Parshas Emor / Lag B’Omer 5785
A young entrepreneur has achieved enough success that he needs more hands on deck. No longer capable of managing the company alone, he needs a team around him to help manage and maintain what’s already been created, as well as to help scale the business and propel it forward. So he brings on a COO and begins to train the new recruit in all aspects of the business—production, inventory, clientele, revenue, overhead, and on and on.
The new COO is adept enough—truly professional—and has the whole thing down. A couple weeks go by and he feels like he’s doing a fine job, but can’t shake the feeling that his boss seems unsatisfied. “Is something wrong?” he inquires, “Is there more you expect of me?”
“I do have a bone to pick with you,” the boss admits. “Your work is fine. Superb, actually. Neat, high-quality, comprehensive. Your communication skills are great. You just…well…you just don’t seem to care…at least not the way I did when I was running things.”
“Respectfully, sir, it’s your company, not mine.”
Among its presentation of the laws relating to the various Yamim Tovim throughout the year, Parshas Emor provides instructions for counting the days of Sefiras HaOmer. And it does so in an unusual manner. Rather than simply “וספרתם—You shall count,” the Torah demands “וספרתם לכם—You shall count for yourselves.”
That extra “לכם—for yourselves” is not completely anomalous in the realm of mitzvos. Indeed, just a few pesukim later in relating the laws of the Arba Minim, the Torah instructs, “ולקחתם לכם—You shall take for yourselves.” Chazal understood that the implication regarding Sukkos is that the Arba Minim must be your own and cannot be borrowed from another. Yet what is true for an esrog or lulav would not seem to be applicable to Sefiras HaOmer. If I must own the Arba Minim to fulfill the mitzvah, what is the Torah’s expectation when it comes to counting?
Rav Sholom Yosef Zevin explained that the import regarding Sefirah is actually the same; we need to own it. With every new day journeyed towards Har Sinai, we must feel ownership over the Torah we learn and the Torah we keep. Admirable tough it may be to simply bow our heads in deference to Hashem, to submit to His will, and to do it for Him, the Torah here is actually demanding more of us. Namely, that we personalize the experience of Torah and take ownership over it.
That young entrepreneur would have been absolutely right to notice a difference between his own effort on behalf of his company and that of his new employee. And the new COO was spot on in his response, if perhaps a bit too honest should job security be something he’d like to maintain. There is simply no way to bring the same level of vigor and passion to the toil you are doing on behalf of someone else as you would to an enterprise that was your own.
There must be pride of ownership when it comes to our observance of Torah. More than a sense of simply clocking in and clocking out and completing my hours. More than finishing the job and earning the paycheck so that I can afford to do what I really want to be doing.
The demand of וספרתם לכם is the demand that we actually own it, that it be ours. That our counting—our growth and development in Torah—be what defines us even more than anything else we may call our own.
Consider what we all do to furnish ourselves with our most cherished assets—houses, cars, and the like. We obsess over them, work hard to make the right payments, service every element that requires upkeep. Never is there the sense that the car will change its own oil, that the bank will let a few months’ mortgage go by without a fuss, or that the landscaping will grow in all its own. We are scheduled, meticulous, and concerned over the things we own. Business owners know full well that the buck stops with them and that if they are not scheduled, organized, and diligent, they simply will not achieve the success they’ve long dreamed of.
It is that sort of attitude that וספרתם לכם calls for. To think of our learning as our business. Do we manage it to the same degree? To think of our davening as our car. Do we just shrug our shoulders as it fall into disrepair? To think of our bitachon as our house? Do we obsess over improving it until it matches the image we’ve always held in our mind? Do we even have an image we hold in our mind?
As we shift to the second phase of Sefiras HaOmer, celebrating Lag B’Omer as the day upon which the plague that ravaged Rebbe Akiva’s students finally halted, it’s worth considering how Rebbe Akiva ever moved on. How did he pick up the pieces after every last one of his 24,000 students had perished and bring himself to start all over again? How did he muster the courage to bring together a small band of five talmidim and convey to them the Torah and mesorah he had already painstakingly transmitted—seemingly all for naught?
I would argue that Rebbe Akiva fulfilled וספרתם לכם. He took ownership over his relationship with Torah. When you are simply doing someone else’s bidding, you make a reasonable effort, but no more. When life provides you with every reasonable excuse to say, “Well, I tried,” you take it and retire. It is only when you take ownership over your Torah, when you see your own life as inextricably bound with your toil on behalf of Hashem, that you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go on to build another yeshiva, even as the ruins of the previous one are still smoldering.
It was, after all, Rebbe Akiva, who saw Torah as something personally acquired by those who toiled for it. Upon returning home to his wife after 24 years apart, years in which he transformed himself from an ignoramus to the Gadol HaDor, he gestured to his wife in the presence of his throngs of talmidim and declared, “שלי ושלכם שלה היא—All that is mine and all that is yours, is actually hers.”
May we never have the need to rebuild the way that Rebbe Akiva did. But if we are to build anything impressive at all, the first step is to realize that it’s our own name on the deed.