The 49th day of the Counting of the Omer begins on Monday night. Tonight we count seven weeks of the Omer, the last day of the counting. Tuesday night will begin Shavuot.

This is the day of Malchut within Malchut, nobility within nobility. Today, after walking through the previous 48 gates of paired qualities, I think about the big picture of my life. What, ultimately, makes my life worthwhile, meaningful and noble?

Each of us lives a life that is a paradox. We are all stuck inside of our own heads, never being able to experience life from any vantage other than through our own eyes, ears, memories and brains. We never really get to see the world directly through the experiences of another person. Yet, we also recognize that to live only for ourselves is not really any life at all. Without ever being able to be anyone else, we have to live our lives for the benefit of the strangers who live behind eyes we will never get to see through. 

This is what can make our lives noble. For me, the great leap of faith is not the leap of believing in a supernatural God high above us. For me, the leap is believing that, by living for others, we can stretch our existence beyond the limitations of being stuck in our own minds. We become truly and deeply noble when we give away our lives – the greatest gift anyone has ever received – and commit them to the service of others.

When we do that, we become champions and heroes. When we live unselfish and giving lives, we overcome our inborn instinct to gather up everything we can and keep it all for ourselves. We transcend the desire to withdraw into the familiarity of our own egos. We lift ourselves beyond the limitations that physics and biology have decreed upon us, and we become the champions of our own lives.

On this final day of the Counting of the Omer, I commit to living my life as if it matters beyond myself. I commit to living as if the whole world depends upon my ability to see beyond my own narrow needs and interests. In a way, the world does depend upon it. In a way, the world depends upon all of us living that way.

May this be a day for you in which you become the champion of your own life.


For the introduction to the Counting of the Omer, click on this link:
The First Day of the Counting of the Omer

Tonight begins the forty-ninth day of the Counting of the Omer, seven weeks. It is the day of the divine quality of Malchut within Malchut, Nobility within Nobility. 

This is the last of the forty-nine gates we must pass through before entering Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah. It is the day that asks us to confront the most deeply held questions about our identities: Are you living a life in which you constantly strive to take the next step in your own growth? Are you the champion of your own life?

It seems deeply appropriate to me that this week has been bookended by people who show the qualities of intentional growth and heartfelt conviction. Last Shabbat morning, twelve adult men and women from Temple Beit HaYam stood before the congregation as b'nei mitzvah—adult children of our tradition. This coming Friday night, ten young people will lead our congregation's service at their Confirmation. I have worked with both groups over the course of the last year. Although the two groups are separated by a lot of years, and by significantly different motivations, they have in common the quality that I call Jewish heroism.

A Jewish hero is not necessarily a person who scores the winning point or who runs into a burning building to save a life. In Jewish tradition, a hero is, most importantly, a person of conviction—a person who lives his or her life with dedication to doing what is right and with deep understanding that a meaningful life is spent in service to something beyond self. A Jewish hero is a person who becomes the champion of his or her own life. This is the quality of the last day of the Counting of the Omer, and it is the quality I have seen in our adult B'nei Mitzvah students and in our Confirmation students. 

That's what I heard on Saturday morning as one man described how becoming a bar mitzvah was a way of fulfilling a promise he had made to himself decades earlier, when he felt inadequate to the task of saying Kaddish for his father. It is what I heard when a woman in our class talked about her grief after the murder of her son, how she was not able to recover until she learned to let go of anger and rediscover faith. 

It is what our congregation will hear this Friday night from our Confirmation students. Each of them will stand before the congregation with personal statements that announce what it is they intend to confirm about themselves. Here is a small preview:

• "I would like to confirm that I will stay true to the Jewish dream. I will not let anyone tell me or make me do something that I don’t wish to."

• "I would like to confirm my place is in not just in the Jewish community, but the world. I wish to change things."

• "I am a Jew, and all of Jewish history is part of my identity. By learning our history, I confirm myself. This is who I am."

These fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds are heroes, too. They are a model for us all of living a life of conviction and spirit. As we await the giving of the Torah tomorrow night, we are encouraged to take up the challenge, as they have, to live as the heroes of our own lives.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Counting from Freedom to Covenant: Nobility
Ki Tetze: Each of Us Fights a Battle

Interestingly, though, the actual text of the Ten Commandments is not prominent in Jewish tradition. The Ten Commandments are not included in the extensive liturgy of Jewish daily worship. It is very rare that an artistic representation of the two tablets includes the complete text. In fact, the words of the Ten Commandments are generally only heard in the synagogue on Shavuot and when they are read as part of the weekly Torah portion. We do not recite them daily, as we do with other biblical passages

There are historical reasons for this. Early in the rabbinic era, the Ten Commandments were read as part of the morning service, in the place where we now recite the blessing Ahavah Rabbah, which speaks of God’s love in giving us the entire Torah. The rabbis appear to have dropped the Ten Commandments from this place because their inclusion gave the impression that these ten laws were the most important. But, Judaism is a tradition of 613 commandments, not ten. The Ten Commandments say nothing about dietary laws or observing holidays other than Shabbat. They do not command us to provide for the needs of the poor or to actively pursue peace and justice in the world.

