Timeless Torah

The human body consists of 100 trillion cells. Within each is a nucleus containing a personalized genetic code, the blueprint of our entire body. In simple words, the microcosm is a map of the macrocosm. Does this apply to Judaism? Can one mitzvah, a single fragment of a highly complex structure, reveal the totality of Judaism? If so, we might view the Bible as more than a series of unconnected laws, but as a unified spiritual response to a very un-spiritual world.

We are presently in the midst of fulfilling one of the commands from this week’s reading, the counting of the Omer, “From the day after the Shabbat (Pesach)...count seven complete weeks...count fifty days.” During the period of the Geonim (between the eighth and eleventh centuries), a question arose concerning one who forgot to count one day. Could he continue, or had he forfeited the mitzvah? There are two contrasting views. According to the Hilchos Gedolos, the commandment is no longer operative. For him, the key phrase is, “Seven complete weeks.” Forget one day, and the ‘completeness’ is gone. In this view, the 49 days constitute a single religious act. If one of the parts is missing, the whole is defective. (Compare this to a Torah scroll, that if missing one letter invalidates the entire scroll.)

Rav Hai Gaon argues that each day is a separate command. Failure to count one day is no impediment to counting the others. (Does failure to pray one day prevent one from praying on subsequent days? Obviously not.)

The law compromises between the two. Out of respect for Rav Hai, we count the rest of the days: out of respect for the Hilchos Gedolos we do so without a blessing. This dual characterization suggests that the counting is both, a single extended process, and forty nine distinct acts.

A story: When Shammai the elder found a special food he would say, “Let this be for the Shabbat.” If he later found a better one, that one would be put aside for the holy day. Hillel had a different approach. Every treat was consumed that very day, employing the verse, “Blessed be the L-rd day by day.” (Psalms 68: 20)

For Shammai, time was a journey towards a destination. From the beginning of the week, he was already conscious of its end. Time was not a mere sequence of moments. It had purpose and direction. Hillel, by contrast, lived each day knowing it had its own challenge, its own task, and its own response. For Hillel, faith was a matter of taking each day as it came.

Ancient civilizations patterned their lives on cyclical time, which is how they experienced nature. Each day is marked by the same succession of events: dawn, noon, and night. Each year is a succession of repeating seasons. Life itself is a recurring sequence; birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death. But beneath the apparent changes of cyclical time, the world remains the same. As King Solomon said, “Generations come and generations go, but…there is nothing new under the sun.”

In Judaism, priestly time is cyclical. Each part of the day, the week, and the year has its specific sacrifice, unaffected by what is happening in the world of events. In this sense, Jewish law is priestly. All may change, religion does not. It represents eternity in the midst of time.

And yet, a different form of time was born in Israel, covenantal time. Thus, time was not merely a series of moments traced on the face of a watch, always moving yet always the same. It was a journey with a starting point and a destination. Each moment had meaning, which needed to be viewed in the context of history. The Hebrew prophets understood this.

A prophet is one who sees the end in the beginning. While others are at ease, he foresees the catastrophe. While others are mourning the tragedy, he already perceives the eventual consolation. There is the famous story of Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues at the ruins of the Temple. They weep, he smiles. When they ask why, he replies: Now that I have seen the prophecies of destruction, shall I not believe in the prophecies of restoration? They see the present; he sees the future. That is prophetic consciousness, recognizing time as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

If we look at the festivals, we see that each has a dual logic. On the one hand, they are cyclical, celebrating seasons; Pesach is the festival of spring, Shavuot of first fruits, and Sukkot of the autumn harvest. However, they are also covenantal, commemorating historic events. Pesach celebrates the Exodus, Shavuot the giving of the Torah, and Sukkot the forty years of wandering in the wilderness.

The counting of the Omer follows suit. On the one hand, it is cyclical, representing the period of the grain harvest when each day brought forth its own blessing, deserving of its own thanks. But it is also historical, symbolizing the journey from Egypt to Sinai, from exodus to revelation. In this sense, the 49 days represent a sequence. After all, climbing the heights of freedom at Sinai is not a single day’s excursion that can be rushed. One false step and you lose everything.

There is the voice of G-d in nature, and the call of G-d in history. There is the word of G-d for this time, and the word of G-d for all time. The former is heard by the priest, the latter by the prophet. G-d is not to be found exclusively in one or the other, but in their complex interplay.

There are aspects of the human condition that do not change, there are others that do. The greatness of Judaism is its ability to respond to both: To be loyal to the law that is immutable, to hear the music of possible change beneath the static of world events; to give nature its due, to give history its meaning. The journey has been slow. The recognition of human rights, the construction of a society of equal dignity, these have taken centuries, millennia. But they eventually happened because people saw injustice, not inevitability.

Cyclical time is deeply conservative; covenantal time is profoundly revolutionary. Both are in the Omer. Both are in Judaism. One mitzvah: a map to a new way of life.