I think of Judaism as a tradition that prefers counting up, not down. Take the period in which we find ourselves now: s’firat ha’omer (“the counting of the omer).
Jewish history wonks who study this kind of thing know that it reflects the biblical commandment to count the days and weeks between the barley harvest (that matures on Passover) and the wheat harvest (that matures some seven weeks later at the festival of Shavuot).
An omer is a biblical measure, one days’ worth of manna, the food dropped from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 16). But it is also the first sheaf of the barley harvest brought to the Temple (Leviticus 23:10). Josephus says it was dried, crushed, and ground up; some of it was then thrown on the altar as a sacrifice; the rest was baked and given to the priests.[i] It inaugurated the counting period that lasted until Shavuot.
When the Temple fell in the war against Rome (70 CE) so too did the sacrifices, but the counting ritual remained and was eventually associated with certain mourning customs (a ban on weddings, for example). Medieval Jews connected the mourning with a Talmudic tale about 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiba who died during the omer as punishment for envying one another’s mastery of Torah. Other, midrashic, sources give the number as 12,000, or only 300, and do not necessarily connect it with the omer period or explain it as student envy. What came first, the mourning customs or the explanation for them, is a good question. But either way, counting of the omer has continued to this day, sometimes, in fact, called simply s’firah, “counting.”[ii]
And the point is, we count the omer by counting up, not down.
The same is true of Hanukah candles. The Talmud (Shabbat 21b) discusses whether we should go from eight candles on day one to a single candle on day eight, or vice versa? Counting up won.
A third example is the Seder song, “Who knows One,” the point being the singularity of God. But the various verses count up: “Who knows two?” “Who knows three?” all the way to “Who knows Thirteen?”
By contrast, North American culture prefers counting down. Think of New Year’s Eve and a crowd of thousands in New York’s Times Square, waiting for the ball to descend. As midnight approaches, they count down: “10, 9, 8,” until finally “1” – and then a burst of apocalyptic joy: fireworks, applause, embraces, and kisses. It’s mania on Main Street in a million similar gatherings across the world.
The launching of a NASA spacecraft too comes with a countdown. Who hasn’t watched TV coverage of the countless Apollos, Challengers, and Voyagers and heard “10, 9, 8…. 1 – We have liftoff.”
Counting up or down matters. “Down” has a necessary ending: zero. Utter finality. “Up” ends arbitrarily at any number we want, but wherever we stop counting, there are more numbers waiting in the wings. “Down” delivers an absolute end, a vacuum of nothingness, the end of days, a new world aborning, the long-awaited Apocalypse, finally at hand.
Yes, Apocalypse. Counting down is the way any number of devotees throughout history have measured off the years until a messiah was due to arrive (and then didn’t). New Year’s Eve is itself a secular version of messianic anticipation. Out with the old; in with the new. And what is our space program, if not the hyped-up hope of discovering new worlds, stretching our reach through the universe, “to go where no man has gone before,” in Star Trek lingo.
And that, perhaps, is why Jews prefer counting up. We have been burned too many times by false messiahs. Our tradition warns against imagining we can hasten the messianic coming; the Talmud even curses anyone who thinks they know when that will be;[iii] and, frankly, given the Talmud’s bloodcurdling warnings about the period leading up to the messiah’s coming (devastation, suffering beyond measure),[iv] I’m not so sure we want even to be there.
Mainstream Judaism’s messianism is not a single apocalyptic Armageddon. It is a cumulative piling up of good deeds; penitence for the wrongs we put out into the world; and acts of loving kindness, that whittle away at the corrosive cruelty around us.
British Poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a sad soul, who virtually starved himself to death at age 63, despite becoming a favorite poet of his generation and receiving numerous awards for his work. He spent his last thirty years as a librarian, had a few lovers off and on, but died wifeless, childless, and friendless, with a reputation for being parsimonious, misanthropic, misogynistic, and even racist. But I read his poetry anyway – were I to measure art by the character of the artists who produce it, I’d have to forego the music of Wagner, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the stories of Roald Dahl (anti-Semites); the literature of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens (colonialists); and the writings of Flannery O’Connor (racist). So I read Philip Larkin, who had this to say:
“Always too eager for the future/ we pick up bad habits of expectancy.” And in the end, we are left “holding wretched stalks of disappointment.”[v]
So I restrain my eagerness for a revolutionary end to all that ails us; I don’t count down; I count up, postponing whatever final victory there may be some distant tomorrow. Especially in moments of despair, when it seems beyond me to effect revolutionary change, I remember how Judaism has never liked revolutions anyway, and how it prefers the strategy of regularized drops of human kindness, that can offset an entire sea of human ugliness.
Tonight is Wednesday May 7; 25 days, which are 3 weeks and 4 days of the omer.” Onward and upward, still counting!
[i] Josephus, Antiquities 3:250-251.
[ii] Cf. Talmud Babli, Yebamot 62b (24,000); Ecclesiastes Rabba 11:6 and Genesis Rabba 61:3, Tanchuma Chayei Sarah 6 (300). For the history of the omer, see Efrat Zarren-Zohar, “From Passover to Shavuot,” in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, Two Liturgical Tradition,” Vol. 6, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 71-93.
[iii] Sanhedrin 97b
[iv] Sotah 49b.
[v] Philip Larkin, “Next Please,” in Philip Larkin Poems: Selected and With an Introduction By Martin Avis(London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 24/25.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 