Freedom, Shabbat, and the gift of time

I once received a story via email from an anonymous author:

Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the well-known German composer, was far from being handsome. Along with a rather short stature, he had a grotesque hunchback.

One day he visited a merchant in Hamburg who had a lovely daughter named Frumtje. Moses fell helplessly in love with her. But Frumtje was repulsed by his misshapen appearance.

When it came time for him to leave, Moses gathered his courage and climbed the stairs to her room to take one last opportunity to speak with her. She was a vision of heavenly beauty, but caused him deep sadness by her refusal to even look at him.

After several attempts at conversation, Moses shyly asked, “Do you believe marriages are made in heaven?”

“Yes,” she answered, still looking at the floor. “And do you?”

“Yes, I do,” he replied. “You see, in heaven at the birth of each boy, G-d announces which girl he will marry. When I was born, my future bride was pointed out to me. Then G-d added, ‘But your wife will be humpbacked.’

“Right then and there I called out, ‘Oh G-d, a humpbacked woman would be a tragedy. Please, give me the hump and let her be beautiful.’ “

Then Frumtje looked up into his eyes and was stirred by some deep memory. She reached out and gave Mendelssohn her hand and later became his devoted wife.

Sometimes, we have a sense that we have been there before. On our journey through life, we often experience the feeling that we are not traveling a new undiscovered path, but rather coming back to where we have somehow been. And often it is the little things, the seemingly mundane occurrences all around us, that can give life its deeper meaning.

This week’s portion, Emor, amongst other things, contains a listing and description of the major festivals of the Jewish people, including a process we find ourselves in the midst of: the period beginning with the Exodus from Egypt and the festival of Pesach (Passover), and culminating in the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai on Shavuot.

So often in life, we try to set goals for ourselves, and then seem to lose track of how to get where we thought we were headed, wondering what our goals really are, why we bother setting them, and whether the ones we have are really so worthwhile after all?

Does Judaism offer a recipe for how to keep life on track, and ensure we don’t lose sight of living in the midst of the struggle we call life?

There is a particular Jewish ritual in the Jewish calendar known as the counting of the Omer.

Beginning with the second night (the beginning of the Jewish day) of Passover, we begin to count the days leading up to the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which commemorates the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

For seven weeks (49 days), every evening between Passover and Shavuot, we recite the blessing thanking G-d for the mitzvah (commandment) of the counting of the Omer, and proceed to count the first night of the Omer, and then the second night of the Omer, and so forth.

What is this ‘counting of the Omer’? What exactly is it we are trying to achieve? Sadly, for many Jews, this nightly ritual has become a detail focused on recalling which particular night of the Omer it is, and has lost any of the meaning the mitzvah was meant to inspire.

The Omer was actually a sacrifice of barley (the beginning of the harvest of the grain) offered up in the Temple on the second day of Passover. And it is from the time of this offering that we begin to count the days until the festival of Shavuot, seven weeks later. But even putting aside what the actual significance of the Omer offering was, why do we count the days of the Omer? If we are counting the days till Shavuot, why don’t we just count the days? Why not just count the first day till Shavuot, and the second day till Shavuot, etc.? What is the meaning of counting the days of the Omer, an offering that by the time we are counting the last day of the Omer, had been offered seven weeks earlier?

In fact, the source for this mitzvah appears in the portion of Emor, and it is worth taking a closer look at the way in which the Torah gives us this particular commandment.

“U’Se’fartem Lachem, Mi’Macharat HaShabbat, Mi’Yom Havi’achem Et Omer Ha’Te’nufah, Shevah Shabatot Temimot…” (Leviticus 23:15)

“And you shall count for yourselves, from the day after Shabbat, from the day you bring the waved Omer offering, seven complete weeks…”

It is interesting to note that the day we bring (and wave before the altar) the Omer sacrifice is called here Macharat HaShabbat, the day after Shabbat. Our oral tradition teaches, however, that Shabbat here refers not to the seventh day of the week, but rather to the first day of Pesach, also called Shabbat.

This is an important point, which was the source of great controversy in Jewish history. Over two thousand years ago, a sect of Jews who believed only in the literal translation of the Bible, known as the Sadducees, understood this verse to mean that the counting of the Omer always began on the first Sunday after Passover, a point bitterly contested by the Rabbis of the time.

So if this wording became the source of such controversy, one wonders why the Torah chose to use such ambiguous terminology? Why not just say that the counting of the Omer begins on the day after Passover?

Obviously there must be some connection between this mitzvah of the Omer and the theme of Shabbat. So what does Shabbat have to do with the Omer, and for that matter with Pesach (Passover)?

The mitzvah of the Omer is all about counting. We are counting days and weeks; but we are really counting time.

There is an expression that has found its way into our lexicon today: ‘time is money.’ Is this really what a day is? Is it just a unit of potential for more things, and more money? Judaism suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. That is not at all what time really is.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe once said that time is life. A day is a piece of life, but do we really see this? When we fall into bed at the end of another long day, do we really feel we have lived a piece of life, or have life’s endless trivialities and mundane details actually prevented us from really living?

Where, indeed does life seem to disappear?

We long for purpose and meaning in our lives, and yet life somehow seems to get in the way of living!

How do I achieve my goals, remaining certain that those goals are good, without getting lost in the details?

In truth, changing our children’s diapers, doing the laundry, and cooking dinner are not chores that prevent me from living; they are gifts, which are an essential part of the beauty of life.

And this is the secret of the Omer.

The Omer offering is an offering of barley, the coarsest of grains. Raw barley is actually animal fodder, and it is symbolic of all the seemingly mundane parts of daily living, which seem, at first glance, to be a distraction from the joy of life. The challenge of the Omer, is to learn how to see all of my ‘barley,’ all the chores and details which seem so insignificant, as much a part of the meaning of life, as the mountain views we love to escape to.

Imagine how different my day becomes, if, in the midst of changing my children’s diapers, I consider how many families in Israel, with an empty crib where a baby, now a victim of terror, once slept wish only for the joy and the gift of bonding with a child who needs their diaper changed. How many wives, longing for the husband who isn’t coming home anymore; wish they could be doing his laundry again, with only the dreariness of such a chore on their minds.

In fact, this may well be the meaning of the reference to Passover as the day after Shabbat.

Because when, in the midst of leaving Egypt we became a free nation, the gift we were really given, was the gift of time.

A slave has no concept of the true value of time, because his time is not his own. Only when they became free did the Jewish people re-discover the gift of time.

But time is not an achievement, it is a responsibility.

The question, now that we were given the gift of time, was what we were going to do with it. Freedom was not the goal, it was a challenge, and the festival of Pesach represents that challenge. It was not the end of the journey; it was, rather, a beginning. Hence, the day after Pesach, we begin counting the Omer. As if to say, in the midst of the headiness that must have accompanied the incredible events surrounding the Exodus from Egypt, understand that life is not just the splitting of the Red Sea. It is also all the seemingly insignificant details represented by the barley; the animal fodder the Jews had to feed their cattle, even in the midst of the Exodus from Egypt.

Shabbat, more than any other part of the Jewish experience, represents the gift of time; of transforming every given moment in to the beauty of life. Shabbat is the opportunity, every week, to look back at my week, my life, and appreciate all the details.

So what is the counting of the Omer all about? I am offering up my barley, the most mundane aspects of my life, and I am marking life as a whole new experience, (a “Minchah Chadashah,” v. 16, a “New offering”) which is the result of appreciating the gift of the Omer.

For one week every year I desist from chametz, but only so as to re-discover how much that very same chametz can be a gift to elevate my life. And eventually, after forty-nine days, I am ready to turn this chametz into loaves of bread on the altar of life.

Counting the Omer every night is really an enormous opportunity, to consider all the different pieces of ‘barley’ in our lives, and how much these things that seem to distract us from life, are really the essence of the beauty of every single day and every single moment.

Shabbat Shalom,

Binny Freedman

Rav Binny Freedman, Rosh Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem’s Old City is a Company Commander in the IDF reserves, and lives in Efrat with his wife Doreet and their four children. His  weekly Internet ‘Parsha Bytes’ can be found at www.orayta.org