The Month of the Omer: Counting in Order to Count Oneself

Well then, listen: we are going to speak about this period of the Omer, which, beginning from Pesach, opens a season that is, after all, a sad one — sad until the thirty-third day of the Omer. This is because twenty-four thousand disciples of Rabbi Akiva died during this period, up to the thirty-second day of the Omer. And there we make a pause. Imagine: a thousand funerals a day throughout that time. It marked the generations that followed. And on the thirty-third day, because the decree was lifted from the congregation of Israel, there is — well — an outburst of joy that does not quite account for this halt, this truce. Why, in the end, did the thirty-third day of the Omer become truly a day of union for the whole people of Israel? To grasp this, we must understand what the Omer actually means. And the problem is not foreign to our own days. For if we go back to the origins of this epidemic that struck the disciples of Rabbi Akiva — which forced Rabbi Akiva to seek out five disciples through whom he would renew the heritage of the Torah, the very heritage we hold in our hands today, thanks to the five disciples he sought out in the south of the country — then we understand a little better. We understand better why it happened.

It happened because they did not recognize one another. They failed to show — not love of one’s fellow — but recognition of the human dignity of every person. They did not seek to accept difference, diversity, nuance within the stream of thought that each one chooses, provided it flows from the source and returns to the source. Let me explain. The Midrash says: “Al tehi mitzvat ha-omer kalah be-einecha” — do not let the mitzvah of the Omer be light in your eyes. One must not neglect this mitzvah of the Omer, because the covenant of the promise of the land is conditional on it; and therefore one must be very careful with this mitzvah of the Omer. And when we ask ourselves what the mitzvah of the Omer actually consists of —

We are counting days, and we count them one by one, within the structure of the seven days of creation. Since a single day carries within it the elements of all seven days, we are obliged to count both the days and the weeks. But which days, which weeks are we speaking of? Not the days and weeks of creation, but the days and weeks in which the Jewish people was formed and set out on its march toward the Land of Israel. For the purpose of the Exodus from Egypt is, of course, the fulfilment of the covenant at Mount Sinai, with the luchot ha-brit, the tablets of the covenant, and the Torah, which is called Sefer ha-Brit, the Book of the Covenant. And the final purpose is the arrival in the Land of Israel: to celebrate Pesach there and to bring the Omer offering. Now, what is the Omer? It is a measure — the measure of the manna that came down in the midbar (wilderness) throughout the forty years in the desert. But behold, when the first harvest is gathered in the Land of Israel, the manna stops, and man begins to feed on the fruit of his labor, on the produce of his own land. And what did he do in the meantime? He brought the Omer offering, as the Torah required: that is, he brought a measure of barley, the first reaping he made on the morrow of Pesach, in order to make it permissible to take personal benefit from the fruit of his labor. Indeed, this is a commandment of the Torah that follows the institution of the Pesach sacrifice, of the celebration of the festival of Pesach: when you enter the land, you shall bring it before Hashem. This Omer offering thus formed the link between the manna — lechem min ha-shamayim, bread from heaven, heavenly food — and the produce of man’s labor on his land, earthly food. And it is precisely the meeting of these two foods, the heavenly and the earthly, that truly secures life: “lo al ha-lechem levado yichyeh ha-adam, ki al kol motza fi Hashem yichyeh ha-adam”: man does not live by bread alone, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of Hashem.

It is not only earthly, material, tangible bread that nourishes man. Man lives “by all that comes forth from the mouth of Hashem”: the word of G-d, too, sustains us. If we want our food to benefit us fully, it must have its spiritual dimension; it must find its way back to its source of emanation. And its source of emanation is the bread of those who are devoted to the service of the spirit. Yet this must be made concrete through food. And you know very well that when the world was created, the first commandment given to man was to eat of the fruits of the Garden of Eden — and to eat generously. Why? To maintain the indispensable bond between the concrete, the material, and the spiritual. Without it, a threat even hangs — if one may say such a thing — over Elokim Chayim, the living G-d, the G-d of life.

We must allow this spirituality to remain present within us. Now this is not the time of creation; it is the time that we have conceived, the time we have devised. We have spoken of a particular feature of the Hebrew calendar. We are used to the idea of conception in the earth, to the germination of our seeds […], and of course we are aware of that movement of conception which ensures the reproduction of humanity. But there is also a conception of time. It is we who determine time, on the basis of our events, of our history. There is a time that is not governed even by the sun.

