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Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org. We're going to do an episode about counting the Omer.
I'm curious if remembering to count the Omer is easy for you or hard for you personally.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's overall not the hardest thing in my life, but I've forgotten. I don't have some perfect record and I would say usually every year there's a night that I forget and I get it the next day.

Rav Avi: Yeah, for me it's all about routine. As long as I'm living my routine then I can develop a routine. But if it's like I count with my kids at bedtime but then I skip a bedtime then that's where it becomes dangerous.

Rav Eitan: My father-in-law always puts a note on his pillow. That's his system.

Rav Avi: That's I think the perfect lead-in to this question, which is going to be about the time of counting the Omer. So this is what the questioner writes: I have a question about counting the Omer at shul. My shul starts Friday night services at a standard time, 7:30 p.m., and so in the summer we bring in Shabbat early before sunset. During the Omer, we also count the Omer during services, and so we are saying the blessing and the day number when it is still the day before.

What should I do in this situation? Should I not say the blessing or count with my shul and count by myself at home like all the other days? Should I count at shul and then count without a blessing at home? So this person is looking to us for guidance. Okay, so where do we start with this question?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, this is one of those questions I feel like has two components. One is getting into the answer on this timing question, and then the second, which is what the questioner gets to at the end of should I count at shul, count without a blessing at home, actually gets to a more meta question of how do I interact with communities that I don't feel are fully aligned with how I ideally would do things if I were in charge? You sense here the questioner is like I have a feeling you're going to tell me something that's not going to align with this group of people so then what do I do? I just head off on my own or I integrate?

Rav Avi: Right, okay, so the first element of this question we could say like what if I'm actually organizing the minyan? It's up to me. Should I have us count early or should I have us wait?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so let's get into that, which is when must you count the Omer? All right.

So the Torah has language around this, usfartem lachem mimachorat haShabbat, you should count from the day following the Sabbath, which we understand to be the first day of Pesach. Sheva shabbatot temimot tihyena, count seven, let's translate temimot as complete weeks. There should be seven complete weeks, okay? But the word temimot is unusual because you could just say like sheva shabbatot tihyena, make it seven weeks, and the Omer, it's got to be perfect and complete. So it probably just means something like seven complete sequences of seven days, like don't think that a partial week will count or something like that.

But there are already very early rabbinic interpretations of this word which indicate that temimot means that the individual days that are being counted, these 49 days of counting, are supposed to be as complete as possible. So for instance, this is a passage from the Sifra, the early Midrash Halakha on the book of Leviticus. It says could it be that you would harvest the Omer, so there's actually this grain offering that you harvest which kicks the whole thing off, could it be that you would harvest the grain in the day and count in the day? So this is the 16th of Nisan. Could it be the whole thing happens in the day?

Rav Avi: This is like don't count your chickens while they are hatching?

Rav Eitan: Something like that. Yeah and truth be told I think the idea that you would do this in the day is just that's the normal time. Like that's what... and you're bringing the sacrifice of the grain, so maybe, cut down the grain, count the day, bring the sacrifice all in the day.

And the Sifra says no, because it says Sheva Shabbatot Temimot Tihyena, it has to be seven complete weeks. When are they complete? Bizman shematchil baerev, when they begin the evening before. That is to say, if you think about it, if you start counting in the day, that is to say the daylight hours, but the Jewish day begins at nightfall or sunset—we'll get to that—the evening before. Well then you haven't actually counted from the start of the day.

So we want you to from the beginning of the date as it were, right, we want you to be able to start marking this as special time.

Rav Avi: Okay, so this is the opposite of how I was reading it, which was don't count too early. This is saying don't count too late. Yeah, like zrizim lamitzvah, hurry to the mitzvah. As soon as the day starts, you should count, which is at night.

Rav Eitan: That's right. And actually exactly what you just said kicks in a further instinct to extend even further. That text we just read, all it means is count at night as opposed to the day.

