From Sinai to Messiah: 50 Days to Freedom & a Meaningful Life! The Secret of Counting the Omer

Heart is feeling. Heart is emotion. Heart is not direction. Brain is direction. And if we're going to be all heart, we're going to be confused. Similar to an animal. That's why an animal, when it walks, its heart and brain are on the same level. When a human walks, the brain is above the heart. And these are all things built into creation. You might say, "Oh, you know, you're having This is like kid stuff." No, this is not kid stuff. It's called God stuff. From Pesach until Shavuot. Uh in the Gemara, they call Shavuot Atzeret. It's a It's the day that we stop what we're doing and we we come together. Uh Again, Shavuot is the giving of the Torah. There's 50 days in between our departure from Egypt and Shavuot. So, what What is the point here? What are we trying to accomplish? And what is the message of these 50 total days being connected as where our starting point is Egypt and our final point is Maamad Har Sinai, receiving a Torah from God at Mount Sinai. Having God open up the heavens and showing us the ultimate reality, ultimate truth. So, I think the answer is found in something that actually surfaces later. Meaning, the first time the Jews counted the Omer, 50 days in the desert, it wasn't called the Omer. It was called counting, Sefirah. So, originally, there was something called Sefirah. And when there was a Beit Hamikdash and a Mishkan, so at that point, when God built a Mishkan with sacrifices, there was added to this this time period between Pesach and Shavuot, we added the concept of sacrifices, an Omer offering, and two loaves of bread that the on Shavuot. The Omer offering was made from barley, and that was the offering um that starts after we leave Egypt is what it corresponds to. It's the second day of Pesach. Okay, that's the Omer. Now, at the end of the process, Shavuot is when we brought these two loaves of bread. So, again, of course, you know, anything Jewish has food surrounding it, right? But we would question what's so good about barley. Barley's not considered the highest quality type of anything. Bread, it's not the choice of bread. Shavuot makes a little bit more sense. It's It's nice challah from from wheat. So, the rabbis point out that barley essentially, you know, today we eat also barley, but barley was essentially animal food. And wheat that we make the bread from is was was human food. And so, we have an indication here as to what we're trying to accomplish. We start off with animal food symbolizing the the animal nature within every human being. The the idea of the human creation, the the the human being we can be if we follow our nature, our instincts, our heart, without allowing the brain to dominate that heart and direct it. Heart is feeling. Heart is emotion. Heart is not direction. Brain is direction. And if we're going to be all heart, we're going to be confused. Similar to an animal. That's why an animal, when it walks, its heart and brain are on the same level. When a human walks, the brain is above the heart. And these are all things built into creation. You might say, "Oh, you know, you're having This is like kid stuff." No, this is not kid stuff. It's called God stuff. Like I said in a in the the prior class, you know, even the most confused Jew is already one step above the greatest scientist or professor in college, cuz they haven't even figured out why they're living. Figure out why you're living, and then figure out the details of what. Why comes before what? So, if we're here to to fix, so let's appreciate. We can start off on this lower level. The word for human being is anashim. That's plural. Anashim means people. Man, humanity, human, men and women. Is Everything I say when I say the word man, it means both man and woman. Gever is another word for a man. And then there's adam. Now, gever and and and ish, gever and ish in plural are anashim and gevarim. So, they both have a singular and plural form. There's ish, anashim. Gever, gevarim. Adam has only one form, singular. There's no adam in a plural form. There's only adam. It implies a unique level of of of a human being, which doesn't exist in plural because it's talking about a holy human being. A human being that becomes a part of Hashem and that is attached to Hashem and that is part of the holiness and the oneness of creation. And that type of person is called an adam. That's why in the Gemara, the Talmud, it says that adam, that unique term, adam, is really exclusively used for Yisrael. Atem keruyin adam. We are the only ones called adam because the idea of connecting with and uniting with holiness and oneness and the oneness of Hashem is through the mitzvot that we were given. So, there's this adam that we can become through the mitzvot, but there's this gever or enosh, this the ish, this lower level of a human being that we start off as. That's the animal food that we eat in the beginning because we have a lot of animal characteristics in us, the raw passion, the the the ego, selfishness. These are These are core components that we are born with. We have to work through that, break that, transform that, and transcend into an adam, a godly human being through Torah. So, the process is you're trapped in Egypt. That means you're trapped in your as so to speak addictions. You're trapped in your life addictions, your habitual natural behavior, like like a a sophisticated animal. An animal is is really running on nature and the way he was created. You also are running on nature and the way you were created. If you're getting angry a lot, it's because you have that anger component. If you're getting jealous a lot, it's cuz you have that potential for jealousy, and so on and so on. So, you're living on