The Torah states: “And you shall count from the day after the day of rest, from the day that you brought the wave offering of the Omer, seven complete weeks they shall be.” (VAYIKRA 23:15).
Why do we have the emphasis on counting the days of the Omer until Shavuot? The Torah gives us a mitzvah to count the days from the second day of Pesach until the holiday of Shavuos. The root of this commandment, wrote the Chinuch (a book, now available in English, that gives an understanding and details of each of the 613 mitzvot) is that the essence of the Jewish people is the Torah. The Israelites were redeemed from Egypt in order to accept the Torah at Sinai and to fulfill it. The counting of the days from the exodus from Egypt until the day of the accepting of the Torah is an expressionof the importance of the Torah for the Jewish People. Just as a person who is enslaved and knows that he will be liberated on a certain day will count each day until he finally gets his freedom, so too, we count the days until we receive the Torah. Counting the days shows that our entire being has a strong desire to finally reach the end of the time we are counting. (Sefer HaChinuch 306)
The greater your appreciation of the Torah, the more you will study it. Realizing how important the Torah is for us as a nation and for each of us individually, we will have great joy and pleasure when we devote ourselves to studying and mastering it. Every year when we count the days between Pesach and Shavuot, we once again repeat this message daily for forty-nine days.
May we all learn and grow through torah and be zocher to be simcha and to bring moshiach now!!
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