Pesaĥ, as befits a celebration of beginnings, is not only a self-contained festival in its own right. It also looks forward. It is the start of a journey through space and time. Hence the command, associated with the bringing of the grain offering known as the Omer, to count time, numbering the days and weeks until the next festival, Shavuot. The following three sections are about this command. The first is about a famous controversy that arose between different Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period. The second is about a later disagreement, in the era of the Geonim (c.589–1038). The third is about the post-talmudic custom to mark this time, or at least a major portion of it, as a period of collective mourning.

I. New Light on an Old Controversy

One feature of Pesaĥ occasioned intense controversy between the various factions in the Second Temple period and in early medieval Jewish life. It concerned the offering known as the Omer and the count it initiated to the next festival, Shavuot. Here is the law as stated in Leviticus:

When you enter the land which I am giving you, and you harvest its grains, you shall bring the first Omer measure of your harvest to the priest. He shall wave the Omer in the presence of the Lord so that it may be accepted from you; the priest shall wave it on the day following the [Pesaĥ] rest day…. And you shall count seven complete weeks from the day following the [Pesaĥ] rest day, when you brought the Omer as a wave-offering. To the day after the seventh week you shall count fifty days. Then you shall present a meal-offering of new grain to the Lord. (Lev. 23:10–11, 15–16)

The passage raises obvious questions. What did the Omer offering signify? What did it have to do with Pesaĥ, or for that matter with Shavuot? Why the counting of the days between, something we do not find in connection with any other festival?

The real historical controversy however, and it was prolonged and acrimonious, was about the phrase “the day following the [Pesaĥ] rest day.” What does this mean? If we translate maĥarat haShabbat as “the day following the Sabbath,” then the plain sense is Sunday. But which Sunday? And why? And did it really mean Sunday here? There are, after all, two cycles of time in the Jewish year. There is weekly time, determined by the cycle of seven days culminating in the Sabbath, set by God Himself in the act of creation. And there is monthly time, entrusted by God in His first command to the Israelites themselves (Ex. 12:2), to determine the calendar in a complex synthesis between the sun that gives rise to seasons and the moon that gives rise to months. So the reference to the Sabbath in the context of Pesaĥ and Shavuot seems discordant, a confusion of two time modes – God’s time (the Sabbath) and Israel’s time (the festivals).

There was a tension here and it highlighted the deep schisms in Jewish life in the late Second Temple period between Pharisees on the one hand, and other groups like the Boethusians, Sadducees, Samaritans and the Qumran sect on the other. Later in the period of the Geonim, from the eighth century onward, a similar controversy arose between the followers of the rabbis and the Karaites. The Pharisees and the ­rabbis held, as we do, that there is an Oral tradition, the Torah Shebe’al Peh, of equal authority with the Torah’s written text, the Torah Shebikhtav. That tradition said that “the day following the rest day” meant “the day after the first day of the festival,” which, being a day of rest, could also be called Shabbat.

The other groups, denying the Oral tradition, held that the word “Shabbat” was to be construed literally. For them the Omer was offered on a Sunday, and Shavuot would fall on Sunday seven weeks later. The Boethusians, Sadducees and Karaites understood the phrase to mean “the day after the Shabbat during Pesaĥ.” The Qumran sect understood it to refer to the Shabbat after Pesaĥ. The Jews of Ethiopia held a fourth view, understanding it to mean the last day of the festival, so for them Shavuot fell six days later than for the Pharisees and rabbis. The result was chaos: different groups celebrating a major festival on different days.

Almost certainly the controversy arose because of an ambiguity that developed in post-biblical Judaism. Two concepts that in the Torah are quite distinct became blurred: the word Pesaĥ and the phrase Ĥag HaMatzot, “the festival of unleavened bread.” Pesaĥ in the Torah refers to the fourteenth day of Nisan, on the afternoon of which the Paschal offering (the Pesaĥ) was brought. Ĥag HaMatzot is the name of the seven-day festival that begins the next day, on the fifteenth of Nisan (see Lev. 23:5–6). Pesaĥ itself was not a day of rest, but the first day of Ĥag HaMatzot was (Lev. 23:7). That is why in this chapter, Leviticus 23, the Torah uses the phrase “the day after the Sabbath,” meaning “the day after the day of rest,” to make it clear that it does not mean, “the day after Pesaĥ,” that is, the day after the fourteenth, but rather, “the day after the fifteenth, which is a day of rest.” Only in post-biblical usage, when Pesaĥ began to be used as a synonym for Ĥag HaMatzot, did the confusion, and thus the controversy, arise.

Why, though, did it take the shape it did? I will argue in this ­section that a different issue was at stake than the authority of the Oral Law. But first, though, the count itself. What did it represent? There were two types of approach, depending on whether we understand the festivals seasonally or historically. Historically, Pesaĥ was the anniversary of the Exodus, Shavuot the anniversary of the Giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.¹ On this reading, the counting of days has to do with the journey between Egypt and Sinai, between liberation on the one hand and the making of the covenant – the constitution of liberty – on the other. The count is a way of marking the significance of this key seven-week journey, italicizing time for emphasis.

footnotes: ¹ Note, however, that the association of Shavuot and the Giving of the Torah at Sinai is nowhere mentioned in Tanakh. This too is part of the Oral tradition.

