commanded to "be" a holy nation - which is a synthesis of doing and hearing. We must internalize the teachings of the Torah that have been given to us so that we can do good in each and every one of our interactions with the world.

This idea of synthesis is perhaps hinted out in the famous phrase describing the Jews' arrival at Mount Sinai. Whereas before their wanderings and their encampments were described in the plural ("They wandered." "They encamped."), when the people get to Mount Sinai it says, "Israel [in the singular] encamped there in front of the mountain" (Exodus 19:2).

Our Sages explain that this means that the Jewish people agreed to put aside their differences and that they were of one heart. They all agreed to accept all of the Torah and so there was no such thing as some of the people saying "we will do," while others said, "we will hear."

This commitment to do and to hear all that is written in God's Torah was imprinted upon the soul of every Jew as an individual and upon the Jewish nation as a whole. "We will do and we will hear" has given us a system of checks and balances that has allowed us to maintain our moral compass throughout our 3,000-year-old history. It is what has allowed us to live amongst murderers without becoming murderers ourselves and to retain a clear vision of the truth in a world that is obscured by a fog of lies.

And so as we commemorate the Giving of the Torah this Shavuot, we should all make an effort to remember the phrase that signaled the completion of our transformation from a nation of slaves to a holy nation and enthusiastically say, "We will do and we will hear." By subjugating our will to His will - by making His vision of a just and moral world our own vision - may it be His will to fulfill the blessings of His Torah and grant all of Am Yisrael long life and peace.

Chag Shavuot Sameach (Happy Shavuot)!