Dropping the Ten Commandments from the liturgy may have been a response by the rabbis to early Christianity, which sought to de-emphasize the laws of the Torah and to create a “pared down list” of the most important mitzvot. The rabbis rejected this idea and sought to dispel the notion that the Ten Commandments were superior to the other 603.

The Ten Commandments do have great meaning and significance in Jewish tradition.  It is just that the importance of the Ten Commandments is more about the moment of their revelation than about the specific laws that are included in the actual text.

The chasidic rabbi, Menachem Mendel of Rimonov, actually taught that the words of the Ten Commandment are incidental to the essential experience of God communicating to us. He wrote that, at Mount Sinai, God spoke only the first letter of the first word of the Ten Commandments—the silent letter Aleph. The contemporary Jewish thinker, Rabbi Arthur Green, says of this claim, “God speaks only the great silence; the Divine is a silent womb that contains all of language within it.” 

Is there a contradiction here?  Was the moment of God’s revelation to Israel a moment of a profound ethical teaching, surrounded by shofar blasts and cosmic upheaval, or was it one of preternatural silence?  Perhaps it was both. 

Mount Sinai is the moment that symbolizes the Jewish people's link to God. Like a personal moment of deep meaning and life-changing intensity, Sinai may be described as the cosmic event in which  we feel an internal avalanche that shakes the foundations of our being and our view of the world. It also may be a moment of stunning calm and equanimity in which we feel that we see the world with new clarity. Perhaps this is why Jewish tradition describes the moment of Sinai in such contradictory terms—it is both the storm and the calm at its center.

Many people who have experienced a moment of personal spiritual intensity say that they continue to carry it with them for many years after. The afterglow of that moment comes back at the times when it is needed most, when we feel that life has left us tattered or disconnected from the world.

We can think of the Ten Commandments as the Jewish people’s collective afterglow from our Sinai moment. We felt God within us at that mythical moment at Sinai and ever after we have wanted to carry some reminder of it with us in our soul. We are just like the person who says during a spiritually intense moment, “God, I promise that, from now on, I’m going to live my life differently.”  At Sinai, we vowed that we would abide by a fundamental code for living lives that are ethical, virtuous and meaningful, and the feeling has stayed with us.

We have spent the last seven weeks since Passover counting the days and weeks to Shavuot, which begins this Tuesday evening. What does this suggest about the holiday we call the "Time of the Giving of the Torah"? We await the Torah's arrival like one would await the arrival of a beloved friend...or a lover. We count every day in growing anticipation of Torah's passionate entrance, as this classical midrash suggests:

Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:12-13
“Give me the kisses of your mouth!” (Song of Songs 1:2).  When was this said? Rabbi Yochanan answered: It was said at Mount Sinai!

An angel carried each of the Ten Commandments from the Holy One of Blessing and brought it to each Israelite and said, “Do you accept this commandment? These rules are attached to it, these penalties, these precautions, these precepts, these lenient and strict rulings, and these rewards. Do you accept?” The Israelite would answer, “Yes!” The angel then said, “Do you accept the Holy One of Blessing as your God?”  The Israelite would answer, “Yes, Yes!” Immediately, the angel kissed the Israelite on the mouth.

The rabbis, however, say that it is not an angel that kisses each Israelite. It is the commandments themselves.

There is no question about the kind of kiss that the Torah's commandments are delivering. Song of Songs, after all, is not about chaste pecks on the cheek! This is a passionate, amorous kiss that comes with the acceptance of the Torah. Does it seem strange that we would think of the laws of the Torah as sensuous pillow-talk between lovers? How can we re-imagine the Ten Commandments as a cosmic come-on that God is whispering into our ears?

This is exactly the way the rabbis intend for us to understand Torah. Beneath the outer garments of laws and rules, Torah is a love-song between God and Israel in which the deep secrets of divinity are revealed. God is wooing us to enter into the ways of the Torah, to walk along paths that draw us into the deepest joy of living life fully and meaningfully. The laws of the Torah are a tantric courtship stimulating us to the highest levels of awareness in our relationship with God. 

On Tuesday night, the Torah will call to us, beckoning us to come spend the night together (!) in the practice of Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the all-night study session on the night of Shavuot. The wait has been long—we've been counting the days and weeks—but when your lover arrives, you, too, will say, "Yes! Yes!"