The rationalist and mystical traditions, in the form of Maimonides and the Zohar, understood this in their respective ways. For Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed, III:43), it was a counting-to. The Israelites keenly anticipated their encounter with God at Sinai and counted the days as they traveled to the destination. For the Zohar, it was a counting-from. The Israelites, defiled by their long stay in Egypt, were engaged in a process of purification.², Emor 97a. This difference neatly coincides with two other commands of counting in Jewish law. A nidda, a woman who has menstruated, counts the days until she can become purified again – a counting-from (Lev. 15:28). And in biblical times the court counted the seven cycles of seven years to the Jubilee – a counting-to (Lev. 25:8). The former corresponds to the Zohar’s reading of the Omer count, the latter to Maimonides’ interpretation.

footnotes: ² Zohar

The festivals, though, also have a seasonal dimension, relating to the agricultural year. The Omer was an offering of the first produce of the barley harvest. It was this that allowed the people to eat from the new produce of the field – until then it was forbidden to do so. The following seven weeks were the most intensive time of the farmer’s year, the period of the grain harvest, culminating in Shavuot with its offering of two loaves of bread made of leavened wheat.

From this perspective, counting the days had to do with the extended period of the grain harvest. It was a way of praying for a good crop (Abudraham), or of giving thanks for God’s blessings in the fields (Sforno). Probably it was both. There is a further theory that the counting was necessary because people were in the fields, away from the town. There was a danger that people might forget when the festival was due. Hence the count so as not to lose track of the fact that Shavuot was imminent (Roke’aĥ).

To return now to the phrase “the day following the rest day”: those who understood it literally as Sunday had some compelling arguments in their favor. First, that is what the phrase usually means. If the Torah meant, as the Pharisees said, “the day after the first day of the ­festival,” why did it not say so? Besides which, only by starting the count on the first day of the week does a count of forty-nine days yield “seven complete weeks” in the usual sense, namely a seven-day period beginning on Sunday and ending on Shabbat. One Boethusian reported in the Talmud (Menaĥot 65a) offered a third and touchingly human consideration. Moses, he said, was “a lover of Israel.” Realizing that after seven exhausting weeks in the field, farmers would be tired, Moses (or rather, God) had compassion on them and gave them a festival that immediately followed Shabbat – in other words, a long weekend!

However there is a further reason, not mentioned in the talmudic sources but clearly hovering in the background. The word “omer,” in addition to meaning “sheaf,” has a highly significant connotation in the context of the Exodus. It was the measure of the manna that fell for the Israelites when they had exhausted the matza they had brought with them from Egypt. The Torah (Ex. 16:1–18) tells us that the food ran out, the people were starving, they complained to Moses and God sent them the manna, one of whose miraculous properties was that however much people collected they always found that they had an Omer’s quantity (one tenth of an ephah).

This suggests that the Boethusians and other sectarians may have had a specific historical understanding of the Omer. It was a way of remembering the manna itself – the bread of freedom they ate in the wilderness once the unleavened bread of affliction had been ­consumed. This is not absurd: still today we observe the custom of having two loaves of bread on Shabbat to recall the double portion of manna that fell on Friday in honor of Shabbat. If this is so, then the Boethusians would have had another and yet more powerful argument to deploy in their debate with the Pharisees: the manna first fell on a Sunday! On this even the Talmud, the classic text of rabbinic Judaism, agrees.³ 87b; Rashi to Ex. 16:1. That, the Boethusians might have argued, is why the Omer is always offered on Sunday: it recalls the manna that first fell on Sunday.

footnotes: ³ Shabbat

The mention of manna, however, brings us to one of the simplest and most compelling arguments against the Boethusians. It is given by Maimonides.⁴ 7:11. See also Ibn Ezra to Lev. 23:11; Judah HaLevi, Kuzari, III:41. He refers to the passage in the book of Joshua that we read as the Haftara for the first day of Pesaĥ:

footnotes: ⁴ Laws of Daily and Additional Offerings

The children of Israel camped at Gilgal and they made the Pesaĥ offering on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening, on the plains of Jericho. They ate of the produce of the land on the day after the Pesaĥ, matzot and roasted grain, on that very day. And the manna ceased [to come down] the next day, when they ate of the produce of the land, and the children of Israel no longer had manna; they ate of the crops of the land of Canaan that year. (Josh. 5:10–12)

Here we see the Israelites eating from the new produce “the day after the Pesaĥ (mimaĥarat haPesaĥ),” not “the day after the Sabbath.” New produce may only be eaten after the Omer has been brought. Clearly then the Omer was brought on the day after the festival, rather than on a Sunday. The proof is impressive.⁵ But Maimonides is implicitly telling us something more. The offering of the Omer recalls not the beginning but the end of the manna. If this is so, the implications are immense.

footnotes: ⁵ Note, however, Ibn Ezra’s critique of this proof in his commentary to Lev. 23:11.

The differences between the manna and the new produce of the land, the food Joshua and his contemporaries were the first to eat, were these:

• The manna came from the wilderness; the new grain came from the land of Israel.

• The manna was in many respects miraculous; the new grain was not.

• The manna was the gift of God; the new grain involved the work of humans, farmers.⁶

footnotes: ⁶ To be sure, the grain the Israelites ate at Gilgal in the days of Joshua was not the result of the Israelites’ work but that of the Canaanites. Nonetheless it represented the fruit of human labor, which in the future would be that of the Israelites themselves.

