Parshah Commentary

Parshat Emor

These days, I am counting. The Torah commands us to count 50 days, from Pesach to Shavuot, from Egypt to Mount Sinai, from getting free to getting the Law. This period of “Sefirat ha-Omer,” or “counting of the sheaf,” also spans the yearly shift from last year’s grain to the new crop, binding history and nature in a quantitative bouquet. The directive occurs in our parshah, Emor, which mandates: “you shall count off seven weeks; they must be complete.” The reasoning for the practice is obscure, one of many mysteries in this enumeration—beginning with the start date, the object of sectarian strife at least since the Second Temple period. Today, as if reckoning the cacophonous syncopation of Jewish collectivity, Rabbinic Jews, Karaites, and Samaritans each count a different Sefirah, like stubbornly misaligned hands in an ancient clock, its movement subtly but irreparably deranged, the secret of its repair long lost.

Indeed, even the Sefirah’s mood is debated. Some rabbis view it as a somber period: Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri, a Mishnaic sage, suggests that the wicked are punished in the underworld between Pesach and Shavuot, while a Talmudic legend tells us that 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died in this period, “because they did not treat each other with respect.” In light of these texts, Jews traditionally observe mourning practices during this time, refraining from weddings and haircuts. On the other hand, the medieval Spanish commentator Ramban argues that just as Pesach and Sukkot, which begin and end with feast days, contain intermediate days (the paradoxically named chol hamoed, or “secular festival”), the Sefirah is a mundane interlude between the exodus and the giving of the Torah—less sacred than the events that bookend it, but still celebratory, a blending of ordinary, workday time and holiday convocation.

Most years, I find the Sefirah’s ambivalences mildly mystifying but ultimately uninspiring. I simply count the days, ticking off boxes of obligation on a mental calendar. This year, though, the Sefirah makes a weird sense, because it uncannily parallels my experience of the pro-Palestine encampment in my neighborhood, at the University of Chicago. I visited the encampment on the seventh day of Pesach, dropping off borscht and hard-boiled eggs for observant student-protesters. I went back twice, drawn by ethical obligation but also by the odd, stirring mixture of grief and joy: face painting for children, students eating matzah and chicken salad, the Muslim call to prayer and a Maariv minyan, photographs of Palestinians martyred in Gaza, protesters basking in the long-awaited spring sunshine, a friend teaching about Jews occupying Columbia buildings in the ’60s, defiant chants about genocide and divestment, and endless aluminum trays of donated food. I am writing this a few hours after the university police, at 4:50 am, raided and “cleared” the encampment. Already it seems sad and sweet, like a dream from which one reluctantly awakes.

For me, the encampment and the Sefirah have been mutually illuminating. Now I see how one might celebrate the connection between new knowledge and liberation while simultaneously mourning tens of thousands. (The Talmud’s cryptic report about Rabbi Akiva’s dead students has led some to speculate that they were killed by occupying Roman troops during Bar Kokhba’s disastrous anti-imperial revolt in 132 CE—a fanciful but presently poignant conjecture. That 24,000, which in most years seems an absurd exaggeration, is now outstripped by the grim figures from Gaza: at least 34,789 killed as I write and, as they say, still counting.) I also understand how the mere marking of time acquires meaning. In an email, University of Chicago president Paul Alivisatos wrote, “the disruption becomes greater the longer the encampment persists,” which at once made no and perfect sense, since what was disrupted was not classroom instruction (which continued unimpeded), but the administration’s symbolic control. And I understand what the Ramban was driving at in evoking the oxymoronic fusion of the secular workday with festival interruption, the struggle to synchronize the quotidian, reassuring cycles of academic life with the jarring traumas of history.

Here’s one last wrinkle I understand better. The tradition, playing on Devarim’s command to begin the Sefirah “when the sickle is first put to the standing grain,” is to count standing up. I have often wondered about this odd injunction to imitate the proud, upright stalks in the field, at precisely the moment they are being mowed down in the harvest. As cops around the country descend in riot gear to arrest and raze, I think I get it. We stand with those cut down, not with the reaper. And though an individual stalk can never resist the scythe, neither can any blade cut through a tightly bound, organized sheaf. Separately, our strength is feeble; in solidarity, we count.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.