Our Torah portions are named not for their content but rather according to the first significant word that occurs. This week’s portion (beginning at chapter 21) is called Emor because although it begins “God said to Moses”, what God then says is Emor, “Speak” (to the priests, the sons of Aaron).
It’s almost as if to suggest that God speaking isn’t remarkable enough! But what follows is a series of instructions and laws instructed by God to Moses to pass on to Aaron and his sons and the Israelites in general. By chapter 23 these have turned to a list of our major festivals, to be kept each “at their appointed time”.
In among this list of more easily recognised festivals, after Pesach but before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, comes a rather lengthy description of the unnamed “sacred occasion” that we now call Shavuot, and the Omer period of seven weeks to count from “the Sabbath” (understood to be the first day of Pesach) to get there.
Indeed Shavuot, unusually, does not have an explicitly specified date in the Bible; it simply comes fifty days after Pesach.
I confess, I’m an Omer-counting fan, but for many its observance and original meaning have been obscured by its later connection with mourning and associated restrictions. In a world where we have become so divorced from the harvest cycle – where food apparently grows in cans and is available at any time of year – a ritual that reconnects us with agriculture should be all the more important.
In a world where we have a tendency to rush from one appointment to the next, from one month to the next, a ritual that heightens our awareness of the passage of time, that takes us on a journey from one festival to the next, will serve a real and meaningful purpose.
In fact, in more recent centuries, the Kabbalists have also invested the counting of the Omer with new meaning. On each day a different combination of sefirot or attributes is considered so that the Omer becomes an extended period of guided meditation and personal reflection.
If Pesach is our festival of freedom and Shavuot (when we celebrate the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai) is our festival of law and responsibility, we can live this journey from Pesach to Shavuot as a symbolic journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai, from liberty to law, from freedom to responsibility. We can do so with all the more conviction and confidence if we have at the same time reinvigorated the tradition of counting the Omer with new relevance and meaning for our lives.
Image: Shavuot marked the wheat harvest in ancient times (photo: Getty)