• The manna is described in the Torah as “bread from heaven” (Ex. 16:4); the new grain is “bread from the earth” (Ps. 104:14).

• The manna was, according to Rabbi Akiva, “bread that the angels eat” (Yoma 75b); the Omer, brought from barley, was coarse food, sometimes the feed of animals.

The manna was special. The Israelites did not have to work for it. There was no plowing and planting and tending and reaping. It was God’s gift; it fell from the sky. New manna appeared every day and all they had to do was collect it. Entering the land must have seemed in one sense a disappointment, an entry into the prosaic quotidian world of labor in the fields and waiting anxiously to see whether the harvest would be a good one or whether it would be ruined by drought as often happened in the land of Israel.

Judaism, though, has historically and from the outset taken a different view of the world of work. It contains a deep polemic against the idea of a leisured class, and a strong sense of the dignity of labor. God Himself, in Genesis 2, plants a garden and fashions the first human from the earth. The first man is charged with serving and protecting the garden. “Sweet is the sleep of a laboring man,” says Kohelet (5:11). “When you eat the fruit of your labor, happy and fortunate are you,” says the psalm (128:2). The vision of happiness in the prophets is “each man under his vine and his fig tree” (Mic. 4:4).

Flay carcasses rather than be dependent on others, said the third-century Amora Rav (Pesaĥim 113a). Someone who does not engage in yishuv ha’olam, constructive work, is invalid as a witness in Jewish law (Sanhedrin 24b). Rabbi Yehoshua said of the nasi Rabban Gamliel, “Woe to the generation that has you as a leader,” since you do not understand people’s struggle to earn a livelihood (Berakhot 28a). Work is a source of dignity and self-respect. Dependence is the opposite. As we say in the Grace after Meals, “Do not make us dependent on the gifts or loans of other people…so that we may suffer neither shame nor humiliation.” Jewish mysticism coined the phrase nahama dekisufa, “the bread of shame,” for food you receive from others without having to work for it.

Work is dignity. Work without cease, however, is slavery. Parekh, the term used to characterize the labor the Egyptians imposed on the Israelites, probably means work without rest and without an end in sight.⁷, Behar 6:6. That is why Shabbat is central to the project of constructing a world that is not Egypt. Keep Shabbat, said Moses in the second iteration of the Ten Commandments, in Deuteronomy, so that “your male and female slaves may rest as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt…. It is for this reason that the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day” (Deut. 5:13–14). Freedom does not mean not working. It means the ability to stop working. Shabbat is the first taste of freedom. That is why the first day of Pesaĥ is described in the Torah as Shabbat.

footnotes: ⁷ Ex. 1:13, 14; normally translated as “with rigor”; Sifra

What is the larger significance of the phrase maĥarat haShabbat, “the day following the rest day”? To understand this we have to go back to the story of creation itself. In six days God created the world, and on the seventh He rested. As the sages read the text, dovetailing the two accounts in Genesis 1 and 2–3, God created the first humans on the sixth day. That same day they sinned and were sentenced to exile from the garden. God granted them one complete day in paradise, Shabbat itself. Immediately after Shabbat they left Eden for the darkness of the world. God however made them “garments of skin” (read in the school of Rabbi Meir of the Mishna as “garments of light”)⁸ and, according to rabbinic tradition, taught them how to make fire, which is why we make a blessing over light in Havdala, the service to mark the end of Shabbat (Yerushalmi, Berakhot 8:5). Again, this has far-reaching implications. On Shabbat we celebrate the world God creates. The day after Shabbat is when we celebrate the world we create. The phrase maĥarat haShabbat is a metaphor for human endeavor and achievement – the space God makes for us.

footnotes: ⁸ Gen. 3:21; Genesis Raba 20:12.

The argument between the Boethusians and the Pharisees now takes on a completely new dimension. It is generally argued by scholars that the Sadducees and Boethusians were an elite. They were either priests in the Temple or officials or landowners, as close as Judaism came to a leisured class. The sectarians at Qumran were an elite community who had turned their backs on society as a whole. The Pharisees were, as far as we can tell, largely made up of the working class. Certainly the image we have of figures like Hillel, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yehoshua and others is that they were poor but refused to live on charity. It is to them that we owe many of the key rabbinic statements about the importance of independence and of working for a living.

We can now hypothesize that for the Boethusians, Sadducees and sectarians, the event we would wish to memorialize is the first falling of the manna. This was holy, miraculous, spiritual, the gift of God, bread from heaven that fell through no earthly labor. This, the bread that first fell on Sunday, is what we recall when we offer the Omer, whose dimensions (one tenth of an ephah) are precisely those of the manna itself.

For the Pharisees the complete opposite was the case. As long as the Israelites were completely dependent on God they were querulous, ungrateful, rebellious and immature. That is what dependence does. It arrests the growth of character. The one time the Israelites achieved their real dignity was when they labored together to build the Tabernacle. They worked; they gave of their time and skills and possessions. There was harmony. They gave so much that Moses had to say “Stop.” That was their true apprenticeship in liberty.