that natural level. I like to call it the pinball machine level because if you ever look at a pinball, there's a lot of mo- motion and movement, but it's not going anywhere on its own. It's being pushed and pulled in many directions. That is sometimes how I feel and I think how sometimes we can feel. Sometimes life is pushing our buttons, and we're just being pushed and pil- pulled in so many directions, you could ask, "Where is that real me? Where am I Where's the me that really knows where it's going and getting there?" So, there's that trapped in Egypt level. We were slaves to Paro. Paro means also physicality, and we built buildings that sunk because this is a temporary world. If you invest all of you into this temporary world, you've invested in something that's eventually going to sink. The body decays. This is only a temporary world. So, so Paro and Egypt represents temporariness and the idea of physicalness. And if you live for only those two things, this physical [clears throat] physical pleasures and the temporary world that we're in, then you've invested everything in something that is not real, not eternal. And so, that's level one. But level two is the Torah. It's God's wisdom. It's God's will. It's eternal. And it's that adam that we can we can become, this godly person that is even higher than an angel and is part of the the real truth of life and the eternality of life. The world to come, an eternal world. How can we fit in a in an eternal world that's spiritu- It's really spiritual and physical divine if we're only physical? It's a mismatch. We You could come with half a body to the next world. Are you going to come with half a suit to a to a wedding? You can't be half dressed. You can't fix only half of yourself or focus on only half of who and what you are. So, that's if you serve this world, you're a slave to Paro. You are a slave to your addictions. And you're you're being half a man at best. But you can become Hashem's slave or servant, and then you can become complete and whole. And that's why the sages tell us, there's no such thing as a free person in this world except someone who accepts the the the the the leadership of God and its Torah. Someone who accepts God's Torah and accepts to be a servant of God, then he can attain true freedom. You become free from your animal, free from the the pressures and the and the the the the concealed the the the prison, so to speak, the the the thing the the elements of this world that kind of trap you, trap you and and keep you stuck. You can break out of that, and you become a servant of Hashem. So, Torah is the vehicle through which we rise and attain true eternal freedom, and eternal life. And that's this kind of process. You got to get out of Egypt. That's step number one. We needed help for that. God helped us. But once you're out, now what are you going to do? God wants to see what we're made of. And you got to start climbing from the bottom. That's the 50 days. And then you're ready for a Torah, which is phase two. Take Hashem's Torah, and with that, conquer. Conquer and transform and transcend yourself and the world. And the stage three is Olam Haba. It's either stage three is the world to come, Mashiach, eternal life. Real perfection, self-made perfection. There's no such thing as a self-made millionaire. He's using a lot of help from everywhere around him. But and we also use God's help. But ultimately, we are going to get as close as we can to being a self-made adam. Imagine, you make yourself into an adam. You make yourself into a godly being. You you unb- It's unbelievable what you accomplish. We accomplish something that's impossible. Imagine, you were put in this world to accomplish the impossible. How can you do it? Cuz there's a piece of infinicy in you. Is that the right word? Is that the right word? Wait. There's a piece of God in you. There's you're you're intrinsically holy. There's something holy in you and there's something that is unstoppable. There is something that is impossible inside of you to exist, but it exists cuz Hashem gave it to us. Through that godly component within us, here we can accomplish the impossible. It's not such a big kiddish. Why are Jews still here and no other nation lasted this long? Cuz we're we're a miracle. We're beyond this world. We're beyond this world and in this world at the same time. We can accomplish the impossible and that's what we're on route to accomplish very, very soon. I see you already to start seeing the the the roads turning and that's the finish line. The finish line's right beyond that last turn and that's what we have to feel. We have to tell ourselves every day, "Yes, I don't see an end, but I see a turn and after that turn, we're there. We're home. We're almost home. We are almost home." That's what we have to tell ourselves. It's been a hard, long, confusing, winding road, but we're reaching the end. We are reaching the perfection and the world that Hashem is begging, wanting, waiting to give us to live happily ever after with Hashem in not his world, in the end. And what's the difference between this world and heaven and the world to come? It's one difference. Listen very carefully. This is Hashem's world and heaven is Hashem's world. This is a world where that is his, but he hides and heaven is a world that's his where he doesn't hide. But there's a third world that's not Hashem's world. It's our world. It's ours and Hashem's world together. That's the world we want to live in. That's the world we want to be in. It's a world Hashem says, "I want a world that you can be in it with me. But if it's my world that I invite you to, you're just a visitor in my world. I want you to create a world for both of us and it will be our world and that's where we're headed.