Can you imagine — can you imagine that Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of creation, the first of Tishrei, finds itself postponed in the course of a leap year? So the Day of Judgment, the day of reckoning, is delayed. Why? Because the beit din, the court, decided that the measure of time had to be balanced between the solar year and the lunar year, and so it generated a time — a year of thirteen months. And this time is the one that G-d asked us to reckon for ourselves, for our festivals, for our events. And it is this time that we begin to count from the morrow of Pesach. Why? Because even the giving of the Torah depends on this awareness — on the time we have taken into account, the time we have taken in hand, day after day, day after day, always within a structure of seven days, which is a structure of new creation. That is why, when we count the Omer, we count the day we are on and, at the same time, the week to which it belongs, since each of these seven days has its own character. And just as these seven days each have their own character, so too does the middah of man. Middah means “measure.” What is the numerical value of middah?

Mem is forty, dalet four, and heh five: together, forty-nine. That is seven times seven. Why seven times seven? Because within a single day there is each time a structure of seven that gathers all the elements of creation in miniature, bringing out the particular character of that day. And there are seven middot that govern the world. These virtues, these middot, these sefirot, are what govern our life and what govern the world; and we must integrate them, and through them rediscover the dimension of Adam — for just as we are Adam, so too is the world. Indeed, the Torah calls the created universe Adam Gadol, the great Adam.

And we are the small Adam, for it is our personality that forms the personality of the universe in which we live. And the Torah does not fail to speak of tabbur ha-aretz, the navel — the embryo — of the earth; ein ha-aretz, the eye of the earth; pi ha-aretz, the mouth of the earth; kanfot ha-aretz, the wings of the earth. It attributes to the earth an image of man’s personality. So when man becomes insignificant — and how does he become insignificant? First of all, in the way he feeds on the produce of the earth. When there is no blessing — when there is no blessing, our Sages say, it is as if he were eating like a dog. That is, he regards this food simply as prey: just as the beast finds its prey and seeks only to satisfy its instinct, so it is with him.

Now — I don’t know why the picture has disappeared, but I will carry on all the same. Can you still hear me? Hello? Hello? — We can hear you, Rav Benizri, no problem, we can hear you. — Very good. So: a berachah (blessing) is needed. Now we will understand that this blessing of the Omer does not refer to the day. For which blessing do we say? We say “al sefirat ha-omer”: who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us concerning the counting of the Omer. But the Omer itself is not counted — the days of the Omer are. One would then have had to say “the counting of the days of the Omer.” It is not about time, no: sefirat ha-omer is what gives value to this measure, the Omer, which was the food ration of every member of the community of Israel during the forty years in the desert. So its form had to be purified: sapir, the sapphire — that is, to restore to the object its transparency, to restore to food its transparency, to reattach it to its source of emanation. And the Omer, in particular, is yesh.

Yesh has the numerical value of Omer: resh is two hundred, mem forty — two hundred and forty; and ayin seventy — three hundred and ten. Yesh — you know the word yesh very well. It has no equivalent in other languages, does it? It is not a verb. There is he, there is you, there is he. Does man exist, or does he not? It means giving reality to something. And that reality is present when it carries life, carries sovereignty. I will mention all the same this allusion: the name Yisrael has been broken down as follows — in Yisrael there is yesh, that is, reality (and what this reality depends on, I will come to shortly); and at the end there is al. Al, “no” — al is negation. There is no middle ground.

There is no middle ground: either yesh, or al — or nothingness. So what determines one side or the other? The resh. Everything depends on whether the resh, the head, is on the side of rosh, of kingship; or whether the resh turns into rash, the poor man — poverty, pettiness. Then it is decline, it is downfall. Everything depends on this resh in the middle. And the resh is the panim, the face. For there are two realities in man: his physical reality, and the reality of his face — man’s panim, which reflects his inner life. And this is important.

It is important because “kol ha-malbin pnei chavero ba-rabim” — whoever makes his fellow’s face blanch in public… One must take care not to show contempt, not to humiliate one’s fellow in public, for that is tantamount to a crime: his face flushes, then pales — it is tantamount to a crime. Our Sages said that a person must be zahir, careful: it is better for him to throw himself into a furnace than to compromise his fellow’s life. This brings us back to the notion of kavod — the recognition of the other. One may well leave Egypt and set out on this march toward the land; if one has not agreed to cut something away from oneself, to leave room for the other, one has achieved absolutely nothing.

Everything has to begin again. And that is precisely why, paradoxically, the Midrash links the covenant of the land, the promise of the land, to the brit with Israel. And what is the brit? We have already explained it. […] The brit is the covenant. Yet we speak of karat brit, “cutting” a covenant. In principle one should have said “concluding,” “binding” a covenant. No — because we are indeed condemned to be separate from one another, even in our love. But each one has cut off a part of himself and entrusted it to the other, and the other has done the same; so that wherever we are, wherever we may be, we carry with us the part of each of them. And this is essential for the promise of the land. Now this promise of the land is tied to the covenant of the land, and it is tied to yet another covenant. What is it? The first covenant: the covenant of milah, the brit milah — which consists in cutting something from the organ through which one reproduces oneself.

