Why do we count the Omer?
Ask 3 people and you might well get 3 answers.
- We are counting the days between Pesach and Shavuot, the time we left the slavery of Egypt to the time we received the Torah at Mount Sinai.
- These are the days when Rabbi Akivah’s students all died and it is a period of mourning.
- To commemorate bringing the Omer offering.
So, which one is right? All 3 are right, of course.
The first mention of counting the Omer that is in the Torah is in Vayikra (Leviticus 23:10), where the children of Israel were told to bring an offering of barley on the second day of Pesach, which would then allow them to eat the grains which had been recently harvested. Until the time of the Omer offering, the new grain was not allowed to be eaten.
We were then told to count 49 days (which brings us up to Shavuot) and then bring the first wheat offering. So, on an agricultural level these 49 days bring us right through the grain harvest. We go from barley, which in ancient times was used for animal fodder (no insult to those of us who regularly put barley in our Shabbat cholent), through to wheat, which is an important part of a human’s diet.
But these offerings have a spiritual dimension as well. Just as our offerings became more refined and went from being animal food to food for human beings, as we count the days from the beginning of the harvest, we should be refining ourselves. Each week of the Omer has a specific area of our character which we should be working on and improving.
In the same way, the days between leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai were used as a time for refining our character. When we left Egypt, we were on the lowest rung of the spiritual ladder. That’s why Hashem took us out then; any later and we would have been beyond redemption. But we had a long way to go spiritually to be prepared and worthy to receive the Torah seven weeks later. That involved a lot of hard work on our middot (personal character traits).
But what about the no haircuts/no weddings/no music part of the Omer? Where do these mourning regulations come from? None of the above harvest offerings and counting up to receiving the Torah are to do with mourning.
Time-wise, the connection is quite distant. Approximately 1,400 years after we received the Torah, Rabbi Akivah became one of our greatest sages and teachers. We are told that he had 12,000 pairs of students.
Why doesn’t it say 24,000 students? The traditional Jewish way of learning in yeshivot, and even privately, is in pairs, known as chevrutot. Each one helps the other, encourages, explains, listens, discusses and explores the texts. It’s a system which has continued successfully for thousands of years.
But at some point, these 24,000 talmidim stopped treating each other with respect, which is such an important part of chevrutot. We don’t know exactly what they did, but it is apparent that instead of being 12,000 pairs learning together, they became 24,000 disparate students. Being on such a high level of Jewish scholarship, they were held to a far higher standard than most other people and were sentenced to the death penalty.
We know that their deaths continued for 33 days, some time between Pesach and Shavuot – but we don’t know exactly which 33 of the 49 days. Different periods of time have been adopted by various communities for the mourning of these thousands of students.
But we are told that they stopped dying after 33 days. So the 33rd day of the Omer, known as Lag Ba’Omer (the letter lamed equals 30 and the letter gimmel equals three), is accepted as a day of celebration.
What is so ironic is that this should have happened exactly during the time of the year that we are meant to be working on refining our characters, leading us up to receiving the Torah, every year on Shavuot.
So the three reasons we have for counting each day as we look forward to receiving the Torah, offering the first wheat of the season, and the end of the deadly plague are all connected by our need to improve our interpersonal relationships.
No more lashon hara, no more one-upmanship, no more disrespect for our fellow Jews. Let’s all work on our tolerance to those who don’t think and behave just like us, thoughtfulness and care to those less fortunate, and kindness to all.