The supreme moment of religious achievement came when, no longer homeless nomads, they entered the land God had promised Abraham. The first moment they ate of its produce was the first taste of that long-delayed fulfillment. Each year that moment was recaptured in a single symbolic moment: the first produce of the grain harvest. This was the dream finally made real: a holy people working the land God had called holy – at last, His partners in the work of creation. The land was His, the labor was theirs; the rain was His, the grain was theirs. They had sown in tears; now they were reaping in joy. And though the grain was coarse – barley – and though it was entirely non-miraculous, coming from earth not heaven, it was precious in their eyes because it was precious in God’s eyes. It was the humble symbol of the-day-after-Shabbat, the first day of human creation after the seven days of God’s creation. They had received so much from God. Now God had given them the greatest gift of all – the ability to give Him a gift. What mattered was not that it was refined like the finest wheat flour (that came later, in the two loaves of Shavuot) but that it was the work of their hands.

Now, too, we can understand the significance of counting the days. Genesis 1 describes divine creation. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. For God there is no delay between conception and execution, the idea and the fact. For humans, however, there is a delay. It is the ability to endure the delay that makes all human creative achievement possible. It takes time to become a farmer, to learn how to plow and plant and tend. It takes time to become anything worth becoming.

A slave never learns this. He or she lives in the moment. The master commands, the slave carries out the task. The slave does not have to worry about long-term risks and consequences. In this sense, the manna the Israelites ate in the wilderness was not yet the bread of freedom, for it involved no time consciousness. It fell each day; it had to be eaten each day; with the exception of Friday, it could not be kept for the morrow. The Israelites ate it the way slaves eat their daily subsistence diet. It had the taste of holiness but not yet the taste of freedom. A free human being has to learn the art of time that goes with risk-taking and creation. He or she has to acquire skill and wisdom, patience and the ability to persist through many failures without giving way to despair. The fundamental lesson of the wilderness years, as Maimonides emphasizes in The Guide for the Perplexed (III:32), is the time it takes for erstwhile slaves to acquire the mental and emotional habits of free and responsible human beings. In the case of the Israelites it took a generation.

The mark of a free human being is the ability to count time, to endure a lengthy delay between the start of a journey and its completion. “Teach us rightly to number our days,” says the psalm, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Counting the days, without impatience or attempting shortcuts, is the precondition of all creative endeavors – and at the heart of the Pharisees’ and rabbis’ creed is the belief that the God of creation wants us to be creative rather than be dependent on the creativity of others. There were some who believed otherwise: the wealthy Sadducees, the apocalyptic desert dwellers of Qumran, mystics like Rabbi Shimon bar Yoĥai who at one stage apparently believed that the words, “you shall gather in your grain, wine and oil,” were not a blessing but a curse and who viewed with contempt those who plowed fields (Berakhot 35b; Shabbat 33b). But these were voices at the margins. The mainstream held otherwise.

The Omer is the immensely powerful symbol of an offering from the first fruits of the humanly planted and reaped grain, brought on the anniversary of the day the “bread from heaven” ceased and “bread from the land” of Israel began. Coarse and unsophisticated, yet the combined work of land and rain from God and labor from man – partners in the work of creation. The journey to freedom begins on Pesaĥ with the Shabbat, “the rest day,” the first taste of freedom, which is knowing that you do not have to work without cease. But immediately, on the second day, it passes to “the day following the rest day,” the world of human work, the day on which Adam and Eve left paradise to make their way in the world, a task full of difficulties and threats, yet one in which they were robed, in Rabbi Meir’s lovely phrase, in “garments of light.” You do not have to live in Eden to be bathed in divine light. Work that is creative is not the work of slaves. But it requires one discipline: the art of counting time or as Freud put it, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. Indeed most of Jewish law is a form of training in the art of disciplining and deferring the gratification of instinct.

So the argument about the Omer and its significance was a deep one and not just about the authority of the Oral Law. It was about the nature of the religious life. Does God want us to be involved with society, contributing to it and being creative within it, or is that for others, not for us? It is fair to say that the argument has not yet ceased. This side of the End of Days, perhaps it never will.

II. Two Concepts of Time

More minor, but in its way no less interesting, is the disagreement that arose between two of the great sages of the period of the Geonim (sixth to tenth century) on a seemingly minor detail of the command to count the Omer. The Torah states the law in the following terms:

And you shall count seven complete weeks from the day following the [Pesaĥ] rest day, when you brought the Omer as a wave-offering. To the day after the seventh week you shall count fifty days. Then you shall present a meal-offering of new grain to the Lord. (Lev. 23:15–16)

The following question arose: What is the law for someone who forgets to count one of the forty-nine days? May he continue to count the remainder, or has he forfeited the entire commandment for that year? There were two sharply contrasting views. According to the Halakhot Gedolot (a work usually attributed to Rabbi Shimon Kayyara, first half of the ninth century) the person has indeed forfeited the chance to fulfill the command. According to Rav Hai Gaon he has not. He continues to count the remaining days, unaffected by his failure to count one of the forty-nine (see Tur, OĤ 489).

How are we to understand this disagreement? According to the Halakhot Gedolot, the key phrase is “seven full [temimot, i.e. ­complete] weeks.” One who forgets a day cannot satisfy the requirement of ­completeness. On this view, the forty-nine days constitute a single ­religious act, and if one of the parts is missing, the whole is defective. It is like a Torah scroll: if a single letter is missing, the entire scroll is invalid. So, too, in the case of counting days.

According to Rav Hai Gaon however, each day is a separate command – “You shall count fifty days.” Therefore, if one fails to keep one of the commands, that is no impediment to keeping the others. If, for example, one fails to pray on a given day, that neither excuses nor prevents one from praying on subsequent days. Each day is a temporal entity in itself, unaffected by what happened before or after. The same applies to the Omer. Forgetting one day does not invalidate the others.

