Time, Land, Love

For the past several years I've been writing short 'drashes to offer during the Friday Healing Circle, an online gathering for prayer, song, meditation and poetry that's been onset of the pandemic.  I call these drashlets "Torah Bytes." Mostly they touch on the Torah portion of the week, but sometimes I speak about an upcoming Festival or something happening in the world. The past few weeks I've been speaking about the counting of the Omer and how the daily the qualities that we invoke in the service of spiritual refinement and purification may connect with the Torah portion of the week. Here's a sample from Friday, May 16, 2025, which was the 33rd day of the Omer, L'ag B'Omer. The poem at the end is from This Is the Day, Ha-Yom Yom, my book of poems inspired by the practice of counting the Omer.

Parashat Emor, Hod sheh’Hod, L’ag B’Omer
by Rabbi Diane Elliot

In this week’s Torah portion, Emor, as we near the end of the Book of Leviticus, the Priestly Torah, the Divine, speaking through Moses, lays out the whole year’s-worth of  “appointed festivals”--mo’adei YHVH--times when the people are to appear before God after they have settled in the Land of Promise. (At this point in the story, both the people and God are expecting this to happen very soon.)

Beginning with Shabbat, the Holy One conveys an intricate web of ritual, a weekly and yearly round of observances designed to keep the whole community in connection with YHVH, the agent of their freedom, provider of their sustenance, and Source of their Holiness. After Shabbat comes the Pesach offering and hag ha-matzot, the seven-day Festival of Unleavened Bread, on the second night of which a tray of coarse flour made from roasted, ground barley kernels of the Omer, the sheaf of barley from the early harvest that has been brought to the Temple, is to be lifted as a wave offering. This inaugurates the counting of the seven weeks: sheva shabbatot t’mimot tih’yehnah, seven complete weeks they shall be. 

Then, on the 50th day, a new meal offering is made to HaShem, and the people make another pilgrimage to the Temple, this time offering of the first fruits of the early summer harvest along with fire offerings, sustaining the thread of connection until they will convene again for Sukkot, the festival marking the final fall harvest with an enormous number of fire offerings and the famous water-drawing ritual the Simhat Beit Sho’evah, invoking Divine favor in the form of rain—rain in due season, not too harsh nor too scant—to foster the bringing forth of next spring’s harvest. And so the cycle begins again. 

What struck me in contemplating Parashat Emor this year is that before we Jews had a national narrative or a mystical tradition of spiritual refinement, we had these very physical seasonal agricultural rituals tethering us to Divinity, to the Presence and promise of a Divine guardian to whom we were accountable. We were never to appear before the priests empty-handed, but always to show up carrying the best fruits of our labors to share with one another and with God. In this way, together with the observance of mitzvot, spiritual imperatives for how we were to treat our fellow beings and balance ourselves, we would weave a holy community.

And despite centuries of exile from the land, cut off from the seasonal rounds of planting, lambing, and harvesting, our ritual calendar continues to tie us to the seasons, the cycles of sun and moon, of rain and wind and heat and dust. Through the millennia we have clung to these festivals. They keep us whole, awake, alive. For if we are people of the book, we are also people of the body and of the Earth. Even in our urban existences, our religious culture has maintained that deeply grooved sense of the flow of time in relation to the Earth’s turning, the changing light, the upwelling and dying away of crops, the cycles of living and dying. This is Jewish time. In the midst of cities, we build our sukkot, modeled on the harvest-time field huts of yore, on the roofs of high-rises and on asphalt parking lots. We count the days, perhaps subliminally feeling traces of the anxious anticipation that our ancestors must’ve felt awaiting the maturing of the crucial wheat crop. 

Today national narratives and centuries of mystical spiritual practice overlay the ancient agricultural rituals that once bound us to the Great Power we sensed commanding sky and land and sea, wind and rain and sun––the One. Last week we passed the midway point of the Omer season. Today, Hod sheh’b’Hod, the 33rd day of the Omer, moves us to the depth of the Omer, inviting us to profound humility and awe in the face of all that we have been gifted here, the miraculous luminous effulgence of our World, our Beit HaMikdash, our Holy Temple Earth.

Within one tiny seed
bedded in a garden plot
upon this whirling Earth--
graceful dancer in
the sardanes of 
our solar system,
within this swirling galaxy,
one amongst uncountable
such gatherings in vast cosmic 
​reaches—a sprout 
bides its time,
awaiting just the moment
to burst through
to light of Sun
and blue and wet,
to wed its tininess to
the vast array, the 
way the quick 
intake of breath
before the first
sung note 
predicts a multitude of
symphonies
 
                   Day 33,  Hod sheh’b’hod (L’ag b’Omer)
                     Humility/splendor within humility/splendor