DO YOU HAVE SELF CONTROL?

Joke: There are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can’t.

But for those who know how to count, it is not difficult to figure out that 14 days constitute two weeks!

There is something strange about how we count sefirah the 49-day count between Passover and  Shavuot as we read in this week’s Torah portion Emor.

The Talmud states: "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:

Then, the Torah talks about two forms of counting: counting seven weeks and counting 49 days. We thus fulfill both mandates: After the first week, we count as follows: “Today is seven days, which is one week to the Omer.” The next night: “Today is eight days, which is one week and one day to the Omer.” “Today is forty-eight days, 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? One of these counts is superfluous. What do we gain by counting the week after we have already counted the days?

Let’s excavate the mystery of the days and the weeks, the teachings of Kabbalah and Chassidism describe seven basic character traits in the heart of each human being: Chesed (love, kindness), Gevurah (discipline, boundaries, restraint), Tiferet (beauty,  empathy), Netzach (victory, ambition), Hod (humility, gratitude, and acknowledging mistakes), Yesod  (bonding and communicatively) and Malchut (leadership, confidence, selflessness). 

This is the deeper significance of the “counting of the omer,” the mitzvah to count seven weeks from  Passover to Shavuot. Judaism designates a time of the year for “communal therapy,” when together we go through a process of healing our inner selves, step by step, issue by issue, emotion by emotion.  On each of the seven weeks, we focus on one of the seven emotions in our lives, examining it, refining it, and fixing it aligning it with the Divine emotions.

The first week we focus on the love in our life. Do I know how to express and receive love? Do I know how to love? In the second week, we focus on our capacity for creating boundaries. Do I know how to create proper borders? In the third week, we reflect on our ability to empathize. Do I know how to emphasize? Do I know how to be here for someone else on their terms, not mine? In the fourth week, we look at our capacity to triumph in the face of adversity. Do I know how to win? Do I have ambition? The fifth week is on our ability to express gratitude, show vulnerability, and admit mistakes.  The sixth week is on our ability to communicate and bond. Finally, in the seventh week, we will focus on our skills as leaders. I’m confident enough to lead. Do I know how to lead? Do I possess inner confidence and dignity?

But as we recall, the mitzvah is to count both the days and the weeks. Each of the seven weeks is further divided into seven days. Each of these seven traits is expressed in our lives in various thoughts, words, and deeds. So during the seven days of each week, we focus on each day on another detail of how this particular emotion expresses itself in our life. If the week-count represents tackling the core of the emotion itself, the day-count represents tackling not the emotion itself at its core, but rather how it expresses itself in our daily lives, in the details of our lives, in our behaviors, words, and thoughts.

When I say, “Today is one week to the omer,” I am saying that I managed to tune in to the full scope of that emotion, transforming it, healing it at its core.

Occasionally, you hear what we call a miracle story. Someone who has been struggling with an addiction for many years has a deep insight, or perhaps they go through a therapeutic program and they come out completely healed. They have touched such a deep place within themselves, that it completely transformed their life. The addiction is gone. Their anger or jealousy is no longer an issue.  Like a child who is being toilet trained, at one point he stops entertaining the idea of using a diaper.  There is no challenge any longer. He has matured. So too, there is a possibility of counting weeks i.e. completely transforming a particular emotion, completely weeding out the distortions. 

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."

This is true for many of us. Reflect for a moment on something that 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. 

But to be honest, that is a unique and rare experience. We now come to the second model of self-refinement, the “day model.” This is the model that belongs to each of us, at every moment. I am not always capable, maybe I am never capable, of the week model, but I am always capable of the day model. There is no great transformation here, the urges are there, the temptations are there, the 

dysfunction is there, the addictions are there, the negative emotions are there, and the promiscuous cravings are intact, but I manage to refine the day meaning I learn how to control where and how that emotion will be expressed in the details of my life. I may not have the ability to redefine the very core of the emotion the entire “week” but I can still choose how it will be channeled, or not channeled, in the details of my life.

Imagine you are driving your car and approaching a red light. Now you've got someone in the backseat screaming, “Go! Run the light! Just do it!” The guy is screaming right in your ear. The screams are loud and annoying, but if you're the one behind the wheel, no amount of screaming can make you run the light. Why not? Because you can identify the screamer as an alien voice to yourself; he is a stranger bringing up a ludicrous and dangerous idea. You may not be able to stop the screaming, but you can identify it, and thus quarantine it, putting it in context of where it belongs to a strange man hollering stupidity. 

But imagine if when hearing that voice “take the red light,” you decide that it is your rational mind speaking to you; you imagine that this is your intelligence speaking to you then it becomes so much harder to say no.

Ditto with emotions and thoughts. Even while being emotionally hijacked, I still have the wheel in my hand. I may not have the ability now to transform my urge and stop the screaming of certain thoughts, but as long as I can identify that this thought is not my essence, and is coming from a part of me that is insecure and unwholesome, I need not allow that thought to define my, to control my behavior, to dictate my words and actions.  

Say you get a text from your wife: “When are you coming home?” Immediately you experience a thought that produces anger. “Will she ever appreciate how hard I work? What does she think I am doing here in the office? Can’t she just leave me alone!” 

But, hey, relax. All she asked was when you are coming home, perhaps because she misses you and loves you and wants to see your face. But due to your insecurities, you can’t even see that. You are used to your mother bashing you, and you instinctively assume she is also bashing you. But she is not.  She just asked a simple, innocent question.

Can I get rid of my insecurity and my anger? No! But I can IDENTIFY my emotions as coming from my insecure dimensions, and I can say to myself, that I will not allow that part of myself to take control over my 

life. Once I identify where the emotion comes from, I can quarantine it, and let it be what it is, but without allowing it to define me. The key is that I do not get trapped into thinking that that thought is me and that it reflects my essence. No! it is just a thought. It is not me. And it does not have to be me. I define it; it does not define me.

I did not manage to refine the week. But I did manage to refine the day I got control of how my thoughts and emotions would manifest themselves in the individual days and behaviors of my life.

Winston Churchill suffered from depression. In his biography, he describes how he came to see his depression as a black dog always accompanying him and sometimes barking very loudly. But the black dog was not him. The depressing thoughts were just those thoughts.

It is one of the powerful ideas in Tanya, that thoughts are the “garments of the soul,” not the soul.  Garments are made to change. We often see our thoughts as our very selves. But they are not; they are garments. You can change them whenever you want to. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky