Life’s great challenge: Make every moment count

There is a legend regarding Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the well-known German composer, who was far from being handsome (long 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 hunchbacked.’ Right then and there I called out, ‘Oh G-d, a hunchbacked 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 been. This week’s portion, Emor, contains a Jewish ritual that we find ourselves in the midst of: the counting of the Omer.

Beginning with the second night of Passover, we begin to count the days leading to the 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, and so forth.

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 the actual significance of the Omer offering, 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? Furthermore, why are we counting up, why not down?

I remember the nightly ritual in the army of one of my veteran soldiers, Chaim Berro, who, like most of the veterans in the unit who were getting closer to the day they would finish their regular service, had a huge chart with each day in a box till the last day which was the day he was due to get discharged. Every night, he would gather his buddies and make a big ceremony of marking an X in the box of the day just passed. In fact, he patterned his ritual after the counting of the Omer, and would yell out:

“ HaYom Yom…” “Today is 27 days, which are three weeks and six days left until Chaim Berro gets out of Hell!”

Why don’t we count down 20 days till Shavuot, and then ten days till Shavuot, building up the excitement at the approach of the day when 3,200 years ago we received the Torah? Why do we count up?

The verse in our portion of Emor states: “And you shall count for yourselves, from the day after Shabbat, from the day you bring the waved Omer offering, seven complete weeks.” (Leviticus 23:15)

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. What does Shabbat have to do with the Omer, and for that matter with Pesach?

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

What does it mean to count a day? We live in an age where the smartphone and Post-it notes have turned our days into a list of “to do”s. We think a day is a project list, but in truth we have lost sight of what a day is really meant to be. Of the expression “time is money” — is this really what a day is? Judaism suggests that nothing could be further from the truth.

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 feel we have lived a piece of life, or have life’s endless trivialities and mundane details actually prevented us from really living?

There is a beautiful Mishnah in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) that says that if a person, in the midst of learning Torah, happens across a beautiful tree and interrupts his learning to exclaim Mah Na’eh Ilan Zeh (How beautiful is this tree!), then Mitcha’yev Be’Nafsho (His life is forfeit!).

Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch suggests a beautiful idea to explain this teaching: if seeing a beautiful tree is an interruption of a person’s Torah study, then he is missing the entire point. The beauty of nature is not an interruption of my relationship with G-d; it is an extension of it. Changing my 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; oly when they became free did the Jewish people rediscover the gift of time. But time is not an achievement, it is a responsibility.

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, we understand that life is not just the splitting of the Reed 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.

And this, of course, is the essence of Shabbat. 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 counting 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 (New offering) which is the result of appreciating the gift of the Omer.

And of course, this is why we count up, because the point is that we are growing every day, every minute, as a result of this relationship we can have with our ‘barley.’

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.

Indeed, one of life’s greatest challenges is to make every moment count.

Rabbi Binny Freedman is rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem.

Columnist@TheJewishStar.com