The final law mediates between these two opinions. Out of respect for Rav Hai, we count the subsequent days, but out of respect for the Halakhot Gedolot we do so without a blessing – an elegant compromise (Terumat HaDeshen, 37).

We might, before moving on, note one salient fact. Usually in the case of a dispute about Jewish law, the doubt lies in us, not in the biblical text. God has spoken, but we are not sure what the words mean. In the case of counting the Omer, however, the doubt lies within the biblical text itself. Unusually, the command is specified in two quite different ways:

• “Count seven complete weeks.”

• “Count fifty days.”

There is a view that this dual characterization signals two distinct commands, to count the days, and to count the weeks (Abaye in Menaĥot 66a). However, as we have seen, it also suggests two quite ­different ways of understanding the counting itself – as a single extended process (Halakhot Gedolot) or as fifty distinct acts (Hai Gaon). This duality was not born in the minds of two halakhic authorities. It is there in the biblical text itself.

Within Judaism there are two kinds of time. One way of seeing this is in a talmudic story about two of the great sages of the Second Temple period, Hillel and Shammai:

They used to say about Shammai the elder that all his life he ate in honor of the Sabbath. So, if he found a well-favored animal he would say, “Let this be for the Sabbath.” If he later found a better one, he would put aside the second for the Sabbath and eat the first. But ­Hillel the elder had a different approach, for all his deeds were for the sake of heaven, as it is said, “Blessed is my Lord for day after day” [Ps. 68:20]. It was likewise taught: The school of Shammai says, “From the first day of the week, prepare for the Sabbath,” but the school of Hillel says, “Blessed is my Lord for day after day.” (Beitza 16a)

Shammai lived in teleological time, time as a journey toward a destination. Already from the beginning of a week, he was conscious of its end. We speak, in the Lekha Dodi prayer, of the Sabbath as “last in deed, first in thought.” Time, in this view, is not a mere sequence of moments. It has a purpose, a direction, a destination.

Hillel, by contrast, lived each day in and for itself, without regard to what came before or what would come after. We speak in our prayers of God who “in His goodness, continually renews the work of creation, day after day.” From this perspective, each unit of time is a separate entity. The universe is continually being renewed. Each day is a universe; each has its own challenge, its task, its response. Faith, for Hillel, is a matter of taking each day as it comes, trusting in God to give the totality of time its shape and direction.

The dispute is strikingly similar to the more recent disagreement about the nature of light. Is it a continuous wave or a series of discrete particles? Paradoxically, it is both, and this can be experimentally demonstrated.

The argument, however, goes deeper. Much has been written by historians and anthropologists about two distinctive forms of time consciousness. Ancient civilizations tended to see time as a circle – cyclical time. That is how we experience time in nature. Each day is marked by the same succession of events: dawn, sunrise, the gradual trajectory of the sun across the sky to its setting and to nightfall. The year is a succession of seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Life itself is a repeated sequence of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. Many of these moments, especially the transition from one to another, are marked by religious ritual.

Cyclical time is time as a series of eternal recurrences. Beneath the apparent changes, the world remains the same. The book of Kohelet contains a classic statement of cyclical time:

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises…. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again…. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl. 1:4–9)

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

In this respect, Judaism did not innovate. However, according to many scholars, a quite new and different form of time was born in ancient Israel. Often, this is called linear time. I prefer to call it covenantal time. The Hebrew Bible is the first document to see time as an arena of change. Tomorrow need not be the same as yesterday. There is nothing given, eternal and immutable about the way we construct societies and live our lives together.

Time is not a series of moments traced on the face of a watch, always moving yet always the same. Instead it is a journey with a starting point and a destination, or a story with a beginning, middle and end. Each moment has a meaning, which can only be grasped if we understand where we have come from and where we are going to. This is time not as it is in nature but as it is in history. The Hebrew prophets were the first to see God in history.

A prophet is one who sees the future in the present, the end already implicit in the beginning. While others are at ease, he foresees the catastrophe. While others are mourning the catastrophe, he can already see the eventual consolation. There is a famous example of this in the Talmud. Rabbi Akiva is walking with his colleagues on Mount Scopus when they see the ruins of the Temple. They weep. He smiles. When they ask him why he is smiling, he replies: “Now that I have seen the realization of the prophecies of destruction, shall I not believe in the prophecies of restoration?” (Makkot 24b). Rabbi Akiva’s companions see the present; he sees the future-in-the-present. Knowing the previous chapters of the story, he understands not only the current chapter, but also where it leads. That is prophetic consciousness – time as a narrative, time not as it is in nature but in history, more specifically in covenant history, whose events are determined by free human choices but whose themes have been set long in advance.

If we look at the festivals of Judaism – Pesaĥ, Shavuot and ­Sukkot – we see that each has a dual logic. On the one hand, they belong to cyclical time. They celebrate seasons of the year – Pesaĥ is the festival of spring, Shavuot of first fruits and Sukkot of the autumn harvest.

However, they also belong to covenantal/linear/historical time. They commemorate historic events. Pesaĥ celebrates the Exodus from Egypt, Shavuot the Giving of the Torah and Sukkot the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. It follows that the counting of the Omer also has two temporal dimensions.

