Shavuot

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Pentecost — The second major Jewish holiday of pilgrimage (Yomim Noraim) in the annual cycle, also spelled as Shavuos, Shvuos or Shavuoth

Sefirat HaOmer—A Study in Klal u’Prat

The forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot are called the days of Sefira or the days of counting Omer—Sefirat HaOmer—when Jews count every day as the first day of the omer, the second day of the omer, and so on until on the Eve of Shavuot, when the last, forty-ninth day is counted. . . . And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest, from the day that ye brought the Omer of the waving; seven weeks shall there be complete.Leviticus 23:21 Seven weeks shalt thou number unto thee; from the time the sickle is first put to the standing corn shalt thou begin to number seven weeks.Deuteronomy 16:9 This period is marked by semi-mourning with observance of such customs as avoiding haircuts, not shaving, not celebrating [...]

By |2022-05-27T19:33:27-04:00May 27th, 2022|Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Husband and wife, Kabbalah, Klal and Prat, Omer, Passover (Pesach), Sefirot, Shavuot, Uncategorized|2 Comments
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Shavuot (in Russian)

Шавуот Праздник Дарования Торы Aлександр Полторак    Закончился праздник Песах.  Все евреи поспешно убрали пасхальную посуду в особые шкафы или на чердаки до следующего Песаха.  В домах появились после восьмидневного перерыва свежеиспечённые булки. Наступили будни... Прошедший праздник оставил во рту приятный привкус подгоревшей мацы, воспоминания о Седере, проведенном в кругу семьи, рассказы об Исходе. Но закончился ли на этом Песах? Мораль и Свобода Выбора Вспомним, что главная идея Песаха это идея свободы, свободы от рабства Египетского или иного, физического или духовного. Итак, Бог вывел еврейский народ из Египта, сделал нас свободными людьми. Но стали ли мы свободными, освободившись от гнёта египетских надсмотрщиков?  Подчас, раб, освобождённый своим хозяином, остаётся у него добровольно, ибо некуда и незачем ему идти, нет у него ни места, ни смысла жизни...  Что же это всё-таки такое, свобода? О свободе [...]

By |2020-05-19T19:00:17-04:00May 19th, 2020|Freedom, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Passover (Pesach), Physics, Shavuot, Uncategorized|2 Comments
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Counting Weeks and Days

There is a Biblical Commandment to count the days between the Passover and Shavuot, the "Feast of Weeks" (a.k.a. Pentecost). We start counting on the second day of Passover (the first day of the barley harvest in the land of Israel, when the wave-offering of the omer, i.e., “sheaf,” of ripe barley was made in the Jerusalem Temple) and finish on the eve of Shavuot—the day when two loaves of bread made of wheat were offered at the Temple. There are exactly seven weeks (forty-nine days) between these two holidays; we are commanded to count the weeks and the days. These forty-nine days are called days of Sefirat HaOmer (the days of “counting the Omer”) or, simply, days of Sefirah ("counting"). This commandment is given in the following verses of the Torah: And [...]

By |2024-05-17T18:10:51-04:00April 28th, 2020|Fractals, Kabbalah, Mashiach (Messiah), Omer, Sefirot, Shavuot, Spirituality, Sukkot, Uncategorized, Zohar|2 Comments
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Fitting Pieces of the Puzzle Together

Meditations on the Maaseh Merkavah – IV This is the fourth and the final installment in the series of posts related to Ezekiel’s prophesy, Ma’aseh Merkava, “The Making of the Chariot.” For background information, refer to the previous posts, “Space – Between Future and Past,” “Relational Space,” and “Collapse of the Wave Function.” Regular readers of my blog may be wondering about my last post “Futurist Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” which was about my new interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is not a physics blog, however; the Quantum Torah blog is about Torah and physics (or, more broadly, Torah and science). What did the last post have to do with Torah? Hopefully, it will all now become clear. Last Shavuot I had a very unusual experience. Sitting in shul listening to the reading [...]