Okay, and so that could be like, yeah, you don't start counting the Omer like you wake up, you daven Shacharit, you say your morning prayers, and then you count the Omer. No, no, no, do it the night before. But it could be like 11:00 PM counts for that, like as long as you're marking day one in the sector of the day that is the night, it's fine. But you start to have some medieval voices that say, oh, temimot, it should be as early as I can towards the beginning of the night. I want to basically almost time it, right, with the beginning.

Rav Avi: Like I'll get the most credit of the day having counted.

Rav Eitan: That's right, I'll account for most of it. The Rosh is one medieval authority who says you should be sure to count as early as possible.

Now, not everyone agreed with him. The Ran is another medieval authority who just says no, no, no, if you counted at night, anytime at night, that counts as temimot. But once anyone is sort of driving to go as early as possible, well then the natural question is, what's the earliest that counts as the start of the day? So here's a couple options, we'll give a few markers for it. Nightfall, what we sometimes call Tzeit Hakochavim, when the stars emerge. That is clearly part of the new day. That is to say, if we're talking about a Jewish date beginning at the night, well definitely by the time the stars are out, it's the night according to any definition. And even biblically, in the book of Nechemia, when they're talking about how they would work all the livelong day, the way they say that is we got up at dawn and worked until Tzeit Hakochavim, until the stars come out. And so that's the end of the workday. That is what some sources will call Vaddai Layla,

Rav Avi: definitely nighttime.

Rav Eitan: And you know, our clearest indicator that like when the stars are out it's the next day, we feel free to resume all regular activities at the end of Shabbat once the stars are out. Again, there's little quibbling of how many stars, how close together, but we're just speaking broadly. When the stars are out, that's clear.

Okay, but what about sunset? Isn't that also sort of the end of the day? Right, I think experientially we often think of on some level an even clearer moment of the end of the day is when you see the sun dip below the horizon, whereas the stars coming out is a little more vague, right, when exactly does that happen? And in fact, we have a statement in the Talmud that says broadly speaking, not about the Omer, we'll get back to the Omer, that bein hashmashot literally means like between the suns, but bein hashmashot, twilight, let's translate it idiomatically, safeka hu is a doubtful period. It is a period of doubtful status. The Talmud basically is sort of sensitive to the fact that well, the day sort of ends at nightfall, but it sort of ends at sunset, and it's hard for me to actually pin that down, and it kind of leaves open. Well, how are we supposed to think about that period of time? So it's easy enough with something like Shabbat to just say, well we're going to be really strict, and we're going to say Shabbat starts at sunset and ends at nightfall.

And Shabbat will basically then be sort of the length of a day plus two twilights. Something like that. Simple enough to say I'm going to be strict with twilight on both ends with Shabbat, but what about the Omer? And in particular, what's the strict way? Is it stricter to say, is it safer to say, well, counting the Omer is really important, I want to get it right, I don't want there to be any doubt that I'm in the correct day, so I will wait until nightfall to count the Omer? Or is strict with the Omer, well, I want to make sure to include as much of the day as possible, so I should actually move it back to the earliest possible time that might be a part of the next day?

Rav Avi: It's sort of like on Shabbat, you can do it because you never go from Shabbat into Shabbat, so you can always prioritize Shabbat over chol. But here, when you're going from one day of the Omer into the next day of the Omer, and they both have to be complete, how do you know, how do you know where to cut it? Wait, somebody just told me this week that there's a game show in Germany, have you heard of this where the whole game show is cutting things in half? Really? Yeah, I don't know, listeners, you can google this or some of you are nodding, you're like, I love that game show. And the whole game is they just give people different things and a knife and it's like, then they weigh both sides and

Rav Eitan: whoever cut it as close as possible.

Rav Avi: So it's like sometimes it's a donut and like where was the jelly and sometimes it's a, but the whole premise, this is what we're doing now. We're like, where do I cut my Omer day?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, where do I cut the days? Very good.

Rav Avi: I'll submit this for the game show.

Rav Eitan: Awesome. Takes a little more abstraction, I feel like.

Rav Avi: We're going to be really good at it.

