An Amish boy and his father were visiting 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 were watching wide-eyed an old lady 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 w/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 your Mother."
There is something strange about the way we count sefirah—the 49-day count between Passover and Shavuot.
The Talmud states:
Abaye stated, "It is a Mitzvah to count the days, and it is a Mitzvah to count the weeks.” This is because both are mentioned explicitly in the Torah: Clearly then, the Torah talks about two forms of counting: “Today is forty-eight days, which is six weeks and six days to the Omer.”
Yet this is strange. Why is the Torah adamant that we count both the days and the weeks simultaneously?
What do we gain by counting the week after we have already counted the days?
What is this sefirah count all about anyhow? What is the point of counting days and weeks that will pass regardless of your count? All other Mitzvot accomplish something tangibly (whether we fully grasp their significance or not), besides this one.
Our ears hear the sound of the shofar; our arms get wrapped in tefilin; our money goes to a poor man, etc.
But what happens when I say, “today is 33 days?” No matter whether I count or not, it will be 33 days!
The truth is, the count from Passover to Shavuot is the count from the day we were set free and given independence as free people to the day, we stood at Sinai and received the Torah.
The count is significant for it represents the count from Jewish peoplehood to Jewish identity.
On Passover, we became a people. An entity called “the Jewish nation” emerged, after being enslaved to another nation for decades.
On Pesach, we could declare, Free at last! Free at last!
But that did not cut it for us. We immediately began counting the days in great anticipation till Shavuot, the day we would stand at Sinai and Receive the Torah, the day we would create a covenant with G-d and accept His constitution, the Torah, as our eternal mandate and blueprint.
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 astronomically occurs at the end of seven days to justify it as a time marker, like the lunar cycle completed every twenty-nine and a half 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 a night. Who came up with the universally accepted idea of a seven-day week? And why?
Judaism’s perspective is clear: Already from the days of Adam and Eve, the seven- day week was enshrined into human life.
“Six days you shall labor and on the seventh day is Sabbath,” Moses tells the ancient Hebrews. It was the seven days of creation culminating with the Sabbath that impregnated the notion of a seven-day the cycle of into the way we mark time. Beginning with Adam and Eve, and their descendants, time was divided into seven days, representing the notion that G-d created the world, and on the seventh day, He rested.
The origin of the universally accepted seven-day-week is directly from Torah.
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 the “Weak-Jew,” the oxygen of the Jewish people is Torah and Mitzvot—the means of our relationship to G-d. And it is this, and this alone, that is responsible for our survival throughout the ages. The Tefillin have remained the same throughout the milieu of Julius Caesar, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Trump. The Matza is the same before and after electricity, before and after the internet haven’t changed much.
The “Day-Jew,” on the other hand, sees Jewish peoplehood in natural terms—we are a a nation like other nations, subject 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.
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.
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 in 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.
Hence, already 3000 years ago, the Torah instructs us that when we define our identity, when we count the days from peoplehood 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, inventors 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 the ambassadors of holiness to the world. The day is part of the week; the week is not part of the day. Our experience as a nation among many must always be seen in the context of the “week”, within our larger identity as G-d’s people.
Some time ago, Rabbi Y. Dovid Grossman, from Migdal Haemek in Israel, was visited by Motty 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 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 World War 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 scroll. 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 fits the description best was Rabbi Y. Dovid Grossman, the Rabbi took the wallet in his hand. There it was: Made of the parchment of a Torah scroll, this Nazi officer fashioned a nice wallet for himself. 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 continues to say, right there on that wallet:
You are all standing today before G-d.
The commentary 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 come into a synagogue, murder it’s Jews, desecrate the Torah scrolls—as was their routine. One of them has the chutzpah to cut off 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 ends up in the hands of a Rabbi in Israel, who now kisses the holy parchment, quotes 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 from it a wallet for your certificate, hand it to your child as his and her eternal heritage, as his or her personal gift from G-d.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...