The Talmud in Yevamot 46b teaches in the name of Rabbi Joshua that the whole Jewish people immersed in water before receiving the Torah at Sinai. This immersion, the Talmud suggests, was an essential step towards being “brought under the wings of the Divine Presence” and into the covenant of Torah.
Deuteronomy 9:21 tells us that a “brook comes down from the mountain” at Sinai. It is presumably in this water that the people immersed in advance of receiving the Torah. The Malbim, Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser (d.1879, Kyiv) writes in his commentary to Exodus 19:10 that these outer washings were meant to be paired with inner sanctifications, a cleansing of thoughts and traits.
An immersion on the outside, transformation on the inside — and the Torah wasn’t even given yet. A radical notion: we can’t wait for the Torah to transform us, first we have to transform ourselves.
What does this transformation entail? Washing, inside and out. The removal of all things unwanted but adhering. We all have patterns in our inner and outer lives that stick around even though they inhibit our ability to receive the Torah. They typically are not hard to identify. The hard part is the washing.
But here’s the good news: Sinai comes with a brook. And the Jewish calendar comes with a time custom-made for this washing, the Omer. If we let it, this time period can be our immersion in advance of receiving the Torah anew. A time when we take stock of our relationship to the Torah and make the changes in ourselves needed to accept the Torah anew on Shavuot.