Rav Eitan: This is further compounded, the question of where you cut the days, by another axis, which at first may sound like it'll help us, but I actually think it just complicates it further. Is the mitzvah to count the Omer in full force when there is no Temple? Or is the practice now vestigial? Cause think about it, if you encounter it in the Torah, it says, on the sixteenth day of Nisan, on the, you know, the day after the fifteenth day of the first month, I want you to bring this offering, the priest will wave it, ba ba ba ba ba, and then count the seven weeks.

Rav Avi: so much of Shavuot is taken away from us by not having the Temple, you're not going to take this away too, are you?

Rav Eitan: So this is a question, right, which is to say there are two ways to read a text like that. One is, no, like there's no meaning to counting those days without having the sacrifice that is literally like the first part of the sentence as it were of that part of the Torah. And so sure, we count the Omer today, that's clear, people in the Talmud are counting the Omer, but it's vestigial. It's the same way we take the lulav on days two through seven of Sukkot, where you basically say this would have been a Temple procedure, we don't have that anymore, but we do it as much as possible.

Or do you say, no, no, no, like the Torah has a couple independent commands there. One of them was to bring this sacrifice of grain, but the other is it's really important to mark the days between Pesach and Shavuot. Of course, in the Torah, they're linked because they happen at the same time, but they're not conceptually interdependent. Yeah.

The shorthand way of saying that is, is sefirat haOmer today a mitzvah d’Oraita, a biblical mitzvah, or is it a zecher l'mikdash? It's a rabbinic reference point to something that no longer exists. So that sounds like oh great, so if I thought it was biblical, which like the Rambam thinks, then that would clarify for me that I'm going to be really strict about this. And if it is rabbinic, which a whole bunch of other authorities think, I think Rav Zerachya haLevi among others, then I can be more lenient.

Rav Avi: But what does it mean to be lenient and strict?

Rav Eitan: Exactly. Let me add one more wrinkle. The Mishnah records in Masechet Brachot that Rabbi Yehuda thought you could pray the evening prayer as early as the time in the day known as plag Hamincha, which is an hour and a quarter variable hours before, let's call it, sunset. So, for instance, in a 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM day, around the equinox, you take the daylight hours, divide them into twelve, which would make one hour each, and you do a one and a quarter of those. Rabbi Yehuda would say you can actually start davening Maariv, the evening prayer, at 4:45 PM.

Rav Avi: So this is going to be a little bit the language of my shul starts Friday night services at 7:30, bringing in Shabbat early, this is where that comes from.

Rav Eitan: That's at least one related justification, exactly, for doing that. I don't know what this person's latitude and longitude are, but gathering from the fact that a 7:30 start time on Friday night is still going to get you to the Omer, which is at the end of davening before sunset, it sounds like this is a place where sunset might be as late as 8:45, 9:00, something like that.
But there, yeah, 7:30 probably is within this band of time, the one and a quarter variable hours before. And the Talmud in Brachot says, if you want to follow Rabbi Yehuda's opinion, you can. Okay, like it legitimates it. So that raises the question of, so does that mean that maybe even there's some time before sunset, even earlier, towards the end of the day that can be considered night, and how does that fit into the debate above?

Rav Avi: Yeah, and that makes me wonder here if it's possible to say, like, this hour is being counted still towards yesterday's day, and also I'm getting a head start on counting for tomorrow, and it's okay, like actually these twenty minutes can be both the sixth day and the seventh day.

Rav Eitan: So we'll see how much tolerance there is for that. I'll say, you mentioned before the sort of the tyranny in a certain way of the clock, and everyone's pulled together, but even before there was a clock and where we lived by, now you know digital time, Jewish prayer has had a heavy communal dimension, and that means you have to gather people, right? And gathering people means herding cats, and it means getting people to agree to come together at a certain time, and I gotta get up to ten, and when am I going to get the ten, and there's always a negotiation. So it's easy enough, right, to say, well I've concluded this is the right time to do it and that's when I'm going to count the Omer every night. But if you are somehow interfacing with a larger community that you're coming together to pray with, well then you may not have the full control, right, over what's happening.

You may be subject to other people's preferences of what's happening.

