Why Do We Count?

By Rabbi Shmuel Goldin

In the midst of the Torah’s discussion concerning the festival cycle, immediately after the commandment concerning the Omer offering (a barley offering in the Temple which marks the beginning of the harvest and allows the use of that season’s grain), the following mandate is found:

“And you shall count for yourselves – from the day after the Sabbath, from the day you bring the waved offering of the Omer – seven weeks; complete shall they be. Until the day after the seventh Sabbath, shall you count fifty days; and you will offer a new meal offering to the Lord.”

As codified by the rabbis, this mitzva, known as the mitzva of Sfirat Ha’omer, the Counting of the Omer, obligates each Jew to verbally count the days and weeks from the second day of the holiday of Pesach until the first day of the holiday of Shavuot. What possible purpose can there be in verbally counting the days and weeks between Pesach and Shavuot? The Torah offers no explanation for this mitzva.

Most obviously, the Counting of the Omer is perceived by many scholars as an act of linkage between the two holidays that border the mitzva, Pesach and Shavuot. Through the act of counting we testify that the Revelation at Sinai (commemorated on Shavuot) was the goal and purpose of the Exodus from Egypt (commemorated on Pesach). This relationship is established at the outset when God informs Moshe at the burning bush: “And this is your sign that I have sent you: when you take the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

On a deeper level, our counting consequently affirms that the physical freedom of the Exodus is incomplete without the spiritual freedom granted by God’s law; a truth mirrored in the famous rabbinic dictum: “No one is truly free other than he who is involved in the study of Torah.”

By counting the days between Pesach and Shavuot, many scholars continue, we also are meant to re-experience the sense of excitement and anticipation that marked this period for the Israelites, newly redeemed from Egypt. Just as we would “count the remaining days” towards an extraordinary event in our personal lives, so too we should feel a real sense of anticipation each year as we again approach the holiday that marks the Revelation at Sinai.

Other authorities choose to view these days primarily as a period of “purification from” rather than “anticipation towards.”

By the time of the Exodus, the Israelites have been defiled from centuries of immersion in Egyptian society and culture. Numerous sources, in fact, maintain that they have descended to the forty-ninth of fifty possible stages of defilement and are on the verge of becoming irredeemable. With haste, at the last moment, God pulls the nation back from the brink. The newly freed slaves, however, must now undergo a process of purification before they can encounter God and receive the Torah at Sinai. Forty-nine days – to counter each level of defilement experienced – must elapse before Revelation can take place.

By counting the days between Pesach and Shavuot each year, we remember and mark this refining journey. Just as a married woman monthly counts the days leading to her immersion in a mikva we must count and spiritually prepare ourselves for our reunion with God at Sinai.

Based on this approach, the Ohr Hachaim explains why Sfirat Ha’omer begins each year on the second day of Pesach, rather than on the first. The Exodus, he observes, occurs on the first day of the festival. For a portion of that day, therefore, the Israelites yet remain in Egypt and the journey of purification cannot yet begin.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik perceives yet another lesson embedded in the act of Sfirat Ha’omer. The Rav suggests that, in Jewish experience, an individual can perform the act of counting within two realms: the realm of Sfira and the realm of minyan (the root of each of these terms means “to count”).

When you count in the realm of minyan, the Rav explains, all that matters is the attainment of the ultimate goal, the endpoint of your counting. Nine upstanding, righteous Jews can assemble for a prayer service but, without a tenth, there is no minyan.

When you count in the realm of Sfira, however, things are different. Although you still count towards a goal, each individual unit in the calculation becomes a goal, as well. While someone counting precious diamonds, for example, is certainly interested in the total number of diamonds he has, he also pauses and holds each gem up to the rays of the sun, admiring its unique facets, color and shape.

The act of Sfirat Ha’omer teaches us to “count our days in the realm of Sfira” – to see each day as a goal unto itself.

Too often, we live exclusively goal-oriented lives; moving from accomplishment to accomplishment, from milestone to milestone, rarely stopping to appreciate the significance of each passing day. And yet, when all is said and done, the quality of the journey, in large measure, defines our lives – and the ordinary moments spent with family and friends are as significant, if not more significant, than the milestones themselves.

