The counting of seven weeks, the Omer, from Passover to Shavuot is a period of focus on the harvest season. Megillat Ruth, the text associated with Shavuot, is replete with agricultural, and particularly harvest, themes.
The Omer itself was a grain offering symbolising the New Year for agricultural produce. This celebration of agricultural growth exists annually in tandem with another, metaphysical growth. These 49 days are representative of the spiritual journey on which the entire nation embarked following our exit from Egypt. We left slavery on the bottom-most spiritual level and had to ascend 49 levels to reach a spiritual peak worthy of receiving the Torah at Sinai. The Omer has thus come to be seen as a time for personal growth.
Despite this optimistic growth outlook, the Omer has also become a period of mourning. Any bride- and groom-to-be know the restrictions and plan accordingly, resulting in an anomalous surge in weddings after Shavuot. Tragically, it was during the Omer period that 24,000 students of the talmudic scholar Rabbi Akiva died of plague. These deaths were attributed to a lack of loving-kindness rooted in academic competition and reluctance to share their own Torah-learning.
Yet the joyous punctuation of the 33rd day marks the yahrzeit of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Rabbi Akiva’s swan-song pupil. Where Rabbi Akiva’s first “crop” of students failed, this second generation of seed flourished and learned to give to others. We celebrate the 33rd day of the Omer to acknowledge this ultimate legacy of Torah growth, a poignant trajectory towards Shavuot when we celebrate receiving the Torah.