Rav Avi: So that's what's happening here in this in this question.

Rav Eitan: Before we continue with today's episode, we need your help. If you love Responsa Radio, please consider supporting it by donating today at hadar.org/donate. Your tax-deductible gift will help keep this podcast on the airwaves and sustain Hadar programs throughout the year. Again, that's hadar.org/donate. Thank you.

So I'll give you a story that is about Rashi.

Rav Avi: Cool!

Rav Eitan: The Machzor Vitry, which is a book about liturgy and davening and the way in early Ashkenazi, early German community they would they structured their prayers. You have there a discussion of how the Omer fits into davening. Very early on, it's understood that when you're praying the evening prayer publicly, you first do all the stuff with the Shema and the Amidah, and then at the end you count the Omer. Some people do it before Aleinu, some after Aleinu, okay, but it's at the end. So we have in Machzor Vitry the following report. It says my teacher, which in this context is Rashi, prayed the evening prayer during the day. He was in the synagogue praying the evening prayer during the day.

Now here we do know a little bit about latitude and longitude. We're here in Northern Europe, okay, France, Germany, the latitudes there, these are places that during Sefirat HaOmer they are not having sunset until it can be after, well after 9:00 o'clock, depending on the exact timing. So they're not having Maariv at that time. We know that in general

Rav Avi: it's too late to gather,

Rav Eitan: it's too late to gather, they're assuming that they're going to pray this and then go home to eat and they're going to do that after they're not going to wait till it's dark to eat. Also saves fuel to eat in the daytime if you can. There's just no reason right to do any of that. So Rashi's in a minyan and they're counting the omer early, just like this questioner and we're told v'lo ratza l'varech al sefirat ha-omer im ha-acherim.

Rav Avi: Rashi had the same problem!

Rav Eitan: Same problem.

Rav Avi: This questioner is feeling so good about themselves right now.

Rav Eitan: He didn't want to make a bracha over the omer with the other people. So just pause for a minute, everyone else is. Everyone else is doing it. How do we understand that practice? Is that without rabbinic approval? I mean Rashi's there. Meaning how do we understand

Rav Avi: what everyone else is doing?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, why were they doing it so early? Or are they actually reflecting in some intuitive way...

Rav Avi: It sounds like Rashi's not a shul rabbi.

Rav Eitan: It does not seem like he's calling all the shots here. Yeah. Or, now we'll listen what he says, because he was worried that that would be a bracha l'vatala. He was worried that counting that early would be a blessing in vain. In other words, Rashi won't say the bracha because he basically thinks this is too early. You shouldn't be saying this. You're counting the tenth day, it's the ninth.

Rav Avi: Okay, like, same exact concern.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, the sun is, I see it!

Rav Avi: It's still the day before.

Rav Eitan: I see it through the window and it's still there. Nonetheless, what did he do? He counted with the others but didn't say the bracha. Okay.

All right. And people would say to him, why are you doing this? If you think this is an invalid time, don't say anything. And if it's a valid time, say the bracha. What are you doing? And he said, well, here's another great one, I might forget to count the omer later.

Yeah, even Rashi was afraid of forgetting! And then what'll end up happening is I will be kereach mikan u-mikan which literally means bald on this side and on this side of my head, meaning I will have lost out on both counts. If I'm so strict and I don't count it now but then I forget it later, then I did nothing. Whereas what you see here, what Rashi's ideal, what he wanted to do was, well, I'm going to count now as an insurance policy but later I'm going to go home and count again.

Rav Avi: Yeah. It's important to remember also that he doesn't have the apps and reminders and an alarm on his phone to go off to tell you to count the omer.

Rav Eitan: If you daven Maariv every night, usually you're not going to forget because you're like oh there's another ritual thing I have to do. But as we see from Rashi you daven Maariv many nights during the year and don't count the omer, so you can just forget.

Rav Avi: Right, or if you daven Maariv earlier, right.

