Just today
A man walks out of shul looking like the world is sitting on his shoulders. His friend stops him. What’s going on? Out it pours: the bills, the tuition, parnassa, the future.
A few days later, same shul. But now the man is glowing. You look wonderful. What happened?
“I saw an ad in the paper. There are professionals now. You pay them a fee, you hand over your worries, and they do the worrying for you. So I gave them everything.”
“But that must cost a fortune. You were just nervous about money.”
“It probably does. But he’ll worry about that for me too.”
The Avudraham asks why Sefiras HaOmer falls here, in this particular season. His answer: because of what this season is. The weeks between Pesach and Shavuos are not the harvest. They are the planting. The plowing, the tilling, the sowing. And for the farmer, this is the most anxious stretch of the entire year. Did I plant correctly? Will the crop take? Will the rain come? Will there be enough to feed my family? It is the kind of worry that can swallow a person whole. And a person consumed by tomorrow cannot be present to today.
So Hashem gives the farmer a mitzvah shaped exactly to that worry. Count today. Just today. One day. Tomorrow has its own count, and you’ll get there when you get there. The avodah right now is this day. Not the harvest. Not the seven weeks. Not next year’s crop.
I was talking to someone from shul recently who shared with me a practice she had started. She was carrying a great deal, more than any one person could possibly hold, and she had begun putting some of it on her calendar. Not the tasks. The worry about the tasks. Monday morning, 9:00 AM: worry about this. Today, she said, she only had these two things in front of her. The others had an appointment. They would get their turn.
What a wise way to live.
The farmer cannot make the crop grow. He can only plant well today. We don’t have someone to worry for us. The Omer does not ask him to stop caring about the harvest. It asks him to give today its day, and to trust that tomorrow will get its own count when tomorrow comes.
Just today. One day.