An Amish boy and his father visited a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and back together again. The boy asked his father, "What is this, Father?" The father responded, "Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don't know what it is."
While the boy and his father watched wide-eyed, an old woman in a wheelchair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched small circles of lights with numbers above the walls light up. They continued to watch the circles light up in the reverse direction. The walls opened up again and a beautiful 24-year-old woman stepped out. The father said to his son, "Go get Mother."
Reflect for a moment on something you have completely transformed. Think about something that was once difficult, that now comes with ease. Perhaps you quit smoking, or find yourself naturally complementing your spouse, or perhaps you were once very insecure, lazy, or shy. Is there a Mitzvah you once struggled with, that now you find yourself doing with ease? Take a moment to reflect and be grateful for this gift of transformation.
Why do we count Sefirah? What is the point of counting days and weeks that will pass regardless of your count?
What happens when I say, “today is 33 days?” No matter whether I count or not, it will be 33 days!
The count from Passover to Shavuot is the count from the day we were given independence as a free people, to the day we stood at Sinai and received the Torah. These represent Jewish peoplehood and Jewish identity.
That is why we include both days and weeks in our count—to highlight and synchronize two ways of defining the meaning of Jewish peoplehood and identity.
A day is a unit of time created by the cycles of nature. The twenty-four-hour period is the natural result of sunrise and sunset. Nature gives us a day.
A seven-day week, on the other hand, is not a result of any natural system. Why does a week have seven days and not six, eight, or the complete number of ten days? Nothing astronomical occurs at the end of seven days to justify it as a time marker, like the lunar cycle completed every 29.5 days, marking the end of a month, or the solar cycle completed after 365 days, marking the end of a year, or the daily solar orbit completed every 24-hours, giving us day and night. Who came up with the universally accepted idea of a seven-day week? And why?
The two fairly recent attempts to change the week into either group of 10 days—the 1793-1806 French Revolution calendar—or into units of five-six days— the Soviet calendar from 1929 until 1940—lasted for little more than a decade and ended up in the dustbin reserved for many experiments throughout history.
Historians are still grappling with this question. Why take a break after every seven days?
Judaism’s perspective is clear: The seven days of creation culminating with Shabbat set in motion the way we mark time. Beginning with Adam and Eve, time was divided into seven days, representing that G-d created the world, and on the seventh day He rested. The origin of the universally accepted seven-day-week is the Torah. “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh, you shall rest.”
Now, there are “Week-Jews” and “Day-Jews.”
A “Week-Jew” is a Jew who sees himself, his people and Judaism as orbiting within a Divine cycle of time. For this Jew, Jewish peoplehood and identity are defined exclusively by the “week”—by a Divine plan. In his or her perception, the DNA of our existence is our relationship with G-d and His blueprint for the world. For the “Week-Jew,” the oxygen of the Jewish people is Torah and Mitzvot—the means of our relationship to G-d. This alone is responsible for our survival throughout the ages.
The “Day-Jew,” on the other hand, sees Jewish peoplehood in natural terms—we are a nation like other nations, subjected to the ordinary laws and patterns of nature. Nations rise and fall like sunrise and sunset. The Jewish nation, they will concede, has demonstrated unique survival skills, but that is because of various historical and cultural factors. In essence, though, they will argue, we are part of the natural family of nations.
This argument fragmented the Jewish world.
All other nations, ancient and modern, have arisen out of historical contingencies. A group of people live in a land, develop a shared culture, form a society, and thus become a nation. Jews, certainly from the Babylonian exile onward, had none of the conventional attributes of a nation. They did not live in the same land. Some lived in Israel, others in Babylon, yet others in Egypt. Later they would be scattered throughout the world. They did not share a language of everyday speech. Rashi spoke French, Maimonides Arabic. There were many Jewish vernaculars, versions of Yiddish, Ladino and other regional Jewish dialects. They did not live under the same political dispensation. They did not share the same cultural environment, nor did they experience the same fate. When the Jews of Spain were enjoying their golden age, the Jews of Northern Europe were being massacred in the Crusades. When the Jews of Spain were being persecuted and expelled, the Jews of Poland were enjoying a rare summer of tolerance. Yet they saw themselves and were seen by others as one nation: the world’s first, and for long the world’s only, global people.
What then made them a nation? This was the question Rabbi Saadia Gaon asked in the tenth century, to which he gave the famous answer: “Our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torah.” They were the people defined by the Torah, a nation under the sovereignty of G-d. Having received, uniquely, their laws before they even entered their land, they remained bound by those selfsame laws even when they lost the land. Of no other nation has this ever been true.
Ours was a nation united by an idea, a covenant, a faith, a commitment, a heritage, a Torah. The ordinary natural definition of a nation—members of one nationality, one homeland, one soil—would not cut it. We were a nation without a nationality, a family without a home, a culture without a language.
In 1948 it became easier to ignore this ancient truth. After the creation of Israel, many have come to think of Jews as just one more nation among nations, a country among countries, a language among languages, a culture among cultures, another member of the United Nations.
