Parashat Emor, Leviticus 21:1-24:23

This Parasha has been generously sponsored by Jeanette Grosman. In memory of her dear friend, Lieba Lesk, 2 Iyar.

In our counting the Omer, God is counting on us.

Few things are as delightful as being present when a young child accomplishes a new task or makes a discovery. I treasure the memories of each of my children managing that first bike ride on his own. Light and darkness were never the same after my then four-month-old son discovered his shadow and tried to catch it. There is something magical about a toddler making the connection between an abstract concept and a concrete item –such as numbers. It is pure pleasure to find out a youngster's age by the number of fingers they proudly hold up.

This intangible pleasure of connecting the concrete and abstract may lie behind the popularity of Count Von Count, the vampirish character on Sesame Street who will count anything and everything. The technical term for his obsession is Arithmomania. The Count has been entertaining and educating youngsters for thirty-six years; that's double Chai in Jewish terms, but who's counting? (Chai, the two-lettered Hebrew word for life has a numerical value of 18.)

It's too bad the Count isn't Jewish. This week's portion, Emor, would have been perfect for his Bar-Mitzvah. He might have started his Dvar Torah (exposition on the weekly torah portion) by telling us that this week's portion is brought to you by the number seven. The twenty-third chapter of Leviticus is all about the calendar. It teaches that the seventh day, Shabbat is important: On six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there shall be a sabbath of complete rest, a sacred occasion. (Leviticus 23:3) The seventh month (Tishrei) contains important holidays: In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with loud blasts. …Mark, the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be a sacred occasion for you: you shall practice self-denial… On the fifteenth day of this seventh month there shall be the Feast of Booths to the Lord, [to last] seven days. (Leviticus 23:23, 27, 34) The pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot and Pesach each lasts seven days. The connection between the third pilgrimage festival, Shavuot, and Pesach is also dealt with in multiples of seven: And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering — the day after the sabbath — you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week — fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to the Lord. (Leviticus 23:15-16)

Counting the days from Pesach to Shavuot is called sefirat ha’omer, the counting of the Omer, the Omer being a measure of grain brought to the Temple in Jerusalem. (For Sesame Street fans who prefer letters to numbers, this week's parasha is brought to you by the letters e, m, o, and r – which in English spell both Emor and Omer.) The period of sefirat ha’omer is the time between the barley harvest in early spring and the wheat harvest in late spring. It consists of seven weeks of seven days. I am sure the Count would love to count the days, if not each grain in the harvest offering; however, someone else got there first, and today it is possible to "Count the Omer with Homer" i.e. Homer Simpson!

Though we are currently in that period of time between Pesach and Shavuot, our concern is no longer with the harvests of ancient times. In keeping with rabbinic interpretation, sefirat ha’omer is the preparatory period to receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai on Shavuot. It is a measure of the spiritual distance we have traveled from Egyptian servitude to freely entering God's covenant.

The period that connects the two levels of freedom, Sefirat Haomer (counting of the Omer), began with the cutting of the first sheaf of barley that ripened. Barley is animal fodder. An animal is a being whose consciousness consists of the immediate situation. Having no vision of what is beyond the self is the least Jewish of attitudes. As we count the days representing the duration of the barley harvest, we rise toward the start of what was the wheat harvest. Wheat is human food, a symbol of hokhmah, intelligence (based on the rabbis' dictum that a child does not utter its first word until it has tasted bread).
… The message is that without Torah, which gives us the insights to recognize what we want, and the moral standards and social ethics to guide us to accomplish it, we are like animals who respond to instinct. Raw barley needs to give way to the refined wheat, the grain to meal and bread. Raw natural intelligence needs to be refined to become the wisdom through which potential can be reached.

Lesli Koppelman Ross, Celebrate! The Complete Jewish Holiday Handbook, p. 125

Counting is also a measure of enthusiasm. (Count Von Count being a wonderful role model for this!) Children count the days until their birthday. Students count the days until summer vacation. We count the days until the visit from a favorite relative. Counting requires our attention. We take note of something and are fully engaged in it; we take account and are accountable. For Maimonides, the eagerness is as crucial as the actual counting:

Just as one who awaits a most intimate friend on a certain day counts in ardent expectation the days and even the hours until his coming, so we count the days from the anniversary of our departure from Egypt until the Festival of the Giving of the Torah. For the latter was the aim and object of the Exodus from Egypt.

In counting the Omer we spiritually reaffirm our devotion to God, Torah and fulfilling the Divine will. You could say that in our counting the Omer, God is counting on us. Each day of sefirat ha’omer is an opportunity to strengthen that spiritual bond. The tradition of studying Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) reinforces this desire. So too does the Kabbalistic (mystical) approach of using every day to focus on a particular combination of God's emanations. (Each emanation is called a sefirah in Hebrew; the same word also means "counting".) Whatever approach one brings to this task, the desire is best expressed in – of all things – Sonnets from the Portuguese:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Shabbat shalom,
MS