Parashat Tazria-M'tsora, Leviticus 12:1-15:33

As we continue through our prayer campaign leading to Shavuot (Pentecost) in less than five weeks, it's good to remember that counting the days of the Omer (Lev. 23:15) is also counting the days of the Resurrection of Messiah. Yeshua rose on the first day of the week during Passover. Resurrection day, the first day of the week, is also day eight, seven days plus one.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminds us of the significance of the number seven. "Seven in Judaism is not a simple prime number. It is the one-after-six. Six represents the material, physical, secular. Ancient Mesopotamia  . . used a numerical system based on the number six. Western civilization still bears traces of this in the twenty-four hour day (2 X 6 hours of light, plus 2 X 6 of darkness); the sixty (10 X 6) minutes in an hour, and seconds in a minute; and the 360 degrees in a circle. . . . Judaism acknowledges the six-part structure of time and space, but adds that God exists beyond time and space. Hence seven--the one beyond six--became the symbol of the holy."¹

April 11 marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom Ha-Shoah in Hebrew.

As a 13-year old, I recall visiting Germany, and with my own eyes I saw heaps of rubble in Stuttgart that were left over from World War II. My parents worked in Germany, hunting Nazi war criminals, for eight years after World War II. Some of my earliest memories in life are hearing the personal stories of Jewish Holocaust victims at my parents' kitchen table. I remember the crying, the tears, and the screams.

In case some of you are not familiar with it, Holocaust Remembrance Day is the day when, in Jewish communities throughout the world, and in Poland, and especially in Israel, there are ceremonies, speeches, personal testimonies and television programming that recall the murder and attempted genocide of six million European Jews from 1939 to 1945. In Israel, a siren wails throughout the nation, stopping traffic, and reminding us of this event.