Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser

April 16, 2010

Making it Count

“525,600 minutes.  525,000 moments so dear.  525,600 minutes.  How do you measure, measure a year?”  So goes the opening line from Seasons of Love, a song from the hit Broadway musical Rent.  The show, written by Jonathan Larson, is based on Puccini’s great opera La Boheme, moving the plot of the action to New York City in the mid 1990s.  Midway through the show as the second act begins, the actors line up across the front of the stage, face the audience, and ask this fundamental question:  How do we measure our lives?

I’ve found myself pondering this same question a lot lately. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of filling out my very first census form, as I’m sure many of you did as well!  A lot has been made of this year’s census- look at this nifty pin I even got sent to me!  It says Census 2010 and its supposed to remind everybody to fill out their forms and mail them back.  The census is short.  It has ten questions.  I didn’t have to think very hard when filling it out.  All I could really think about when filling it out was that I was now going to be avoiding census collector’s bothering me and knocking on my door.  That and a piece of me remembered that our Torah also includes a census in it.  In fact, the book of numbers is so called because the second verse declares the following, “se’oo et rosh kol adat b’nei Yisrael.”  Take a census of the children of Israel!  We took a census thousands of years ago and that idea of measuring the number of people in our society continues through the present.

This April has been extra exciting for people who like to count, who I just found out can be called arithmophiles!  In addition to filling out our census forms, yesterday of course, was Tax Day.  A holiday for few, a big pain in the tuches for many more.  Just as the census questions seem boring and monotonous, so too putting together our tax retu rn s can inspire feelings of irritation and dullness.  Yet we know both filling out a census form every ten years and filing tax retu rn s are a piece of life we cannot avoid.  They are one way in which we, or perhaps others, measure aspects of our lives.

Sometimes, as I’ve hinted, measuring our lives can feel like a seemingly insignificant act.  In his great poem, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot introduces us to a man who has, quoting from the poem, “measured out his life in coffee spoons.”  Prufrock feels stuck, trapped in the world of the mundane.  His world is a place where women come and go talking of Michelangelo.  His day to day existence seems boring, repetitive, small.  Listen to the last few stanzas: 

I grow old … I grow old.

 I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?

 Do I dare to eat a peach?

 I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. --

I do not think that they will sing to me.        

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back,

 When the wind blows the water white and black

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown    

 Till human voices wake us, and we drown.  

Even Prufrock’s fantastic imagery of mermaids is tempered by his realization that they will not be singing to him.  Prufrock laments the fact that life is passing him by, and all he can do about it is decide how to wear his pants and how to style his hair.  The coffee spoon is the marker by which Prufrock has measured his life, and any real meaning has escaped him.  To Prufrock, existence is stark, repetitive, lonely, and lacking.

It’s hard to believe after a magnificent day like this one, but the period in which we find ourselves in the Jewish calendar is one in which J. Alfred Prufrock would  probably feel quite comfortable.  This time, between Passover and Shavuot, is known as the omer.  Traditionally, this is a time of semi-mou rn ing.  Between the two festivals, weddings are not performed, haircuts are not given, and musical and lively celebrations are to be avoided.  Why?  Well, let’s look at the meaning of this season.  On Passover, we are released from Egyptian bondage.  But where do we end up?  In the desert.  A lonely, harsh, place where we wander around and kvetch for forty years.  True freedom, according to our tradition, does not come until matan torah, until the Torah is given to us by God on Mount Sinai which is thought to have happened on Shavuot.  In the desert, we are not slaves and we are not yet free. This is a perilous time.  It is easy, in the midst of the wide expanse of the desert, to fall into Prufrock’s depression and sadness.  We lea rn in our text that our people experience these feelings, sometimes desperately longing to retu rn to Egypt , to the place with which we became familiar with after dwelling there for four hundred years.

So how do we sustain ourselves during this difficult seven week period?  We measure, we count the omer.  The omer was originally a grain offering which was brought to the Temple beginning with the second day of Passover, and we count up from that occurrence all the way to Shavuot, to the holiday when Torah is finally given to us.  Prufrock’s coffee spoons signify a life of smallness and emptiness.  Our small act of counting the omer give us hope and sustenance.  We know we are in the desert, and we know that in a few weeks time, we will leave the desert and enter the true freedom which comes with the giving of the Torah.

Because of this, this mundane looking act which we will experience together in a few minutes, is regarded as incredibly important and therefore involves lots of rules.  For example, according to certain sources, if you forget to count the omer one night, you have to completely abandon the counting for fear you will lose track and observe Shavuot on the wrong night.  Other sources mention if somebody asks you where in the counting we are, you are supposed to give last night’s count.  That is because you are not supposed to count  without having first said the blessing and of course, you cannot count before sundown for that would be a miscount.  There’s a great joke I just heard to illustrate this principle:  A man comes home from the beit midrash, the house of study, and asks his wife what’s for dinner.  She replies, “Last night we had potroast.”  These arcane rules may seem a bit silly to us, but they point to an important principle.  Counting the small stuff, the omer, just like filing your tax retu rn s and mailing in your census forms, are ways in which we measure the seasons of our lives.  These small, seemingly insignificant tools, can offer us enormous insight and vehicles for reflection and possibly renewal and change.

How do you measure, measure a year?  The song from Rent continues:
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.  In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.  In 525,600 minutes, how do you measure a year in the life?

All the mundane moments of our lives can be filled with significance if we pay attention to them.  When we send in our census, we hope that the gove rn ment will take that information and use it as best it can to help better our society.  Our taxes pay for incredibly important social services.  Counting the omer reminds us that Shavuot and our freedom is just around the co rn er.  But how about the other moments in our lives?  The number of times you laughed with your partner over a silly joke, the cups of coffee you drank at Starbucks by yourself with a newspaper in hand, the endless miles you biked across open fields and green hills with your friends.  How are we supposed to measure our lives?  There are so many choices!  As the beautiful song Seasons of Love puts it best:  Measure your life in love.

(And now Cantor Bandman will lead us in counting the omer)