Counting What Counts: A Reflection for the Omer

If someone broke into your home to steal your most valuable possession, how would you respond? You would likely act immediately, drive them away, call for help, do whatever it takes to protect what is yours. And if I can ask: What is your most precious possession? Money? Jewelry?  No. No and No There is one resource that is truly rare, inherently limited, and completely irreplaceable- time

We live with a quiet illusion: that time is abundant. Money we guard, insure, and manage with care; time we leave unprotected, as though it will always be there. And yet, time is the only resource that, once spent, cannot be recovered. As the Roman Stoic philosophe-Seneca observed nearly two thousand years ago, we are remarkably careful with our possessions, and astonishingly wasteful with our lives.

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy… No one is eager to share their wealth, but everyone gives away their time to whoever asks– “Life is not short- we just waste it

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy… No one is eager to share their wealth, but everyone gives away their time to whoever asks– “Life is not short- we just waste it

The Torah gives us a curious instruction: to count the days between Passover and Shavuot “And you shall count for yourselves… seven complete weeks… fifty days” (Leviticus 23:15–16). Why would the Torah ask us to count days? To answer this, we first need to ask: what do we actually count? We count only what we consider valuable. We count money, people, obligations, outcomes; we do not count dust. Counting is a declaration of value.  And so, by commanding us to count each day, the Torah is quietly making a radical claim: that time itself, each passing day, is worthy of our attention, our awareness, and our care. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle writes in “The Power of Now” that the present moment is the only reality. The past is a memory. The future is an imagination. “All that ever exists-is now”. This is why Counting the Omer is a perfect training in presence. Each day we pause, acknowledge, and bless the present moment. The Omer leans into a quiet truth: the present is both a moment and a gift. When someone experiences a panic attack, therapists often guide them to count what’s around them: buttons, cracks in the sidewalk, colors. Why? To ground them in the present. The Omer is more than a ritual. It is a therapeutic practice. A mindfulness disciplines. Perhaps this is why we count upward, not downward- When we anticipate something exciting, we count how much is left; when we build something meaningful, we count what has already been created. The Omer trains us not to rush toward an endpoint, but to accumulate days of presence, responsibility, and growth. And presence, as we know, is not only about awareness; it is about responsibility.

Viktor Frankl taught that “meaning does not emerge from what we expect from life, but from what life expects from us”. Even in the harshest conditions, he argued, And meaning, in the end, is nothing more, and nothing less, than choosing, day after day, not to live only for ourselves.

May each moment be meaningful. Shabbat Shalom

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)