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Back to Question of the Week Carl |
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A: Yes, and we're in the middle of one of the important '50's' in the Jewish year which also happens to be mentioned in this week's parashah. Mathematically, the importance of 50 lies in its being one more than 49. And 49 is seven times seven. And seven is a full, appropriate, holy length of time. Shabbat is on the seventh day. The seventh month, by the Torah's counting, is chock-full of holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atseret. In the Biblically ordained economy, every seventh year was a Shabbat for the land, also known as a "shmita year," in which the land rested and all debts were cancelled. And after seven of those seven-year shmita cycles, came the fiftieth, the Jubilee year, in which the whole economy was reset at the egalitarian go: All slaves were freed and each family returned to its equally allotted ancestral home. The fifty that we're in the midst of now is the counting of seven full weeks from Pesach to the fiftieth day after the beginning of Pesach, which is the holiday of Shavuot. The kabbalists associated these seven sevens with the seven lower sefirot (=divine emanations): loving-kindness, strength, beauty, triumph, majesty, foundation, and sovereignty. So the 49 days of counting (it's called "counting the Omer") allow the kabbalistically inclined to work through every possible permutation of pairs of these divine attributes. This is the fifth week of the Omer so the whole week is about divine majesty. I am writing this on the third day of the fifth week, the day that the kabbalah calls "beauty that is within majesty." written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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