Where do we encounter spirituality in the world? Where do we meet God? This is a fundamental question regarding man's existence, scale of values, cultural foundations, and way of life.
Each of the five chumashim comprising the Torah is named after the first parasha in that chumash. The name of the parasha, in turn, represents one (or two) of the first words in the parasha. Seemingly, then, the name is arbitrary, devoid of any deeper meaning; but does the name "Bamidbar" ("in the wilderness") say anything about the content of this sefer?
The opening parasha of Sefer Bamidbar is famous for being mostly a series of censuses, some quite detailed, of the entire Jewish people, of the individual tribes, of the Levites, and of the firstborn. The usual understanding of the divisions is that God likes to count the Jews (based on the Rashi to the opening verse), the firstborn were meant to be the servants of the mishkan and are here being switched with the Levites, because of their respective roles in the sin of the golden calf, and the Levites are not included in the general census because they are sanctified in place of the firstborn. I would like to show that these assumptions are either wrong or at least incomplete, and that is the theme of today's shiur.
The commandment of counting the omer, which we observe during this period of the year, is a peculiar one, and puzzling in its triviality. The required action consists of a technical, apparently meaningless utterance of the ordinal number of the day. Why does the Torah require such a technical act, and what significance can we attach to it?
