I have been at sixes and sevens all day, preparing for this Shabbat. Not sixes and sevens in the sense of crazed, confused, tzetumelt. But rather I have been working all day with the numbers 6 and 7 that have been presenting themselves with so much insistence. Because as we enter this 7th day of the week, we are also entering the 6th day of the 6th week of the 7 weeks of the Omer!
I know math is not everyone’s thing. I love it but usually have little use for it. I do simple arithmetic on paper. Algebra sometimes comes in handy for me. And once in a while geometry helps with some project. Trigonometric functions have only proven useful when used off label as answers in the New York Times crossword puzzle. And calculus? Don’t ask.
But numbers in Judaism are insistent. We sing number songs on Pesach. We assign number values to the letters, and let the the math, the gematria, open portals of association that we use to find meaning in our texts. We have rhythms in time characterized by counting. Seven days of the week. Forty-nine days from Pesach to Shavuot. Twenty-two days leading to the Destruction of the Temple. Forty-nine again from the first of Elul until Yom Kippur. We track cycles – cycles embedded within cycles.
The number seven obviously has important value in and out of Judaism. Seven Seas. Seven Wonders. Seven Heavens. Seven Up. Seven days of Creation. The seven-day week, ending with and crowned by Shabbat, has created a rhythm that much of the world adheres to.
Seven, when folded, is also a way of describing physical and spiritual space. We have the four directions – north, south, east, west – which on maps are always drawn with little arrows as if space were speeding away from us. These directions define a plane. And then we add up and down, creating 3-dimensionality. This is the world outside of us, the six directions of waving the lulav. And then there is the 7th direction – center, inner, soul, where all the space around us is drawn inward to a place of centeredness and connectedness. Seven directions of body and soul.
Seven directions. Seven-day week. Seven weeks of seven in the Omer.
It is almost as if our collective and ancient Jewish spirit would have preferred a Base 7 counting system. One where we have the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. And then the next number, that we call seven, would written like we would write ten. A “1” in the sevens column and a 0 in the ones column. So it would look like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10. And then our Counting of the Omer, while taking no longer than it does now, would look like a 100-day count.
But no, we instead use a Base 10 system, an homage perhaps to our ancient ancestors, inventing counting by using their dexterous fingers and famously opposable thumbs.
Our Jewish mystical system seems, in a way, to hold both of these. We talk often at Ner Shalom about the Ten Sefirot of the Tree of Life. But you’ll notice that most of the action happens in what’s called the Lower Seven, starting with chesed and culminating in malkhut. Our clever kabbalistic system for counting the Omer using the sefirot only ever uses the lower seven. As if there were a kind of Base 7 system hidden within the Base 10 frame of the Tree.
So this is the 6th day of the 6th week of the 7x7, but that isn’t the only reason the sixes and sevens are so upfront in our attention today. They are at the core of this week’s Torah portion, Behar. In this portion, we are commanded, for the first time, about the agricultural cycle of growing and resting. Six years we may cultivate the land in all the usual permissible ways. Plowing, sowing, growing, pruning and reaping. We may work the fields to our hearts’ content, and harvest the produce to sell or share or eat.
But Behar instructs us that the seventh year is a Sabbath for the land. A shabbaton or sabbatical. What we call the shmitah year. During the shmitah year, we loosen our grip on the Earth, and let it rest, let it have its own Shabbat. During that time we can eat whatever grows on its own. But we can’t make industry of it. Can’t sell it. Profit motive and the concept of ownership are removed from our relationship with the Earth. As we are reminded in Leviticus 25:23, the land doesn’t belong to us. Not really.
This cycle of years resembles our Omer-counting. Because not only is there a cycle of seven years, but also a cycle of 7x7. After 49 years, we reach the yovel, the jubilee year, in which our prying loose the grip of capitalism is even more extreme. Lands are released to their ancestral owners. Slaves are freed. Debts forgiven. Obviously this leads to much complexity in Talmud, which tries hard to preserve the value of the personal investments that Torah releases.
But Torah doesn’t want those attachments to property and profit to be permanent. Every seven years things return to a state of wholeness. Just as, on Shabbat, on the seventh day, we return to a state of wholeness.
