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Yom
HaMeyuchas The forty-sixth day of the Omer,
the Sefirah-Count, is called Yom HaMeyuchas, the Day of
Distinction. It is the
Second Day of Sivan, the day before the beginning of the Shloshet
Yemei Hagbalah, the Three Days of Restraint that Moshe commanded the
Jewish People to observe; restraint in approach to Mt. Sinai and
restraint from marital intimacy. The
purpose of the latter was so that the entire Jewish People would
certainly be pure and full participants on the Day that HaShem
would give the Torah to them, that cataclysmic event that
occurred on the Sixth Day of Sivan, according to one Tannaitic opinion,
or the Seventh Day (only for this first Shavuot), according to Rav
Yosi. The question arises, “What is so
distinguished about this Day that entitles it to such a special
name? Several answers come to mind: 1.
There is, in fact, nothing special about the Day.
It is only that CHAZAL,
the Sages, in their great sensitivity were concerned even for the
feelings of inanimate objects, and even for the feelings of
“entities” such as units of time, like days, the existence of
which is even more tenuous than that of “objects.”
In the case of objects, we find them concerned for the feelings
of embarrassment of the challot, the Shabbat
loaves, while Kiddush is recited over wine, requiring the challot
to be covered. So they
assigned a name to the Day, that sat forlorn in the shadow of Shavuot
and the Shloshet Yemei Hagbalah,
the “Day of Distinction,” a name that it didn’t really
deserve. 2.
On the First of Sivan, HaShem instructed Moshe to tell the
nation, “You shall be a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation” (Shemot
19:6). On the Second Day of
Sivan, Moshe delivered this message and the People answered,
“Everything that G-d has commanded we will do” (Shemot 19:8).
So that great Day of Acceptance of the Torah by the People
was given the title “Day of Distinction.” 3.
This Day symbolizes the machloket, the disagreement
involving the Tanna Rav Yosi, an example of the Oral Torah,
the Torah She-B’al Peh, that is the foundation of
our belief and practice. It
is the existence of this Day in this Week that makes this machloket
possible. 4.
Yahadut, Judaism, is fundamentally a meritocracy.
A person is rewarded for his own achievements, not those of his
fathers or his sons. This
is exemplified by the principle that “a Torah Scholar who is a
‘mamzer’ (the product of an illicit sexual union), is
considered superior to a Kohen Gadol, who is an ignoramus
in Torah.” Thus
yichus or yachas, good family ties, should matter less
than one’s own achievements. If
we take the word yachas, spelled “Yud,” “Chet,”
“Samech” out of the word Meyuchas, Special, we are left
with “Mem” and “Vav,” or forty-six, as in the Forty-Sixth
Day of the Omer.
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