The Omer’s Spiritual Meaning | A Dvar Torah from the Shore

What the 80 Percent Can Teach Us About the Omer’s Spiritual Meaning

Standing at the edge of the ocean for Beach Shabbat last Friday night, with the wind coming off the water and the sky going pink above us, we talked about ones who did not come.

Not the people who missed our gathering in April, though I missed you too. I mean the Israelites who did not leave Egypt.

A Midrash That Changes Everything

There is a midrash, cited by several classical commentators, that only one in five Israelites actually walked out of Egypt with Moses. Twenty percent. The other eighty percent stayed behind. They perished during the plague of darkness, while the rest of Israel was protected, precisely because they could not bring themselves to go.

The first time I encountered this teaching, I found it harsh. Eighty percent. A staggering number of people who looked at freedom and said no. Who chose the familiar over the unknown, even when the familiar was suffering.

It is easy to judge them. It is much harder to recognize ourselves in them.

The Berditchever’s Radical Compassion

The Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, the great 18th-century Hasidic master known for his fierce love of the Jewish people, refused to let that judgment stand.

He asked: what if staying was not a failure of faith, but a failure of imagination? What if those eighty percent were not wicked, but simply could not conceive of themselves as free people? What if Mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt, which literally means “the narrow place,” had narrowed their vision so completely that liberation looked not like rescue, but like danger?

The Berditchever wept for them. He did not condemn them. He wept.

That weeping touches my soul.

What the Omer’s Spiritual Meaning Has to Do With Us

The Omer’s spiritual meaning comes into sharp focus here. The forty-nine days we count between Passover and Shavuot are not simply a countdown on a calendar. The rabbis understood the Omer as a journey of inner transformation, the same interior work the Israelites did in the wilderness on their way to Sinai.

Each week of the Omer is associated with a different sefirah, a divine quality we are invited to cultivate within ourselves: love, discipline, harmony, endurance, humility, bonding, presence. We are not just marking time. We are practicing the slow work of becoming people who can receive Torah, live in freedom, and step out of the narrow places that still have a hold on us.

That is the invitation I put before us at Beach Shabbat.

Where Is Our Mitzrayim?

Where is our narrow place? What familiar constriction do we keep returning to because freedom, even when it is standing right in front of us, feels too uncertain to walk into?

The Omer gives us forty-nine days to ask that question. Not to answer it perfectly. Not to fix everything. Just to ask it, honestly, one day at a time.

Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev teaches me that God does not look at the people still in Egypt and leave them to a verdict. God mourns them. And if God mourns rather than condemns, then perhaps we can offer ourselves the same mercy when we notice our own reluctance to step into the open.

One Step Is the Practice

Standing on that beach Friday night, with the ocean stretching past where we could see, I thought: this is what the forty-nine days are for. Not to pressure ourselves into instant transformation. But to practice, day by day, the slow work of widening. Of becoming people with enough inner room to walk toward what is new, what is free, what is possible.

The Israelites who left Egypt did not leave because they had everything figured out. They left because they took one step.

This Omer, may we take one step.

If you want to explore these questions alongside a community, join us for an upcoming Neshamah Shabbat. 

https://niboca.org/shabbat/

Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Amy Rader

Founder and Senior Rabbi, The Neshamah Institute