It belongs to cyclical time. The forty-nine days represent the period of the grain harvest, the time during which farmers had the most to thank God for – for “bringing forth bread from the earth.” Thus understood, each day of the counting is a separate religious act: “Blessed is my Lord for day after day.” Each day brought forth its own blessing in the form of new grain, and each therefore called for its own act of thanksgiving. This is time as Hillel and Rav Hai Gaon understood it. “Count fifty days” – each of which is a command in itself, unaffected by the days that came before or those that will come after.

But the Omer is also part of historical time. It represents the journey from Egypt to Sinai, from exodus to revelation. This, in the biblical worldview, is an absolutely crucial transition. The late Sir ­Isaiah Berlin spoke of two kinds of freedom, negative liberty (the freedom to do what you like) and positive liberty (the freedom to do what you ought). Hebrew has two different words for these different forms of freedom: ĥofesh and ĥerut. Ĥofesh is the freedom a slave acquires when he no longer has a master. It means that there is no one to tell you what to do. You are master of your own time.

This kind of freedom alone, however, cannot be the basis of a free society. If everyone is free to do what they like, the result will be freedom for the strong but not the weak, the rich but not the poor, the powerful but not the powerless. A free society requires restraint and the rule of law. There is such a thing as a constitution of liberty. That is what the Israelites acquired at Mount Sinai in the form of the covenant.

In this sense, the forty-nine days represent an unbroken ­historical sequence. There is no way of going directly from escape-from-tyranny to a free society. The attempt to do so only results in a new form of tyranny (sometimes the “tyranny of the majority” as Alexis de ­Tocqueville called it). In human history prophetically understood, time is an ordered sequence of events, a journey, a narrative. Miss one stage, and one is in danger of losing everything. This is time as Halakhot Gedolot understood it: “Count seven complete weeks,” with the emphasis on “complete, full, unbroken.”

Thus, both forms of time are present in a single mitzva – the counting of the Omer – as they are in the festivals themselves.

We have traced, in the argument between the two authorities of the period of the Geonim, a deeper duality, going back to Hillel and Shammai, and further still to the biblical era and the difference, in their respective forms of time-consciousness, between priests and prophets. There is the voice of God in nature, and the call of God in history. There is the word of God for all time, and the word of God for this time. The former is heard by the priest, the latter by the prophet. The former is found in halakha, Jewish law; the latter in Aggada, Jewish reflection on history and destiny. God is not to be found exclusively in one or the other, but in their conversation and complex interplay.

There are aspects of the human condition that do not change, but there are others that do. It was the greatness of the biblical prophets to hear the music of covenant beneath the noise of events, giving history its shape and meaning as the long, slow journey to redemption. The journey has been slow. The abolition of slavery, the recognition of human rights, the construction of a society of equal dignity – these have taken centuries, millennia. But they happened only because people learned to see inequalities and injustices as something other than inevitable. Time is not a series of eternal recurrences in which nothing ever ­ultimately changes. Cyclical time is deeply conservative; covenantal time is profoundly revolutionary. Both find their expression in the counting of the Omer.

Thus an apparently minor detail in Jewish law turns out, under the microscope of analysis, to tell us much about the philosophy and politics of Judaism – about the journey from liberation to a free society, and about time as the arena of social change. The Torah begins with creation as the free act of the free God, who bestows the gift of freedom on the one life-form that bears His image. But that is not enough. We must create structures that honor that freedom and make it equally available to all. That is what was given at Sinai. Each year we retrace that journey, for if we are not conscious of freedom and what it demands of us, we will lose it. To see God not only in nature but also in history – that is the distinctive contribution of Judaism to Western civilization, and we find it in one of the most apparently minor commands: to count the days between negative and positive liberty, from liberation to revelation.

III. Surviving Grief

Beginning in the period of the Geonim, from the eighth century onward, we find the period of the Omer given a character it had not had before, as a time of mourning. The customs developed not to celebrate a wedding during this period, or have a haircut.⁹, 109; Tur, OĤ 493. The earliest sources speak of this applying to the whole of the Omer period with the exception of Lag BaOmer, the thirty-third day. Later sources speak of thirty-three days of mourning only, but here customs start to diverge. Sephardim – the Jews of Spain and Portugal, as well as the majority of those in Israel – observe the period from Pesaĥ to Lag BaOmer (Shulĥan Arukh, OĤ 493:2), while Ashkenazi communities begin the ban on weddings and haircuts after Rosh Ĥodesh Iyar (Rema ad loc. 493:3).

footnotes: ⁹ Rabbi Yitzĥak ibn Ghayyat (Spain, 1038–1089), Me’a She’arim

The custom of mourning during the Omer is not mentioned in the Talmud. Surprisingly, since he knew the literature of the Geonim in which it is mentioned, Maimonides makes no reference to it in his ­halakhic code, the Mishneh Torah. Unraveling the complex story behind the custom and its later variants yields a fascinating insight into how Jews responded to tragedy and may even guide us in understanding the response of religious Jewry to the Holocaust.

