Count Your Days … To Make Them Count
From the May 2002 Beit Tikvah Newsletter

What's the deal with Judaism and numbers?

Last month, many of us attended or hosted Passover seders that featured a song towards the end that sounds suspiciously like one of those summer camp memory games, with a numbers twist! In the game one person will say, "When I went on my camping trip, I brought three lamps, two sleeping bags, and one tent, etc." — with each successive person adding a new item while recounting the previous ones.

The song, "Ehad Mi Yode'a," or "Who Knows One?" makes its way up to thirteen symbols or events in Judaism, with each verse adding the next digit. Of course, the seder also featured four questions, four cups of wine, four children, ten plagues, countless variations on how to count them, three ritual matzot, and so on.

For those who attended a seder on the second night of Pesah, the formal counting really begins, namely the counting of the Omer. We count the days between Pesah and the next festival of Shavuot, as outlined in the book of Leviticus. The mandate to count those 50 days evolved from an agricultural ritual in celebration of our journey from redemption from slavery to the revelation of Torah itself, or, as a colleague of mine puts it, from throwing out Pharoah's law to taking on God's law.

We also begin this month to read from the book of, yes, Numbers, the fourth of five books of Torah. The book is so named because it begins with a census, as prime an example of counting as you can come up with. However, the actual numbers in the biblical census generate such confusion and controversy that, according to one scholar, each mother on the journey would have had to bear 50 children, among other hard-to-bear implications!

So it is clear that in Judaism, numbers can symbolize, and refer to, important concepts. The mystics of our tradition, who understood and respected the potency of numbers, also regarded the Omer period as an important time for inner spiritual work. They took their own system of sefirot (literally, numberings or counting), which are names for aspects of the Divine, and grafted the lower seven of the symbols onto the seven weeks of the Omer.
This is how it works: you take each week and assign to it one sefira, or aspect of God. Then within each week, you assign one of the seven for each day, hence 7 times 7 equals the 49 days. They are: 1) Hesed – loving kindness; 2) Gevurah – power, strength; 3) Tiferet – beauty; 4) Netzah – endurance; 5) Hod – humility; 6) Yesod - foundation; 7) Malkhut – leadership/God's indwelling or feminine presence. Hence, week one, day one, is Hesed of Hesed; day two, gevurah of (or in) hesed; and so on through each day and week. (A helpful chart can be found on-line at http://www.rebgoldie.com/Shavuot.htm.)

Look up a birthday or an important day on the calendar for you. May 12, 2002 falls on day 45 of the Omer, which, according to his system, reflects hesed that is in malkhut - an inspiring and apt kavanah for, or way to, frame Mother's Day! So the Jewish emphasis on numbers and counting can be meaningful after all. May the numberings that you are inspired to do truly lead you to "make your days count."