This is the problem. That's exactly the problem. Okay, so Rashi is concerned about... Yeah, it's almost like trying to be too pious and then ending up actually in the hole.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and he's sort of hedging his bets, right, therefore. We don't actually have the full picture here. Like, was Rashi counting with a blessing later at night? In which case, well, he really doesn't think the first one counts for anything. It's irrelevant because you would never say the blessing if you thought there was a chance that you already counted. So is that what's going on? It's almost like lip service. Well, better to count with them this meaningless thing than to do nothing. Right. But it's definitely meaningless and I'm going to count later. Or does Rashi basically when he prays with the community essentially forego saying a bracha at all? He won't say it with them because it's too early, but then he won't say it later because it might have been late enough.

Rav Avi: that would feel surprising to me, meaning

Rav Eitan: to skip it altogether?

Rav Avi: Yeah, my assumption would be that he's saying it later and then he's like on the chance that I forget, I'll rely on the fact that that thing that wasn't real will become retroactively real somehow.

Rav Eitan: Right. So here's what... I'll cite you the following thing from the Shulchan Aruch. Okay. And we can then decide what we think this means.

There's some debate over what it means. And that might weigh in. on what he's doing there and how we think about this. So the Shulchan Aruch based in part on this story says the following: Hamitpallel im hatzibbur mib'od yom. Someone who prays with the community while it is still day, I'll translate it that way. Moneh immahem belo bracha. Counts with them without saying a blessing. This is exactly what Rashi did. Ve'im yizkor balaylah yivarech veyispor. If you remember at night you should make a bracha and count.

Rav Avi: So we're codifying from Rashi?

Rav Eitan: Seems we're codifying from Rashi, but we are offering a little bit of clarification that the later counting is meant to be with a bracha. Your instinct that it can't be that this system was meant to cancel the blessing entirely. That's how the Shulchan Aruch brings Rashi's case. Okay? But I want you to hear how the Shulchan Aruch just gives its general guidance about the timing. So it says when you count the Omer you should do it right after you pray the evening prayer.

Ve'im shachach lispor bitchillat halaylah holech vesopher kol halaylah. If you forgot to count at the beginning of the night go all night. But clearly the ideal is towards the beginning. Further on the Shulchan Aruch takes up a case of saying when a community makes a mistake on a cloudy day and makes a bracha over Sefirat haOmer thinking it was dark and then realizing it was not they have to go back and count when it gets dark. And then he adds the following: Vehamidaktikim einam sofrim ad tzet hakochavim vechen rauy la'asot. Those who are very careful do not count until the stars come out and that's the good way to practice.

Rav Avi: So he's saying actually set your Omer alarm counter for 10:00 PM you'd be fine.

Rav Eitan: Yeah and maybe if it's earlier than that is maybe if at 9:30 it'll be the stars so as early as you can that'll be great. But that is the time you should do it. But here close reading is really helpful. When someone says the midaktikim, the really careful do it this way.

Rav Avi: Means everyone else doesn't?

Rav Eitan: Everyone else doesn't and when you use that language it implies and that's the good way to do it but it's not the sine qua non, right? It's not actually necessary to count after dark to fulfill your obligation. You want to ask me when should you set the Omer alarm?

Rav Avi: Oh I thought he's just saying it's not actually obligated to do it at pitch black.

Rav Eitan: When he says really careful people wait until nightfall and that's what you should do, rauy, it's appropriate, the implication is yeah but before nightfall would also count. So in that sense it seems the Shulchan Aruch's position seems to be when can you start counting the Omer? Sometime before tzet hakochavim, It's just it would be better to wait until after tzet hakochavim.

Rav Avi: I'm curious in that story where they said it with the blessing do they say it again with the blessing the second time?

Rav Eitan: It is not a hundred percent clear and this goes to the question of what are the exact parameters that the Shulchan Aruch thinks we're dealing with in that Rashi case. Let's go back to that language.

The language was you're praying with a community mib'od yom while it's still the day. So on its own I could read that in two ways. While it's still the day could be before nightfall or it could be before sunset. Right? Both of those in a certain way can be while it's still day.