To leave behind a part of oneself, a part of that love through which we reproduce like all living beings — but not in the same way — and the way we do so shapes the way we manage the land. Look at the extraordinary story of the kohen. Aharon was raised to the title of kohen, with an eternal covenant, for him and for his descendants. Why? Quite simply because the first brother who rejoiced in the other’s success was Aharon. When he heard — you know, the whole book of Bereshit (Genesis) is a story of quarrels between brothers. And here, within one family, Aharon, the elder brother, rejoices in the promotion of his younger brother and in the mission entrusted to him by Hakadosh Baruch Hu (the Holy One, blessed be He): an elder brother who rejoices in his younger brother’s success.

There was a second figure who came to have a share in the kehunah: Pinchas. Pinchas saw the decadence and the degradation; he could not bear it, and he intervened forcefully to stop that plague of improper unions — intermarriage, illicit coupling. So Pinchas, too, was promised the kehunah. And we — we are a mamlechet kohanim, a kingdom of priests: we are destined to be priests […], destined to be emissaries among the other peoples. And therefore the recognition we receive will be measured by the recognition we ourselves grant to others. If we disregard […], then nothing works any more.

And that is the Omer. Bringing the Omer means granting man that which keeps him alive — above all because, obviously, when he has nothing to eat he cannot even reflect, cannot think. So the two go together. This life must be sustained; but that is also what brings people closer to one another. […] it is because we consider that sharing one’s bread with the other is the first way, the very first element, of all recognition of the other. So we also understand this rule of the thirty-third day of the Omer. Rabban Yochanan asked his disciples: what is the indispensable virtue for attaining this quality […]

[…] and to enjoy the esteem of G-d and the esteem of men? Each of the disciples answered. One said ayin tovah, a generous eye; another said chaver tov, a good friend; another said ha-ro’eh et ha-nolad, one who looks ahead to the future. But what matters most is lev tov, a good heart. And Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai said: “Ro’eh ani et divrei Elazar ben Arakh mi-divreichem” — I prefer the words of Elazar ben Arakh to yours, because lev tov includes all the other qualities. Lev has the numerical value of thirty-two. When one has a lev tov, one does not suffer from another’s success. One does not look down on the other; one does not sit there analyzing his negative aspects.

One focuses instead on all his good sides. Now, what befell the disciples of Rabbi Akiva — take note: this problem does not belong to small people; on the contrary, it affects great minds. The disciples of Rabbi Akiva were steeped in Torah, but each was attached to his own prerogatives and incapable of considering the other’s stream of thought, the other’s moment, the other’s opinion. One becomes a fanatic of this idea, of this camp or that camp. But no: one must recognize what each person contributes. That is lev tov. And when one has this notion of kavod, then comes tov. Kavod: its numerical value — kaf is twenty, bet two, twenty-two; vav six, twenty-eight;

and dalet four: thirty-two. The numerical value of lev: lamed thirty, bet two — thirty-two. The thirty-third day of the Omer is when we have indeed passed the lev. And once we have reached this lev, what awaits us? Tov. Tov, its numerical value: tet nine, vav six — fifteen; bet two — seventeen. Seventeen days remain that separate the thirty-third day of the Omer from Shavuot. […] In the prayer, where we declare the attributes of G-d in His creation, in their proper order — in the morning Yotzer blessing — we say “tov yatzar kavod lishmo.” Tov yatzar: He created the good; He is the good. Kavod: respect — respect for oneself as well as respect for the other. Lishmo: because when G-d created the world, it was in order to be recognized in His kavod — “for My glory I created it” — for His own recognition, for His own unity: to make a work, to accomplish a work truly worthy of its Creator, its Author, the Master of all, the summit. And so the journey of the Omer, which carries us from the covenant of milah — with this willingness to cut something of oneself for one’s fellow — to meriting the luchot ha-brit, the tablets of the covenant, the Book of the Covenant, the Torah, which is the covenant with G-d, since one submits to its teaching and cares about the way our Sages themselves teach Torah […] — this is the indestructible charter for preserving the state, the land so long promised […].

It takes on its full meaning because the wealth of the land is immediately bound to its heavenly source. For the land is a gift of G-d to the people of Israel; it is not the object of a conquest, not the fruit of conquest. It is first and foremost G-d’s gift of this tabbur ha-aretz, this embryo of the earth, this embryo of creation, to the people which is itself also an embryo of creation. That is why reshit ketzirchem, the first fruits, go together with the reshit of creation, go together with the whole people of Israel, which is itself called reshit, first fruits. Everything is bound back to its point of origin; and when everything is bound back to its root, then everything holds, everything stands in perfect balance.

And that is the message of the Omer. I leave you with that. If you have any questions…