The sources all cite, as the basis of the custom, a passage in the Babylonian Talmud:

Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of disciples from ­Gabbatha to Antipatris, and all of them died at the same time because they did not treat each other with respect. The world remained desolate until Rabbi Akiva came to our masters in the South and taught the Torah to them. These were Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua; and it was they who revived the Torah at that time. A Tanna taught: “All of them died between Pesaĥ and Shavuot.” Rabbi Ĥama ben Abba, and some say Rabbi Ĥiyya ben Abin, said: “All of them died a cruel death.” What was it? Rabbi Naĥman replied: “Croup.” (Yevamot 62b)

This is a tantalizing passage. We have no other evidence of a plague that mysteriously claimed the lives of twenty-four thousand students, nor is it clear in what way they “did not treat each other with respect.” It is hard to believe that this was true of the disciples of the man who taught that “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” was the great principle on which the Torah was based (Yerushalmi, Nedarim 9:5), and who said that reverence for your teacher should be as great as your reverence for Heaven itself (Kiddushin 57a). Equally, as a number of commentators point out, it is puzzling as to why this event should be marked through the ages as an extended period of mourning, when there is no special day of mourning for other and more innocent deaths. Nor does the ­Talmud itself suggest that this incident be memorialized.

There is, however, a significantly different version of events given in the famous letter of Rabbi Sherira Gaon (906–1006). The letter, a reply to a series of queries about historical events, is our main source for many otherwise obscure events in rabbinic history up to the geonic era and is highly regarded for its accuracy. Rabbi Sherira writes:

After the death of Rabbi Yose ben Kisma [killed by the Romans for teaching Torah in public], Rabbi Akiva handed himself over [to the Romans] to be killed. Rabbi Ĥanina ben Teradyon was also killed, and after these deaths, wisdom decreased. Rabbi Akiva had raised many disciples, but a decree of persecution [shemada] was issued against them. Authority then rested on the secondary disciples of Rabbi Akiva, as the rabbis said: Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of disciples from Gabbatha to Antipatris, and all of them died between Pesaĥ and Shavuot. The world remained desolate until they came to our masters in the South and taught the Torah to them.

Note the differences between Rabbi Sherira’s account of events and that given in our text of the Talmud. First, the disciples did not die because of an epidemic, but as a result of religious persecution by the Romans. Secondly, the deaths occurred after Rabbi Akiva had been killed, not beforehand. This places a completely different construction on events.

Twice before, Jews in Israel had risen against the Romans. First came the great rebellion of 66 CE, which led to the destruction of the Second Temple under Vespasian and Titus. Second was the rebellion – not confined to Jews or Israel – that spread through the Roman Empire under Trajan between 115 and 117. Third was the revolt of Bar Kokhba that began in 132. The Roman emperor of the time, Hadrian, had initially been tolerant in his approach to the various nations under Roman rule, but he became less so over time, undertaking a program of enforced Hellenization that included a ban on circumcision and the transformation of Jerusalem into a pagan Roman city.

For as long as Hadrian was in the region, there was no large-scale open revolt, but as soon as he left, Jews rose against their rulers in defense of their religious freedom. Bar Kokhba was a charismatic leader. Rabbi Akiva supported him, believing that he would liberate Israel and prove to be the Messiah. It is not clear that Bar Kokhba himself had any messianic pretensions. In contemporary documents he is referred to as a nasi, a leader or prince, rather than as a king. Other sages strongly dissented from Rabbi Akiva’s position. The Talmud Yerushalmi (Ta’anit 4:5) states that Rabbi Yoĥanan ben Torta said, “Akiva, grass will grow from your cheeks and still the son of David will not come” (i.e. the Messiah will not come in your lifetime).

Initially the rebellion succeeded. The Roman forces in Israel were defeated. The nation briefly regained its independence. Coins were struck, carrying the date of the relevant year “after the redemption of Israel.” The Romans sent additional troops from Syria and Egypt. These too were defeated. Realizing that nothing short of all-out war would save Rome from humiliation, Hadrian summoned Julius Severus, the governor of Britain, together with his troops and others from the Danube region. Slowly the war turned against the Jewish forces, until only a refuge at Beitar, southwest of Jerusalem, remained. Beitar fell in the summer of 135 CE. Tradition dates its defeat to the Ninth of Av (Tisha B’Av).

The result was devastating. The contemporary Roman historian Dio estimated that 580,000 Jews died in the fighting, plus countless others through starvation. Fifty of the country’s strongest forts were destroyed, together with 985 towns and settlements. “Nearly the entire land of Judea lay waste.” Jerusalem was leveled to the ground and rebuilt as a Roman polis named Aelia Capitolina. Jews were forbidden entry except on Tisha B’Av. Hadrian even changed the name of the land from Judea to Syria-Palestina, the origin of the name Palestine by which it was known until 1948.

Even more acute than the physical destruction was the spiritual catastrophe. Countless rabbis were put to death, giving rise to the famous account of “the Ten Martyrs,” recited in different versions on Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur. One sage, Rabbi Natan, has left us this account of what became almost commonplace at this time:

“Those who love Me and keep My commandments” – those are the Jews who live in the land of Israel and give their lives for the sake of the commandments. Why are you to be killed? For having circumcised my son. Why are you to be burned? For having studied the Torah. Why are you crucified? For having eaten matza. Why are you flagellated? For having blessed the lulav. (Mekhilta, Baĥodesh 6)

Jews were prevented from meeting in synagogues, engaging in communal prayer, studying the Torah or maintaining communal institutions. It was a devastating period. There were Jews who lost their faith; the story of Elisha ben Abuya, the rabbi who became a heretic, dates from this period. Others de-Judaized and became Hellenistic in their way of life. Yet others despaired of the Jewish future. In human terms it was the worst disaster of Jewish history before the Holocaust.

