B"H

By Rabbi Amichai Cohen:

Listen Here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6RxkVZKvgepLnrjcoOD1KB?si=dYV_vtC9QXiQ25MDTThugA

The book we open this week is called Bamidbar. In English it became known as Numbers, because it opens with a census. The third counting of the Israelites within about a year. Three accountings within twelve months. Then nothing for the next thirty-nine years.

Why?

G-d already knows the number. So what is the counting for?

Sefer Yetzirah, written by Avraham Avinu, asks a question that has stayed with me for years.

"Before one, what do you count?"

Before one, there is nothing to count. And yet the Torah tells us to count. We count the Omer for forty-nine days. Seven weeks of seven. And then we are told to count fifty. So which is it? Forty-nine, or fifty?

This is the whole question of these days. This is the whole question of being a soul in a body.

There is a story about Rabbi Yekudsel Liepler, a chassid of the Alter Rebbe and a wealthy businessman. He kept meticulous records. Every transaction. Every gain. Every loss. The spreadsheets of his day. He had a bottom line, and under the bottom line he had another line. Ein od milvado. There is nothing but Him.

If there is nothing but Him, why bother with the spreadsheets at all? Just trust. Just roll with whatever happens.

Because G-d wants to be known within the details.

The infinite is not somewhere else. The infinite is here, inside the smallest accounting, inside the most ordinary moment. The detail is not a preparation for something more important. The detail is where He lives.

So when the Torah counts the Israelites, what is happening?

The Midrash says G-d counts us because He loves us. The way a person keeps returning to count what is precious to them. But G-d already knows the number. So the counting is not about information. The counting is about presence. He is telling us, you are one, you are two, you are three. You are individuals, you are distinct, and you are seen.

This is the first counting. G-d's counting. Every moment is its own reality. Not a passageway to the next moment. Not a leftover from the previous one. The present moment is being created right now by the yud of His Name pouring into the heh-vav-heh of hove, of "is." Right now. Right now. Right now.

The mind cannot hold this. The mind values a moment by its output. By what it produces. By where it is going. If this moment is not building toward something useful, the mind calls it wasted time. Burn time. One of my rabbis from eighth grade used to ask, what does it mean to burn time? Time is the most precious thing we have.

The soul knows otherwise. Every moment is infinite. Every moment is a gift, a present, given by the Creator who has chosen this moment to be.

That is the first counting.

The second counting is ours.

For forty-nine days, we count the Omer. Each day we work through something. The mind. The heart. The body. The places we get stuck. The patterns we fall back into. The promise we make at night that we break the next morning. The grappling, the falling, the rising again.

This is also real. This is the human reality. Anger, anxiety, fear, hope, longing, all of it. The Omer is the counting of who we actually are, not who we wish we were.

So we have two accountings happening at the same time.

G-d is counting us with infinite love, telling us that this moment is whole, that we are whole, that nothing is missing.

And we are counting ourselves, working through what is unfinished, what is wounded, what is hidden, what still needs to be brought into the light.

Both are true. Both are the now.

There is a teaching in Hasidus about two names for G-d. Yachid and Echad. Both mean one. But Yachid means singular. There is only G-d, there is nothing else, the multiplicity is an illusion. Echad means one in a series. One, and then two, and then three.

Why does the Torah call Him Echad and not Yachid?

Because oneness is not only found in the singularity. Oneness is found in the multiplicity.

Read that again. Oneness is found in the multiplicity.

It is easy to feel close to G-d when we close our eyes and dissolve into the One. It is much harder, and much more true, to find Him in the noise. In the contradiction. In the rock. In the body. In the Reactive part of ourselves that does not want to be on the program.

The Arizal teaches that all of physicality is condensed Aleph. Aleph is light. Bet is two alephs. Gimel is three alephs. By the time we get to tav, the letter of four hundred, the light is so compressed that all we see is opacity. All we see is a rock. The four hundred years in Mitzraim were the experience of that compression. The light was there. We could not see it.

But it was always there.

The third month is Sivan. The month we are entering now. Its sign is Gemini. The twins. Two opposites brought together.

Sivan is the month of Matan Torah. And the giving of the Torah is the marriage of two realities. G-d descends onto Sinai. Moshe ascends Sinai. Heaven and earth meet, not as a metaphor, but in actual time and space. In a body. With letters. With words. With mitzvot performed by the hand and the foot and the mouth.

The Torah is not only the union of Yachid and Echad. It is the revelation of what is even beyond both. Atzmus. The essence. The essence cannot be grasped by the mind, not as singularity and not as multiplicity. The essence is known, the way you know your own self without thinking about it.

And the essence is most revealed in the body. Not in the highest meditation. In the mitzvah. In the candle lit. In the tefillin wrapped. In the act done in time and space by a soul in a body.

This is the secret of the fiftieth gate. We count what we can count, the forty-nine. Then we step into what we cannot count. The fiftieth is given to us. The essence reveals itself.

We are in the last week of the Omer now. The week of Malchut. The week of bringing it all the way down, into the kingdom, into the actual life we are living. We count what we can count. And then we wait. Then we receive.

Many blessings as we step toward the fiftieth gate together.