Hence, already 3,000 years ago, the Torah instructed us that when we define our identity, when we count the days from people-hood to identity, we must count not only the days but also weeks. Yes, we live in the natural world. We have, thank G-d, our homeland, our army, our language, our culture, our scientific and technological inventions; we have our universities and artists. We have a seat in the United Nations, and we build alliances with many other countries, for trade, defense, and various partnerships. We count the “days.” But at our core, we remain “Week-Jews.” What is the ultimate definition of our peoplehood? That we are “Am Hashem,” G-d’s people, a people chosen by the Creator to be His holiness ambassadors to the world. The day is part of the week; the week is not part of the day. Our experience as a nation must always be seen in the context of the “week,” within our larger identity as G-d’s people.
In 1972, for his 70th birthday, the Rebbe gave an interview to a New York Times reporter, Israel Shenker.
To the suggestion that his orthodoxy marks him as a conservative, the Rebbe objected, saying:
“I don’t believe that Reform Judaism is liberal and Orthodox is conservative. My explanation of ‘conservative’ is someone who is so petrified he cannot accept something new. For me, Judaism, or Halacha [Torah law], or Torah encompasses all the universe, and it encompasses every new invention, every new theory, every new piece of knowledge or thought or action.
“Everything that happens in 1972 has a place in the Torah, and it must be interpreted, it must be explained, it must be evaluated from the point of view of Torah even if it happened for the first time in March of 1972.”
Real Torah does not exclude the “days”—we work with nature and in nature. But we see the days as part of the weeks. The Torah includes every natural phenomenon, and G-d's will and truth can be found in every aspect of the universe. Dedication to progress and scientific discovery is not distinct from Torah; it is all part of Torah.
Some time ago, Rabbi Yitzchak D. Grossman, the Rabbi of Migdal Haemek in Israel, was visited by Mutty Dotan, head of the Lower Galilee Regional Council. Dotan told him that he had just returned from Germany where he attended a ceremony in honor of the 25th anniversary of the twin cities pact between the regional council and the Hanover district in Germany. After the ceremony, German Bundestag (Parliament) member, Detlev Herzig, of the SPD party, approached him and related this story.
His father had died a few weeks before and, before his demise, he confessed to his son for his part in the Holocaust. He explained that since there are many Holocaust deniers today, he wanted to share the truth with his son.
He told his son that he had been an officer in the German air force, the Luftwaffe, during WW II, and handed him an envelope. Upon opening the envelope, the astonished son found a Wehrmacht Army Officer’s Certificate, wrapped in a strange wallet made of parchment.
His father explained that while destroying a synagogue with his Nazi comrades during the war, he encountered on the floor a scroll made of high-quality parchment. The Nazi officer cut out a piece of the scroll to use as a wallet, in which he placed his celebrated officer’s certificate.
Later he discovered that the scroll of parchment was something very sacred to the Jews; it was their Torah. He told his son to give over the evidence to the first Jew he would meet and ask him to deliver it to a holy Jew in Israel who would know how to use it properly.
Upon returning to Israel, Dotan decided that the one who fit the description best was Rabbi Yitzchak D. Grossman, Chief Rabbi of Migdal Haemek, and recipient of the 2004 Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
Rabbi Grossman held it. Made of the parchment of a Torah scroll, this Nazi officer had fashioned a nice wallet for himself. Trembling with emotion, Rabbi Grossman observed that the Nazi had cut out a piece of the Torah from the book of Deuteronomy.
The Rabbi began to read the words inscribed in ink on the parchment of the Torah scroll. They were the terrifying words of the chapter of Rebuke in Deuteronomy, in which the Torah warns of terrible consequences if the Jews would abandon their covenant with G-d if they would reject their Torah.
Then the Torah continued, right there on that wallet:
“Atem Nitzavim...” You are all standing today before G-d.
Rabbi Grossman remembered what the great biblical commentator Rashi explains, that after hearing the horrifying words of rebuke the Jews were terrified they would not survive. So Moses comforted them and said: You are all standing today before G-d. Just as G-d cannot die, you too will never die.
These were the words inscribed on the wallet…
Imagine: Germans entered a synagogue, murdered it’s Jews, desecrated the Torah scrolls—as was their routine. One of them had the chutzpah to cut a piece and use it for his personal wallet. At last, Hitler triumphed over the Jews and their G-d….
Seven decades later that very wallet ended up in the hands of a rabbi in Israel who has thousands of students studying from the same desecrated Torah in his schools. This rabbi kissed the holy parchment that quoted the Divine promise that we will never perish.
This, my dear friends, is the story of our people—we never only count days; we also count weeks. We have an ancient “parchment,” and it is our ticket to survival and eternity. No other nation with similar circumstances could survive; the only reason we did was because of that “parchment” we clung to in thick and thin. I want to ask you today to undo what that Nazi killer did: Take the parchment of the Torah, but instead of cutting it up to make a wallet for your certificate, hand it to your child as an eternal heritage, as his or her personal gift from G-d.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...