So lest we think of this shmitah thing, this sabbatical year thing, as ancient history – let me tell you that we know what year of the cycle we’re in, even though we are not farming the ancient land. We are in year 6 of the shmitah cycle. Year 7, the shmitah year, will arrive promptly this Rosh Hashanah.
So if we pay attention, we can experience the movement from 6 to 7. And that shift can and ought to feel like something. And if we don’t notice it now, it will be another 7 years before we have the chance.
So a little more about our kabbalistic Tree of Life is needed to feel into the sixes and sevens of this moment.
In the Tree of Life, there is a flow of shefa, of Divine, creative, life-giving energy, flowing from one sefirah to the next. In the seven lower sefirot, the flow is from chesed, kindness, to gevurah, strength and boundaries, to tiferet, balance and beauty, where the energy settles for a moment. And then it’s on to netzach, endurance, to hod, splendor and gratitude, and then to yesod, which means “foundation” and also has connotations of creativity and generativity. Yesod, the 6th node of the lower seven, is the gathering point for all the energy and qualities that came before it. All the Divinity of the Tree of Life settles into Yesod in anticipation of union with Malkhut, the 7th sefirah.
You often hear us talking about yichud, about the unification of God and the Shekhinah. We imagine a wholeness that returns to the world with that unification. Our ancestors envisioned it as a sexual embrace. The unfolding of this holy marriage is mapped onto the Tree of Life this way: everything pours into Yesod, which is #6, and six is represented in Hebrew by the letter vav which looks like a phallus, and believe me, this isn’t just my imagination; the mystics of the Zohar were all about this. Everything pours into Yesod, into #6, and six becomes sex, and that vav the vehicle for consummation with Malkhut, with Shekhinah.
We could spend more time on the mechanics of this sexual union, and how we feel about it now that I just gave it over in such a clinical and heteronormative way. But suffice it to say for now that the move from 6 to 7 is not like turning a page on a calendar or moving from an A to a B on a piano. The movement from 6 to 7 is one of union and a completion. The 6 has gathered everything before it. And then it is gathered into the 7. Just as the first Shabbat was the completion and fulfillment of the preceding days of Creation. Shabbat it didn’t replace Creation. And similarly, our Shabbat isn’t a denial of the rest of the week as much as an integration of it.
And this holy union image offers us one more insight about being in the six awaiting the seven. The six is filled with longing, with heightened anticipation.
And similarly, here we are in year six of the shmitah cycle, in a state of anticipation, in a state of longing, in a state of being lovesick. The isolation and restrictions of the pandemic have heightened our sense of anticipation and longing and lovesickness.
The sixth year also has a quality of blessings and productivity to it. In the Torah portion tomorrow, God anticipates one of the objections the Israelites will undoubtedly raise to this whole seventh-year-fallow-field scheme. What, God correctly imagines we will want to know, will we eat in the seventh year? And in the eighth year after we’ve planted again but before the crops are ripe? God answers: “I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall produce enough for three years.”
In other words, Year 6 will produce enough food for Year 6 itself as well as Year 7 when we’re not growing anything and Year 8 while waiting for the new crops to produce.
And here we are in Year 6. And so I wonder, what has come to us in these 6 years? What are we producing to carry ourselves into the next year and beyond? What is the special blessing of this moment of anticipation?
Take a moment and think back to the beginning of this shmitah cycle. That would be mid-September, 2015, Rosh Hashanah, if you can even remember 2015 at all. Think about where you were living. Traveling. Who was still in your life then who might not be anymore? Who was not yet in your life then who is now? What work were you doing? What were you thinking? What were you learning?
See if you can reconjure that time and the years since. You can start now and continue later. What has been the journey of these six years? What has been the blessing of it? What is the pool of blessing that has collected here in the sixth year, to nourish the soil of the seventh year, the year of integration? What is your yearning for the seventh year? What is the wholeness that you seek to find?
Here, on the 6th day of the 6th week of the Omer, in this 6th year of seven, – today would, mathematically speaking, be a fine time to speak those intentions into existence.
For this one I was both inspired and egged on by my number-geek friend, Rabbi Lex Rofeberg, who had also wondered if Judaism was a Base 7 tradition. Read more about Lex’s podcast, Judaism Unbound.