By |2019-06-21T13:21:11-04:00June 21st, 2019|Collapse of the wavefunction, Ezekiel, Freedom, G‑d, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Kabbalah, Names of G‑d, Physics, Quantum Theory, Relativity, Science, Sefirot, Shavuot, Spirituality, Superposition, Time, Topology, Uncategorized, Wavefunction|2 Comments
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Collapse of the Wave Function

Meditations on the Maaseh Merkavah – III This is the third installment in the series of posts related to the Ezekiel’s prophesy, Maaseh Merkava, “The Making of the Chariot.” For background information, the reader is referred to my previous posts, “Space – Between Future and Past” and “ Relational Space.” As I wrote in the first post, “Space – Between Future and Past,” Sefirot line up against four letters of Tetragrammaton, Y‑H‑W‑H, as follows: Yud י Chokhmah, Abba Heh  ה Binah, Imma Waw  ו Six Lower Sephirot (Z”A) Heh  ה Malchut   The first two letters of the proper name of G‑d, Y‑H‑W‑H – Havayah, or Tetragrammaton – are י “Yud” (sometimes transliterated as "Yod") and ה “Heh” (sometimes transliterated as "Hey" or "He").  During the reading of the Ezekiel’s prophesy Maaseh Merkava [...]

By |2019-06-19T03:41:47-04:00June 18th, 2019|Collapse of the wavefunction, Ezekiel, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Kabbalah, Names of G‑d, Physics, Quantum Theory, Sefirot, Shavuot, Uncategorized, Wavefunction, Zohar|2 Comments
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Relational Space

Meditations on the Maaseh Merkavah – II This post is a sequel to my previous post, “Space – Between Future and Past.” For background information, the reader is referred to that post. My second Shavuot “epiphany” was that space is relational. Not that I realized that space was relational for the first time – I always thought so. But, for some reason, thinking about the meaning of the four faces of Chayot, the "living creatures" – the angelic beings described in the prophecy of Ezekiel that we read on Shavuot – made it absolutely clear in my mind. Isaac Newton The debate about the nature of space goes back at least to the times of Newton and Leibniz. Isaac Newton believed (as it is apparent from his mechanics and as it [...]

By |2020-10-20T00:26:20-04:00June 17th, 2019|Ezekiel, Kabbalah, Mathematics, Mathematics, Names of G‑d, Physics, Relativity, Sefirot, Shavuot, Space, Time, Uncategorized|8 Comments
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Space – Between Future and Past

Meditations on the Maaseh Merkavah – I We do science by studying nature. We study physics in a lab, peering into space or working out mathematical models with pencil and paper to see if they fit experimental data. However, great mystics of the past were able to see how this world operates by gazing into spiritual worlds above. On Shavuot, the holiday when we celebrate the revelation on Mount Sinai, we read the prophecy of Ezekiel (the First Vision of Ezekiel) called Maaseh Merkavah (or Ma'aseh Merkabah)—Work of the Chariot. Masters of Kabbalah have taught us that understanding the Work of the Chariot gives the initiated an understanding of the works of nature. This Shavuot, studying and thinking about Maaseh Merkavah, I came to understand some profound insights about the physics of space [...]

By |2024-06-09T17:14:43-04:00June 13th, 2019|Ezekiel, Fractals, G‑d, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Kabbalah, Names of G‑d, Physics, Relativity, Science, Sefirot, Sefirot, Shavuot, Space, Spirituality, Tanakh, Time, Topology, Uncategorized|6 Comments
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Shavuot — Three States of Consciousness

Shavuot (a.k.a. the Feast of Weeks, or “Pentecost”) is the only Jewish holiday with no fixed day on the calendar—it is always the fiftieth day from the beginning of the counting of the Omer (which itself starts on the second day of Passover). What is so special about the number 50, and what is its connection to Shavuot? Shavuot is not only the culmination of the counting of the Omer—Sefirat HaOmer—but also the culmination of the process of the maturation of our consciousness. On Shavuot, it is customary to read the Book of Ruth (Megilat Rut). The story begins with Lot and his daughters running away from Sodom and hiding in a mountain cave. Seeing the destruction of Sodom, the daughters of Lot suspected that God, in his fury, destroyed the whole of [...]

By |2024-06-09T16:48:17-04:00May 30th, 2017|Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Mashiach (Messiah), Omer, Physics, Shavuot, Uncategorized|3 Comments
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613 Degrees of Freedom

Passover has ended. All Jews hastily return their Passover dishes to storage in special cabinets or the attic until the next Passover. After an eight-day break, home becomes filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread. Passover leaves us with the pleasant taste of burnt matzot, memories of the Seder spent with family, and stories of the Exodus. But did Passover really end? In the Mishnah (the precursor to Talmud), the holiday of Shavuot ("Pentecost") is called Atzeret. This word is familiar to us from Shemini Atzeret—the holiday that follows immediately after the seven days of Sukkot, often simply viewed as the last day (or, in the diaspora, the last two days) of Sukkot. Either way, Shemini Atzeret is the conclusion of the festival of Sukkot. By designating Shavuot as Atzeret, the Mishnah seems [...]

