Counting The Omer | Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

in the curriculum of Jewish philosophy, I wanted to look at the time, and that is first of all the days of Sefirah between Pesach and Shavuot, which actually include two sort of opposite ideas. One is this is at least in the in the good old days, this was actually the happiest time of the year. This is this is you know, Israel is is basically we were an agricultural society, and agriculture still plays a major role here. Um and this is the time of the the green harvest. Um and the country's beautiful. It's it's green. It's I don't know if you're doing any traveling now, but it's it's just so beautiful. It's the most beautiful time of the year here. Um and we're anticipating Shavuot, where we we re-accept the Torah. Um okay, that's one side of it. And then there's the other side of it is Um we're also in some minor state of mourning over the students of Rabbi Akiva, 24,000 students um that died between Pesach and Shavuot. Um I want to quickly talk about them. Um no weddings, uh um question of exactly when uh there are different customs brought in the Shulchan Aruch as to which of the days between Pesach and Shavuot are included. Um I thought I would talk about these 24,000 students of of Rabbi Akiva. Um how did they die? There's different opinions on that, but So, the Gemara says the Gemara makes it sound like there was an epidemic. Um the Iggeres of of Sherira Gaon

Jump to a moment

1. 0:00in the curriculum of Jewish philosophy, I wanted to look at the time, and that is…
2. 1:03mourning over the students of Rabbi Akiva, 24,000 students um that died between Pesach and Shavuot.…
3. 2:06of Sherira Gaon, one of the Gaonim, you may remember we spoke about the Gaonim as…
4. 3:08So, why does he choose to disagree? We understand that Rabbi Akiva was the number one…
5. 4:12like aren't there signs in the Torah of like this needs to this happen, this needs…
6. 5:48They knew that the real reason why they were killed was because of the lack of…
7. 6:51Here, the Gemara understood that the lesson we have to learn is not so much an…
8. 7:52character. But I think it still applies though, like even if the issue is just character.…
9. 8:58been great at life. But we lost them because they believed in themselves and not in…
10. 10:06The most important thing is to get the message. The Jewish nation would have been a…

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