The months since October 7th have been difficult; many of us have experienced them as a time of hester panim, the seeming absence of God’s living presence. While there have been clear moments of grace, there have also been too many instances of tragedy and grief.
Tonight we begin counting the fifth week of the Omer, tomorrow is Pesach Sheni, and Sunday is the celebration of Lag BaOmer. In this short dvar Torah, I link those three occasions together, and, I hope, offer a reassuring message as we move forward into the unknown future.
There are two forms of proximity to death: physical proximity and emotional proximity. Jewish law establishes that physical association with death results in tumah, ritual impurity, whereas emotional closeness to death engenders a state of aveilut, mourning. These two states reflect a fundamental Jewish concept: that God is a living God, that life is symbolic of our ongoing connection with Him, while death represents His apparent absence from our lives. The experience of the void, the inability to sense His presence, is nowhere more obvious than in our confrontation with death. Accordingly, tumah and aveilut symbolize the gulf which sometimes appears between man and his experience of the Divine.
The Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, is the antithesis of such an experience. He alone may enter the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, and he therefore must always exist as a symbol of God’s constant presence, even when the Divine presence is utterly hidden. For this reason the Torah forbids the Kohen Gadol from approaching a dead body - even that of his closest relatives - and, moreover, allows him to continue his service in the Temple after the death of any member of his family. The Kohen Gadol represents our awareness that God is always near, even when we sense the exact opposite. The Kohen Gadol experiences neither tumah nor aveilut.
The fourteenth day of Iyar is the holiday of Pesach Sheni, the day when those individuals who were in a state of tumah on Passover and, accordingly, could not bring the Passover sacrifice, are offered a second chance to perform this mitzvah. Four days later is the holiday of Lag BaOmer, the day we mark as the end of the period during which Rabbi Akiva’s 24,000 students died almost two thousand years ago. These two days are a celebration of the same reality represented by the Kohen Gadol: that the impurity of the past will pass away, that mourning comes to an end, and the People of Israel are afforded a new opportunity to bring God into our lives. Death is a temporary state of being; it, too, will one day come to an end, and we will experience true eternal life, filled with the ongoing and open presence of God.
How appropriate, then, that according to the masters of Kabbalah, the week of the Omer on which both Pesach Sheni and Lag BaOmer occurs is associated with the Divine attribute of Hod, or splendor, which in turn is personified by Aaron, the first and greatest Kohen Gadol. Just as the High Priest represents God’s eternal presence, so, too, do the days of Pesach Sheni and Lag BaOmer symbolize the fleeting nature of God’s absence.
May we merit to experience God’s constant presence in our lives, and may we recognize that every feeling of distance from God will one day be followed by the revelation that He was, indeed, with us all along.
According to Chabad.. "The body returns to the earth, dust to dust, but the soul returns to God who gave it. This doctrine of the immortality of the soul is affirmed not only by Judaism and other religions, but by many secular philosophers as well. Judaism, however, also believes in the eventual resurrection of the body, which will be reunited with the soul at a later time on a "great and awesome day of the Lord." The human form of the righteous men of all ages, buried and long since decomposed, will be resurrected at God's will."
Otherwise what is the point of a Chatima Tovah?
And on what basis will the souls of the dead be judged?
"death represents His apparent absence from our lives"
Source?