KA CC Archive April 2023

There was no such thing as time synchronization in ancient Israel.  You’ve probably heard the reason that there are two days of chag (or a festival). There needed to be people who would go as witnesses to Jerusalem to confirm that the new moon had arrived. Then they would start to send out messages to the rest of the communities that it is a new month. Since they were unsure which day was the “correct” day or how long the message took to get to them, they would celebrate holidays for two days outside of Israel and one day inside. This is not entirely so. Though it does have to do with some confusing timing. 

You probably already know that they used bonfires to communicate almost instantaneously.  A first bonfire would be set in Jerusalem; then they had a series of hills on which they had bonfires stretching from Israel to Babylon.  So they knew almost instantly when the holiday started.  Remember back in Exodus, one of our first official commandments was to set a calendar.  Nisan was to be our first month. The next calendaring commandment (in date order) would be Pesach - the 14th of Nisan, when we are to prepare the Passover offering, and then on the 15th, we begin Chag HaMatzot (the Matzah festival).  These are two different days.  Pesach, a day when we do not work, is the 14th of Nisan.  Chag HaMatzot, when we are required to refrain from chametz, is on the 15th.

So, when do we start the next calendar event: the Counting of the Omer?  According to your Haggadah, we started on the second night of Pesach (again, is that Pesach, the 14th of Nisan or Chag Hamatzot, the 15th of Nisan?).  According to the Torah, it is Mimocharat HaShabbat, which in plain sense means “the day after Shabbat,” which would be Sunday. That doesn’t really make sense with the rest of calendaring vocabulary.  The timing of the months is based on a lunar calendar. The chaggim (festivals) are set by the seasons, and seasons are determined by the solar calendar. Those are both naturally occurring events. Shabbat, as a day that ends a seven-day week, is found in the Torah and not in nature (you can’t prove that it is Shabbat without having a calendar).

Since we are a pluralistic religion, with many sects in between, and since we just introduced two different ways of telling time and at least three different possibilities of how to determine when to start counting the omer, that leaves us with a lot of opinions about when one actually starts.  And this all led to a lot of bonfires. Sometimes it was because they believed that they had reached Rosh Chodesh earlier than others, and sometimes because they wanted to confuse their neighboring Jews’ sense of time by lighting the bonfire early.

That’s great, Rabbi, but why do we still count omer?  Great question, glad you asked!  This is my favorite part.  The word omer is only mentioned in one other section of the Torah: when God gave the Israelites manna.  The Israelites are complaining, God gives them the miracle of manna and they are allowed to collect one omer of manna each day, except Shabbat, when they would collect two. And what did they eat before there was omer?  Remember, they had just left Egypt so, matzah!  We celebrate God pulling us out of Egypt where we worked under Pharaoh and ate lechem oni, the bread of affliction, and instead giving us as sustenance the omer of manna, a bread which we just had to pick up in order to eat, a bread of freedom, in the desert.  We’ll count all the way to 49, bringing us to God’s commandments.  I hope you join us to celebrate that culmination of counting, on May 25th at Congregation Beth Am.