Sacred time in a world gone mad

Something is off. The world feels like it’s not turning quite right. The alliances that shaped the postwar order are fraying. The Middle East is reshuffling itself in real time. Here in the US, civic trust is eroding, cultural discourse is unrecognizable, and many Jews are waking up afraid.

This is not just a political crisis; it’s a Jewish one. We wonder: Will this country, long a safe haven for Jews, find its footing — or are we watching a soft, tortured empire imploding in real time? And what about Israel? Can it forge new alliances? Can it come together? Will it be safe?

I don’t know. No one does. But here’s what I do know: Jews have never waited for stability to make meaning. We don’t need the world to figure itself out to claim our story. We absorb the damage, ritualize the memory, and move forward — on our own terms.

We don’t outsource Jewish identity. We don’t ask permission. We craft calendars.

* * *

At first glance, they seem top-down. God commands the holiday and we obey. But looking closer, a deeper truth emerges: the Torah gives us the scaffolding, and we’re the ones who fill it in. In every generation, we have added memories, sorrows, and rebirths. The result isn’t just holy time — it’s Jewish time: a living record of what we carry and choose to elevate.

Right now, we’re counting the Omer — the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot. The Torah frames it as a journey from liberation to revelation, from Egypt to Sinai.

But over time, this period became more than spiritual preparation. It became a season of mourning. The Talmud tells us that 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died during these weeks because they didn’t treat one another with respect. So Jewish communities began to grieve: no weddings, no music, no haircuts, no celebration.

But here’s what we often forget: none of this — the mourning, the customs, the holiday itself — is in the Torah. Even in the Talmud, the connections are tenuous. These rituals only solidified centuries later, especially in medieval Ashkenaz (the region of northern France and Germany) — after the Crusades decimated Jewish communities. Jews needed a container for their overwhelming grief.

When I first traced these customs to their post-talmudic origins, I thought I’d debunked something. I was in college and believed I’d found the “real” story.

But I was wrong.

The fact that these practices emerged later doesn’t weaken them — it reflects the awesome power we have to shape our story. That’s the genius of Judaism. Our traditions aren’t relics. They are responses. Our Jewish calendar isn’t static — it’s evolving. We are tasked not just with living through history but with transforming it into Jewish memory.

Take the story of Rabbi Akiva’s students. Some scholars suggest they were likely killed during the Bar Kochba revolt, which Rabbi Akiva supported. Rome crushed the rebellion — but the Talmud doesn’t blame Rome. It focuses on internal strife between the students. Why? Because Jews have never let empire be the main protagonist in our story. We turned military defeat into moral reflection — and made our ability to fight baseless hatred a task for generations.

Rabbi Daniel Sperber, the great scholar of Jewish custom, described how mourning for Rabbi Akiva’s students became layered with the grief of later generations. His writing transformed the mourning customs of the Omer for me into acts of deep solidarity: “Blood touched blood,” he wrote. “The blood of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples is mixed with the blood of the martyrs of Ashkenaz.”

In other words, our calendar rituals don’t just preserve history — they absorb it and reaffirm our values. What began as mourning for one tragedy became a container for Jews to continue making meaning.

* * *

We didn’t let Rome own our story then. We’re not going to let Hamas, Qatar, or anyone acting against us own it now.

That’s what Jewish time does. It doesn’t just mark what happened. It insists on what matters. It draws moral meaning from destruction. It turns catastrophe into narrative, narrative into ritual, and ritual into continuity.

So when we count the Omer — when we keep its mourning customs, and when we set them down on Lag BaOmer — we are not reenacting a quaint historical memory. We are claiming agency. We are engaging in the most powerful kind of authorship: communal, generational, meaning-making.

I don’t know how this moment will be recorded. But I do know this: we will record it.

Not as victims. Not as footnotes. As authors.