Making room for each other as well as for Torah
I will be honest with you. When Sefiras HaOmer comes around, my first thought is usually about the itch of an unshaved beard and the longing for my favorite music that I cannot listen to during this time. These are the mourning signs we observe because 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died during this period (Yevamot 62b), because they did not treat each other with respect.
But I have been sitting with a question. The Torah (Vayikra 23:15) tells us “tisperu chamishim yom (count 50 days).” This is supposed to be a joyful count toward Shavuos, toward the giving of the Torah, the way you count the days before something you have been waiting for. So how did grief come to define a period that was designed to feel like anticipation?
To answer this question, I want to share a story I heard.
I recently listened to Rachel Goldberg Polin being interviewed about her new book, “When We See You Again.” Rachel is the mother of Hersh, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th and murdered after 328 days. She told a story about her son on the Dan Senor podcast that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
Hersh had reached a point in his life where he told his parents, honestly and directly, that he was not going to be observing Shabbos the way he was raised. For Rachel and her husband Jon, this was painful in the way only a parent who loves something deeply can feel pain.
But Hersh said, “I will always be respectful.” And what that looked like was this. Every Friday night, every Shabbos morning, Hersh kept going to shul with his father. Sometimes he would stumble through the door at four or five in the morning on Saturday after a night out with his friends and still be up at 8:30 to go. Rachel finally asked him in the summer of 2023, “why are you still doing this?”
He said, “because I do not want my dad to sit alone in shul.”
• • •
Rachel spoke about how when someone does something that is not easy, not natural, not even motivated by their own relationship with G-d, but purely because they love someone and something matters to the person they love, that is kedusha. That is holiness.
I was floored when I heard that, because that story captures something essential about what these days of the Omer are asking of us.
Rabbeinu Bachya writes that before the Jewish people could receive the Torah at Sinai, they had to make room for one another. Not metaphorically. As a prerequisite.
The capacity to hold space for another person had to come before the capacity to hold a relationship with G-d. Rav Soloveitchik develops this idea in his essay “The Community,” explaining that G-d modeled this from the very beginning. Creation was an act of tzimtzum, of contraction. G-d withdrew and made room for us to exist. That is how real relationships work. You cannot give yourself to someone who has no room to receive you.
• • •
Rabbi Akiva’s students understood Torah brilliantly. But they competed with one another instead of making room for each other; thus on Shavuos, they could not spiritually receive the Torah anew.
It was not that they hijacked Sefiras HaOmer. It was that they failed it. The count is meant to shape us into k’ish echad b’lev echad, one people with one heart (Rashi, Shemot 19:2). We mourn the fact that they could not get there.
Hersh Goldberg Polin did not go to shul because he had resolved his theology. He went because his father was there, and he could not bear the thought of his father sitting alone. He dragged himself out of bed after four hours of sleep, week after week, year after year, not for G-d but for his father. And perhaps that is exactly the point.
When we make room in our hearts for the people beside us, even when it costs us something, we are already doing the work that opens us to something larger. The work that opens us up to G-d.
That is the real counting of the Omer. Not just the beard. Not just the longing for the music. Each day is a question. Am I becoming someone with enough room in my heart for someone else?
When Shavuos comes, if we have done this right, we will not just be celebrating the giving of the Torah. We will be ready to receive it.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach, www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
