Making Our Days Count

In the book of Psalms it is written,

“Teach us to number our days so that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12)

The weather is warming up and you probably are counting the days until your first cookout — you may already have started barbecuing. Well, this is the Jewish season for counting the days and soon the day for lighting up the campfire. Starting on the second night of Passover, we began counting the Omer, the forty-nine days until Shavuot and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. We count for seven weeks and Day 50 is Shavuot. We are instructed to count seven weeks from the day of the offering (the second day of Passover) and on the 50th day, the festival of Shavuot (also known as the Feast of Weeks) begins.

The term Omer means “barley sheaf” and refers to the offering brought to the Temple on the second day of Passover. According to Leviticus 22:15: “You shall count for yourselves from the day after the day of rest, from the day brought the Omer of the wave offering; seven complete weeks there shall be, until the day after the seventh week shall you number fifty days…”

We are instructed to count seven weeks from the day of the offering (the second day of Passover) and on the 50th day, the festival of Shavuot (also known as the Feast of Weeks) begins. Since the destruction of the Temple, the Omer sacrifice is no longer offered, but it is still a mitzvah to count the 50 days between Passover and Shavuot.

Our holiday celebrations create sacred moments in the present through ritual and worship. According to our tradition, these sacred moments are most accessible and powerful when we connect with our past at the “set times of God.”

In his book, The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us that “Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.”

It is up to us to sanctify time as well as space, and count the moments of time in our lives that draw us toward spiritual connection. As we count our days, weeks, and months, we are reminded to make every day count. In each and every moment we have the potential to recreate ourselves and the world around us.

Learn more about counting the Omer here: http://www.reformjudaism.org/counting-omer

Simpsons fans count the Omer with Homer: http://homercalendar.net/Welcome.html

Download the CCAR Omer app for your phone: https://www.ccarpress.org/shopping_product_list.asp?catID=3754

L’shalom,

Rabbi Audrey S. Pollack

Filed under: Rabbi's Message

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