Rav Avi: If we can't define night we can't define day either.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So on the one hand if you want to read this sort of more conservatively and this is the way a number of interpretations of the Shulchan Aruch go, the Taz and the Vilna Gaon, okay, assume here's what the Yep, he thinks it's valid to count the Omer after sunset, but you should wait until after nightfall. Right? When he relays the story of you're with a community that's counting while it's still day, he means a community that is counting between sunset and nightfall.

Yeah. And though they're doing something which is technically legitimate, and that's why I'm narrating it for you in the Shulchan Aruch, nonetheless, you, O pious one, should count without a blessing and wait to go back at night and count at that point with a blessing. And essentially you'll think to yourself, well, I'm going to count now with them in case I forget like Rashi, but the reason I am still going to count now is if I forget later, I want this one to count. And it can count because it's after sunset.

Okay? The problem is, seems like the Shulchan Aruch actually more outright endorses counting after sunset and thinks that this practice of waiting till nightfall, that's for the medakdekim, I love them, blessings upon their head, but that's sort of extraordinary. And if you read that way, it seems like you should read the other line in the Shulchan Aruch as this community is praying mi-be-od yom, before sunset. It's maybe after this plag ha-mincha, this late of day time, and in that case, you really are going to have to count later.

Nonetheless, why would you count with them without a blessing earlier? So according to this view, which is the view of Eliya Rabba and Levush, it's because well there's some position that thinks it is legitimate to count during this time. That Rabbi Yehuda position, where the day actually begins at the late afternoon of the previous day, there is some parallel universe in which this is nighttime and you're sort of covering your bases that that might also count. Yeah. And I think there's also a phantom factor here, which is obvious once you see it, but is not being explicitly mentioned, which is why is Rashi davening in that kind of community at all? Why are you stuck in a place?

Rav Avi: Judaism is all about—community is all about compromise?

Rav Eitan: Or a community is all about community, at least, which is to say there is some pull here of well I can't just completely separate off from this.

First of all, maybe I want to daven in a minyan, I think I need to daven in a minyan, this is the only minyan around. Never mind all the anthropological forces, like these other people who were there for me during my shiva, I was there for them. There's a sense of I'm bound to these people and I don't like all the choices that they're making. It doesn't mean there's no limits on that, but what you see in that story about Rashi and then the way it is brought in the Shulchan Aruch is there is some living in the overlap, in the Venn diagram of my commitments and what the community is doing.

The debate in that interpretation of the Shulchan Aruch is the Shulchan Aruch telling you to count without a blessing when it's after sunset or even when it's before sunset is actually getting to what are the parameters here of how far am I stretching to be in this given community? And then I think you start to get a sense of, oh, maybe there are actually three different states I might find myself in. There's some times where the thing I ideally want to do, I have at least nine other people who like to do it the same way, and that's exactly what I do. Incredible! I'm part of a minyan that in the summer or in these late spring months has a mincha minyan that finishes before sunset, then a whole shiur that goes for forty minutes, and then maariv with a bracha with the omer. That's one way to be.
Another way to be is on the other extreme, which is to say, yeah, I have this community, like they do a bunch of stuff that's like totally wrong and I can't do those things with them. They are counting the omer like so early, it's before any time I could possibly justify.

Rav Avi: These guys count two days at a time!

Rav Eitan: I'm just going to be like I can't— Maybe I don't go to the service at all or I go to the service but I just step out. I'm just mute at that point, whatever it is. And then there's this middle ground which you see Rashi doing one version of, which is: This is not how I would do it, I actually think the more plausible reading of Rashi is he's worried about the bracha levatala, the blessing in vain, because it's actually probably before sunset. I think that also makes sense with the northern European latitude and time as we know it. But he's still going to count with them because he is aware that there is some way of construing what they're doing as maybe being in line with Rabbi Yehuda's definition of the end of the day. And there the drive to not separate from the community at least gets him to do some form of participation even if later he's got a backup plan to quote-unquote do it right.

Rav Avi: Yeah, this is such a great story and I think the fact that it's Rashi just makes it that much more interesting and amazing, but it's a really interesting story to think about this concept of being in a community that isn't exactly right which I think it would be so easy for us to assume is a modern problem.