We can now revisit the talmudic passage that speaks of the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students. If Rabbi Sherira Gaon’s account is accurate, we have in the Babylonian Talmud a highly veiled reference to the persecutions that occurred shortly before, and then after, the Bar Kokhba revolt. It is not unknown for the Babylonian Talmud in particular to speak indirectly and allusively about historic events that were almost too painful to bear. It records a statement dating from this period, that “by rights we should issue a decree that no Jew should marry and have children, so that the seed of Abraham might come to an end of its own accord” (Bava Batra 60b). It seemed like the end of Judaism and the Jewish people.

This is what we mourn between Pesaĥ and Shavuot: the massacres and devastation that accompanied the failure of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives, the de-Judaization of Israel and Jerusalem, and the loss of an entire generation of rabbis, among them almost all of the disciples of Rabbi Akiva. We can only guess at what is meant by the phrase “because they did not treat each other with respect,” but the simplest explanation is that it refers to the deep division within the ranks of the sages as to whether the revolt was justified or not, whether it was likely to succeed or bring disaster, and whether or not Bar Kokhba himself warranted the messianic expectations Rabbi Akiva had of him. Divided, the Jewish people could not stand.

Another traumatic tragedy, almost a thousand years later, explains the differences of custom between Ashkenazim and Sephardim as to whether the thirty-three days of mourning are at the beginning or end of the Omer period. In 1095 Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade, to take back Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim to Christian hands. On their way toward the East, the Crusaders interrupted their journey in order to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe. As Rabbi Solomon ben Samson, a Jewish chronicler of those times, puts it, the Crusaders argued, “Here are the Jews dwelling in our midst…. First let us take vengeance on them and destroy them as a people, so that the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered.”¹⁰, quoted in H.H. Ben Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 413.

footnotes: ¹⁰ Rabbi Solomon ben Samson, The Massacres of 1096

Jews in Cologne, Metz, Mainz, Speyer and Worms called on the emperor, lords and local bishops to defend them, often offering large sums of money to do so, but to little avail. Some bishops did act heroically. Others found themselves powerless before the mob. Eight hundred Jews were murdered in Worms, eleven hundred in Mainz. Many families of Jews committed collective suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Christians, who they knew would torture and kill them if they refused to convert. Three years later when the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, they gathered together all the Jews and burned them alive.

The massacres of 1096 traumatized Ashkenazi Jewry, as the Hadrianic persecutions had done in their time and as the expulsions of 1492 and 1497 would later do for the Jews of Spain and Portugal. Jews in Europe now knew that they were unsafe, whatever protection had nominally been offered to them. Rulers could turn against them whenever it was in their interest to do so. So could the Church, so could the mob. Here and there, there might be exceptions. Bishop Johann of Speyer, for example, was praised in Jewish sources for resisting and punishing the Crusaders and preventing a massacre. But even well-intentioned Christians could no longer be relied on. From then on, for at least seven centuries, the situation of Jews in Europe was fraught with risk and fear.

The Rhineland massacres took place during the latter weeks of the Omer. An Ashkenazi custom developed to say special lament-type prayers from early Iyar onward. Later, the mourning customs of the Omer were associated with the same period. The Sephardi communities of Spain and Portugal were unaffected by the Crusades, so they continued the earlier custom of mourning for the victims of the Bar Kokhba revolt.

This, then, is the explanation of the custom of mourning during the Omer period, and why Ashkenazim and Sephardim do so in different ways. The Omer was Jewry’s Holocaust memorial before there was a Holocaust. What is remarkable, though, is the rabbis’ obliquity. There is not a word said during the Omer about the victims of the Romans: that is left to the story of the Ten Martyrs on Tisha B’Av and Yom ­Kippur. As for the victims of the Crusaders, they are recalled in the prayer Av HaRaĥamim, said before Musaf on Shabbat, as well as in a number of Kinot on Tisha B’Av.

In general, Jewish communities set limits to their grief, knowing that if they looked back too directly on the destruction, they might, like Lot’s wife, be turned into a pillar of salt by their tears. Despite the many Jewish martyrs in history, it remains the Jewish way to look forward, to affirm life, to survive.

The same has proved true since the Holocaust. With some exceptions, the great religious leaders of Jewry, especially those who were Holocaust survivors themselves, spoke relatively little about the Sho’a for several decades. Instead they focused on rebuilding their shattered world in new lands. They encouraged their disciples to marry and have children. They built schools and yeshivot. Today they are the fastest growing group in the Jewish world.

The custom of mourning during the Omer without saying exactly why testifies to the extraordinary Jewish capacity to suffer tragedy without despair, surviving and enduring through faith in the future and in life itself. Jews never forgot the victims of the past, but they contained their sorrow, saving their tears and confining their grief, for the most part, to Tisha B’Av, so as not to be overwhelmed by the accumulated weight of unredeemed affliction. They carried the past with them, but even while doing so they looked forward, not back.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that, having had no new days added to the calendar in more than two thousand years, four have been added in living memory: Yom HaSho’a (Holocaust Memorial Day), Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen), Yom HaAtzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) and Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), all of them within the seven-week period of the Omer. It is as if the journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai continues to be fraught with history, beginning in tears yet ending in the joy of the Jewish return to the holy land and the holy city at its heart.