By |2024-06-09T16:13:49-04:00June 6th, 2014|Freedom, Passover (Pesach), Shavuot, Space, Spirituality, Time, Uncategorized|1 Comment
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Suspected Adulteress as a Schrödinger Cat

In quantum mechanics, the state of a physical system is described by the so-called wave function (or the "wavefunction"). All attempts by Schrödinger, who first introduced the wave function, and others to interpret it as a scalar potential of some physical field, or as the de Broglie wave (as in particle-wave dualism) were not successful. In 1926, Max Born noticed that the squared amplitude of the wavefunction of a particle in a given region gives the probability of finding the particle in this region. He suggested that the wavefunction represented not a physical reality but rather our knowledge of the quantum state of an object. The wave function represents our knowledge of all possible quantum-mechanical states of an object and their probabilities. In other words, the quantum-mechanical state of a physical system is [...]

By |2020-05-24T16:41:26-04:00May 30th, 2014|Bamitbar, Collapse of the wavefunction, Entanglement, Husband and wife, Naso, Numbers, Parshah, Pentateuch (Chumash), Quantum Theory, Shavuot, Superposition, Uncategorized, Wavefunction|2 Comments
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Carpe Diem

As we have discussed in the post, It’s the time, stupid, Pharaoh never got the message that it’s all about mastery of time.  To make sure Jews did get this message, G‑d gave them the very first commandment—the commandment of keeping time, of marking new months:           This month shall be unto you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you.(Ex. 12: 2) It is important to note that Jews were not only commanded to keep time, they were commanded to “make” time.  Indeed, in Biblical times, the new month was not calculated according to a calendar, as it is done today, it was proclaimed by a Bet Din (an ecclesiastic court) based on the testimony of two live witnesses, who observed [...]

By |2018-01-19T06:54:12-05:00January 2nd, 2014|Bo, Collapse of the wavefunction, Exodus (Shemot), Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Omer, Parshah, Passover (Pesach), Pentateuch (Chumash), Quantum Theory, Rosh HaShanah, Shabbat, Shavuot, Shemot, Spirituality, Superposition, Time, Uncategorized, Wavefunction, Witnesses|0 Comments
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Freedom in Space, Time and Spirituality

And the entire Mount Sinai smoked because the Lord had descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of the kiln… Exodus 19:18 The Holiday of Shavuot is thought to be a culmination of the Passover. Just as Shmini Atzeret is a culmination of the Holiday of Sukkot and comes after seven days of Sukkot, Shavuot is also called Atzeret and comes after the Holiday of Pesach, albeit separated from it by forty-nine days of Omer. On Shavuot, we read a Torah portion from Chapter 19 of the Book of Shemot (Exodus). We already discussed verse 18, "Mount Sinai smoked," in the previous post. Mount Sinai smoked because the Lord had descended upon it. Here, I'd like to focus on the word "smoked" from a different perspective. It hints at [...]

By |2024-06-09T10:47:09-04:00May 18th, 2013|Freedom, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Omer, Passover (Pesach), Shavuot, Time, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Passover, Shabbat and the Principle of Least Action

There is hardly a Jewish holiday more widely celebrated than Passover (Pesach). Jews of all denominations, affiliations, and levels of religious observance, if any at all, gather at the Passover Seder to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. What is often lost amid all of the beautiful rituals, not least among them the singing of Had Gadia and other Seder songs, is the deep meaning of this holiday, which is far more profound than a mere recollection of historical events, no matter how important they may be. What is, then, the deeper meaning of the Passover that transcends its historical significance? On the morrow of Shabbat One obscure and little-known (outside of the observant Jewish community) commandment ("mitzvah") may lead us to a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Passover—this [...]

By |2021-03-14T20:50:19-04:00March 31st, 2013|Creation, Holidays (Yomim Tovim), Omer, Passover (Pesach), Physics, Science, Shabbat, Shavuot, Uncategorized|3 Comments
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