Parashat Emor and Sefirat HaOmer: On the In-Between State

Why wasn’t the Torah given to Israel immediately upon leaving Egypt? It would have made sense. They were wandering, feeling lost, for those almost two months. They could have used the assurance and direction of a revelation at Mount Sinai.

Why do we have this period of Sefirat HaOmer, the 49 day count between Passover and Shavu’ot? Why not go immediately from exodus to Torah? The two are clearly linked; Moshe told Pharaoh from the start that the people are leaving Egypt in order to worship God; when God appeared to Moshe at Mount Sinai in the burning bush, He told Moshe that the people would return to this very mountaintop to worship Him. The purpose of exodus was the revelation at Mount Sinai. That was its destination point. So why have this counting period between the two?

To teach us that the Torah is not acquired easily. Netivot Shalom quotes the Mesilat Yesharim as saying that tehilato be’hishtadlut vesofo bematanah – “Its beginning is through struggle and its end is a gift.” First a person has to work hard on her own, put some effort in; she can’t make it all the way on her own; the end result is a gift from above, but the gift only comes to one who has struggled. Enlightenment, or revelation, as the saying goes, only comes to the prepared mind, to the prepared soul.

Fortunately, we are given a head start in our struggle, a push in the right direction. As Kedushat Levi says, on Passover we have the initial experience of revelation and an awakening from above, but then we are left, during the time of Sefirah, to continue that awakening from below. Usefartaem Lakhem, “Count for yourselves” – You have to do it yourselves, out of your own volition and initiative.

It is no accident that we have this period of Sefirah between the two holidays, that we are called on to make our own way from the one to the other. I think that most of us lead most of our lives precisely in this Sefirah state. We have some vague memory of a past revelation buried inside us, and we can occasionally catch glimpses of a revelation in front of us as well. The daily work is in this middle period of the Sefirah, in our own struggle to find direction, to be able to see Mount Sinai in the distance, and to feel its gravitational pull. The Hasidic commentaries understand sefirah as coming from sappir, or sapphire, referring to a clarity or brightness. The point of this time-period is to create within oneself a clarity of vision, a sense of purpose.

Like the Israelites in the desert, we are all sometimes wonderers, winding our way through life, lost and directionless. Sefirat HaOmer is a way of asserting that our lives are colored by revelation on all sides of us, so that our current state looks backward and forward and is part of some chain. We count each day to remind ourselves of these connections, to help us feel, despite our existential bewilderment, that we are grounded, that we can see the revelation just over the horizon, and that each step is part of a path forward, given a sense of direction by its surrounding poles of clarity.