Rav Eitan: To me this is actually a very fundamental way of thinking about navigating halacha in communal spaces. If I were to sum it up for you it's some version of you ideally want to identify your principles, be able to see which practices are in complete contradiction to them, complete violation of any way you can think about it, and that is going to help you guide what communities you can even be a part of, where you have to draw lines, etc. Then I think part of being a serious person who engages with halacha is to then locate the things where, okay, I do it this way, I feel pretty strongly about it, but I am aware from my exposure to the multi-vocal take of this tradition that there actually are two to three other ways of thinking about this. Maybe the people who are davening early and saying the omer early are not just lazy or having a more convenient time, maybe I could actually understand that practice as in its own way reflecting a sense of it's best to count the omer as early as possible.

And then it at least opens up a place where I can say okay, if I were in charge, right, I might do this differently, but there's enough weight here that given that this is my community, I'm going to at least find a way to not have to step out of it. And the best ecosystems are ones that can then sort of allow different models to coexist. One of my favorite examples of this always raised by my teacher Rav David Bigman, I think we may have mentioned it on this podcast before: When do you time the festive meal, the seuda on Purim? And the Terumat HaDeshen, one of the great late medieval authorities, he essentially reports that: Look, it's best to have the Purim seuda be something like lunch or Thanksgiving dinner time, you know, 2, 3 p.m. or something like that, because you should be spending a lot of the day in that. And he says, and that's what I do, and that's what my talmidim do, etc. But he says the baalebatim, the average people who basically need to work and are not taking Purim off, they have the common practice to do the Purim seuda at the very end of the day.

They start it like 30 minutes before sunset or something like that and then they go into the nighttime. And the Terumat HaDeshen says, leave them alone. Let them do it that way. You want to ask me? Ideally I would do it this way, but actually they need to do it that way, here it is.

Rav Avi: If you can't get the day off, better to still do your seuda.

Rav Eitan: They're giving it in other ways. This is ways and I think even more, I don't think he uses this language, but you could look at a practice like this like you just suggested and say: Wow, that's incredible. People who can't necessarily take the day off nonetheless finding a way to schedule this.

They take a little bit off, they come home a little bit early and they fit this in, and even oh look, they spread it into day 15 which is also a day of Purim. So that notion of sort of a charitable look at practices that you see without just self-liquidating your own commitments. That to me is one of the messages of this story and if we bring it back to the questioner. If you ask me how I would behave, right, in these contexts, so I'll give a couple answers on this.

As a participant, okay, I would not count the Omer under any circumstances before sunset. I could understand how someone else would do that, but I wouldn't do that. I don't think it would be disruptive for me to not count even in a community that was doing that. And if I felt confident that I had a good system for remembering later, I had an alarm, whatever it is, I might not count before nightfall at all in any circumstance.

But, and there have been cases like this where I was nervous I was going to forget, I would say after, after sunset, go ahead, do it, join with the community, and later on you can count it, right? I would do that with a Bracha and then later on you can count again to double down. If I were the rabbi of a shul though, I think I would be thinking very carefully about how likely do I think it is that everyone here is going to remember. And there my general counsel would be: if it's after sunset, you should count with a Bracha, that is to say the official synagogue service should do that. If there's some Medakdekim, some really careful people who want to wait until later, that's their business, but as long as you're sort of in the clear middle zone of, yeah, there's plenty of people who thought that after sunset, it's enough the next day, I would recommend that.
But it's all about the negotiation.

Rav Avi: Thanks! I hope this is a helpful answer for the questioner and I wish everyone the best of luck both in your Omer counting endeavors and also your community navigation. Thank you for joining us for this season of Responsa Radio.
Over the course of the season, we've tackled a wide variety of questions. We're going to take a break and we'll be back in a couple of months for our next season. We can't wait for you to hear it.
Do you have a Halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at [email protected]. Responsa Radio is a project of the Hadar Institute. Thanks to Chana Kupetz and Jeremy Tabick for producing this podcast, and to David Khabinsky for recording and editing this episode.
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