This Torah reading contains a description of the festivals G-d commands the Jewish people to celebrate. It begins with the festival of Pesach, for that is when our people became a nation. The next holiday mentioned is the holiday of Shavuos. But unlike all the other holidays mentioned in this passage, a specific date is not mentioned for Shavuos. Instead of specifying the day on which the holiday should be celebrated, the Torah gives us the mitzvah of Counting the Omer and states that on the fiftieth day of the Counting of the Omer, Shavuos should be observed. (That indeed is the source for the name Shavuos. Shavuos means “weeks.” After seven weeks, 49 days, the fiftieth day serves as a holiday.)
The Counting of the Omer does more than chronologically bridge the gap between Pesach and Shavuos. The spiritual import of the mitzvah enables the two holidays to complement each other. On Pesach, “the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, was revealed” to the Jewish people. They, however, were not able to internalize the revelation for they were still sullied by the impurity that had become attached to them through the years of Egyptian exile. As our Rabbis say: “It took G-d one moment to take the Jews out of Egypt, but forty years to take Egypt out of the Jews.”
Moreover, in a complete sense, “taking Egypt out of the Jews” — i.e., the personal refinement the Jews must undergo — must come from their own efforts and not from a revelation from Above. This defines the nature of the Divine service prescribed for the Counting of the Omer: to refine and elevate our personalities. The 49 days of the Counting of the Omer correspond to the 49 dimensions of our personalities. (According to Kabbalah, our emotions are made up of seven different qualities. These seven interrelate with each other producing a total of 49. The Divine service of Counting the Omer involves polishing and developing each of these potentials.)
Chassidic thought sets out an entirely new set of parameters for this task. Not only must we abandon our undesirable character traits and polish the positive ones, we must focus on conquering our fundamental self-concern, the dimension of our personalities labeled as yeshus, self-concern. At that point, our emotions no longer focus on “what I want” and “what I feel,” but they become aligned with the middos Elyonus, G-d's emotional qualities, and reflect them. That is the inner meaning of the term sefirah. Not only does it mean “counting,” it also means “shining forth.” A person is given the potential to beam forth G-dly light.
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
