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Meditations on the Omer
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

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The counting of the Omer is a vestige of the grain offerings made at the Temple in ancient Israel. Jews were not allowed to eat of their barley crop until an offering of barley was brought to Jerusalem on the second day of Passover. Then they could eat new barley, but they still had to wait 49 days to bring the first fruits of their wheat harvest to the Temple before they could eat new wheat. The Talmud describes barley as inferior grain, more fit for animals than human consumption, but the Torah counts both wheat and barley as two of the seven special crops Eretz Yisra’el is blessed with. If barley was mere animal feed, why would Hashem ask for an offering of it on Passover?

The Torah doesn’t call the month of Pesach ‘Nisan’. Instead, Hashem says, “You depart today, in the month of Aviv.” (Exodus 13:4) The name Aviv is familiar to many Hebrew speakers as the word for spring. We read that during the seventh plague, burning hail, the Egyptians’ barley crop was ruined כִּי הַשְּׂעֹרָה אָבִיב, ki ha-se’orah aviv, “because the barley was in the ear.” (Exodus 9:31) In other words, it got destroyed because it was vulnerable while ripening. The next verse says that “the wheat and the emmer were not hurt, for they ripen late.” (Exodus 9:32) But these grains would not last long. Only a few days later, the plague of locusts “devoured all of the grasses of the field and all the fruit of the trees which survived the hail, so that nothing green was left.” (Exodus 10:15) 

Perhaps, there is a metaphor to be made here. Those of us ‘on the outside’ of prisons who feel comfortable around police might think that we are safe from the reach of the carceral state. In a world of neverending needless carceral violence, it is tempting to soothe our fears that we could be the next to be hurt by saying, “that couldn’t happen to me.” We might think that because we’re law-abiding citizens, because we live in a blue state, because we live quietly and don’t go out to dangerous protests that the police will pass us over—choose not to subject us to brutal beatings, use chemical weapons on us, kill our dogs, lock us up, choke us out or shoot us dead. For Jews who are white, it’s easy to say, “it’s terrible this is happening to Black people, but these things will never happen to me.” We might think that because we are small, because we are not yet ripe with radical politics, we will be spared from violence. But the plague of police is all-consuming. They can and do kill the innocent, the meek, and the respectable. And the plague of fascism that the police usher in will destroy all of us, if we let it. History shows that our mild manners, our lawfulness, our moderate politics, our assimilation into ‘normal’ society, even our conditional whiteness will not save us from those who want us dead. Our appeals to respectability do not protect us; all they do is justify carceral violence against ‘criminals.’ 

Some of us are stalks of barley, ripe for the police to ‘harvest’, because of things we cannot choose—like the color of our skin. Some of us are stalks of barley because we put ourselves in harm’s way, fighting in spite of the risks. It’s important to recognize that these experiences are in no way equivalent: those who choose to fight can always choose to shrink back to comfort—safe in our skin, for the time being at least. But white supremacists have insatiable appetites, and if white Jews do not fight for Black people today, who will fight for us when it’s our turn to die? The cops and the Nazis will come for us eventually. As James Baldwin wrote, “If they take you in the morning, they will come for us that night.” Our choice is clear: we can shrink away, cut ourselves down to a ‘respectable’ size while our brothers are being burned, or let ourselves grow, ripen with radical wisdom, and join the fight before it’s too late. 
 
haggadah Section: Hallel
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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