In our Saturday morning Torah discussion last week, held weekly from approximately 10:30-11 am as part of our Shabbat service, having recently been enriched by the additional, weekly participation of our Hebrew School students, we discussed Parashat Emor, the Torah portion known as “Emor,” Hebrew for “Speak!” with Adonai telling Moses to “speak” to the priests, instructing them on the rhythms of the Jewish year, laying out all the annual holidays (and Shabbat) and how they are to be observed (Leviticus 23).
We focused in particular on the portion of the parashah that details the time period immediately following Pesah (Passover), known as the omer, which leads immediately into the holiday of Shavuot (literally, “weeks;”).
We explored the ritual surrounding this time period, as detailed in Leviticus 23:10-17:
When you enter the land that I am giving to you and you reap its harvest, you shall bring the first sheaf of your harvest to the priest. He shall elevate the sheaf before Adonai for acceptance in your behalf; the priest shall elevate it on the day after [the first day of Passover*]…
Until that very day, until you have brought the offering of your God, you shall eat no bread or parched grain or fresh ears; it is a law for all time throughout the ages in all your settlements.
And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering—the day after [the first day of Passover*]—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 Adonai. You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering; each shall be made of two-tenths of a measure of choice flour, baked after leavening, as first fruits to Adonai.
On that same day you shall hold a celebration; it shall be a sacred occasion for you; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a law for all time in all your settlements, throughout the ages.
[*There was a long debate, not relevant here, about from which exact date one was instructed to begin the counting. Rabbinic consensus eventually formed around this interpretation: beginning to count from the day after the first day of Passover.]
We find ourselves in exactly this period of the Jewish calendar—the 50 days in between Pesah and Shavuot. So we asked our participants, what exactly might be the purpose of these rituals? And how might we make meaning of the ritual as it is practiced today, stoically and methodically counting each of the 50 days between Pesah and Shavuot.
Our participants ventured a number of possibilities. One said that the ritual of taking the first sheaf (omer) of the harvest and presenting it to God before partaking directly of the harvest ourselves, is an acknowledgment that we are not the only ones who contributed to the blessing before us. Even if we worked hard to draw forth this grain from the earth, so much had to go into the miracle that is life’s generation, including Divine blessing.
The subsequent counting keeps us in the rhythm of Jewish time, and is aligned with our hopes and trepidations as we pray that the harvest will continue to bear fruit. These seven weeks were an auspicious time, reliant on the cooperation of the weather and so much else. By counting each day, we kept ourselves aligned with the Source that underlies all things, recognizing our mutual interdependence.
This culminates on Shavuot, the bread offering at the end of the 50 days, as one younger participant taught, as distinct from the grain offering at their beginning, to signal that humanity and the Divine operate interdependently: God creates the raw ingredients, with humanity also having a role in transforming what is in front of us.
This extends, we suggested, to much of our confrontation with the universe: Jewish theology makes space for humanity’s role, in partnership with the Divine, to bring about the world for which we yearn.