The Rav’s observation may also be mirrored in two versions of the verbal formula for Sfirat Ha’omer which have developed over the years. Some communities recite, “Today is the —-day la’Omer (literally “to the Omer”)” while others count “ba’Omer (literally “in the midst of the Omer”).” Taken together, these two versions form the balance that should mark our approach to life. On the one hand, without goals our lives are aimless. We therefore count la’Omer, towards the endpoint of the Omer count. On the other hand, never losing sight of the journey’s value, we also count ba’Omer, in the midst of the Omer.

Goldin, Shmuel. "Why Do We Count?" YUTorah Online. (Viewed May 2, 2014). http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/760527#

Perfection

By Rabbi Steven Greenberg

For Jews, the body is no mere container of the soul. We are, as is the Creator, invested in the creation. We have drunk in the words of Genesis, “and God saw all that God had made and behold it was very good” and remain intoxicated by the manifold power of the material world. According to the sages, man and woman provide the blood, bones and tissues and God contributes the spirit, the seeing of the eye, the hearing of the ear, consciousness and understanding. The whole of the body/soul is what we call, human.

Creation is the ground of Jewish ethics and theology. From this creation-centered beginning, we have become not only a people of the book but a “people of the body”. We are asked to love life as much as does God. For such a people, the state of the body carries meaning. It matters not only what comes out of one’s mouth, but what goes in. Our bodies are meeting places between earth and heaven, literal Temples. As such, the body is a text of sorts. Its form, and consequently, its deformity as well, have meaning.

This identification of body with meaning has a potentially threatening consequence. It shapes a particularly challenging picture of disability. This week’s Torah portion begins with list of the physical deformities and disabilities that would disqualify a priest from serving in the sanctuary. A priest with extra or broken limb, a blind or lame, blind or deaf could not serve. Contact with death would temporarily disqualify a priest, but the loss of a finger would do so permanently. Scholars explain that the special tasks of the priest required perfection. The Temple and its sacrificial service was the conduit of connection between the upper and lower worlds. The priestly officiant needed to mediate between the perfect and eternal upper world and the broken and temporal lower world. To stand at that nexus was dangerous and so required a wholeness of both body and spirit.

After the destruction, the laws of the priesthood largely collapsed into irrelevance. However, there is one halakhic detail in which the bodily wholeness of the priest survives. In synagogues in Israel commonly and in the diaspora on holidays, cohanim bless the congregation. A person with blemished hands, and even blemished feet or facial appearance is disqualified. A priest whose hands have blemishes may not raise his hands [in the priestly blessing]. Even if his hands were discolored, as those engaged in work of dying textiles would have been, he may not bless the congregation. The mishna in tractate Megillah 4:7 explains the reason. People would gaze at him and one may not look at the priest in the midst of the blessing. Whether it was feared that such a gazing was dangerous (holiness can be lethal) or that the appearance of blemish could undermine trust in the blessing, the preoccupation is not primarily with the priest, but with the people who see him. The Tosefta expands the limitation beyond hands to the face and feet of the priest, the exposed areas of the body, but it also permits a priest who is well known to his community, whose blemishes had become familiar to them, the participate in the blessing. Once a community has become attuned to the blemished or disabled person, once the they are no longer troubled or frightened by a person’s difference, even the rarified demand for priestly perfection disappears.

The movement of any disability away from the fear and revulsion, the sense of loss and vulnerability it may generate is about just this, familiarity. Once we know the person, the gazing and gawking diminish and relationship grows. It is the work of all communities to make the different familiar in the service of compassion. Grounding ethics in the realness of the body is a challenging affair, in part because the body is not fair. Its abilities are not evenly distributed and its graces are randomly given to kind and cruel. It is the distinction of Jewish ethics to remain with the body in its varied and socially complex meanings and to push both toward compassion and toward wholeness.

Greenberg, Steven. "Emor 5770." Limmud on One Leg. (Viewed on May 3, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5770/emor/#another