The Complete Guide to Transforming the Soul During the Days of Sefiras HaOmer

00:00 Today we’re going to talk about refining our character traits. The days of Sefiras HaOmer are special days. The Torah says: “You shall count for yourselves from the day after Shabbos; seven complete weeks shall there be. Until the day after the seventh week, you shall count fifty days.” Between Pesach and Shavuos, we have the special mitzvah of counting the Omer. We count the days. But what is the deeper meaning beyond counting the days? That’s what we’ll talk about today. We want to understand: What exactly are we supposed to do during these days? These are great days, holy days, special days. They are the days between the Exodus from Egypt, Pesach, and the Giving of the Torah. We’re preparing for the great festival, for the great moment when we will receive the Torah anew. The Torah isn’t just a history book or a book of stories from the past. And we don’t perform mitzvos merely as traditions to remember things that happened long ago. These things happen in the present. Chassidus teaches us that we need to perform every mitzvah as something happening now. So the question we need to understand is: What exactly does Sefiras HaOmer mean beyond counting the days? The Midrash tells us that counting the days has a very deep meaning. It expresses the yearning and longing of the Jewish people to receive the Torah. When a person knows that something very, very special is coming, he counts each day, waiting for it to arrive. That’s how it was the first time. The Jewish people knew they were going to leave Egypt and receive the Torah. They counted the days with tremendous yearning and longing: When would that long-awaited moment finally come, when they would merit to receive the Torah? And the same is true every year.

02:05 Sefiras HaOmer expresses the longing, the yearning, the attachment, the desire of a Jew who truly looks forward to and awaits receiving the Torah anew, to connecting once again with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, the Giver of the Torah. That’s what will happen on Shavuos. But we know that there’s another, very deep aspect of Sefiras HaOmer: what the works of mussar and Chassidus call refining our character traits. During these days, we’re supposed to work on our middos—our emotions, our ways of behaving, the qualities and powers of the soul that each of us has. We need to work on them and refine them. The sefarim explain that there are seven weeks between Pesach and Atzeres, between Pesach and Shavuos. Those seven weeks represent the seven middos. Each person has seven middos, as the works of Kabbalah explain. There are negative middos and positive middos: the middos of the animal soul and the middos of the G-dly soul, as the Alter Rebbe explains in Tanya. Our task during these days is to refine our middos. What does refining our middos mean according to Chassidus? We can see that this is a very significant subject. In fact, the works of Chassidus say that the entire purpose for which man was created in this world is to refine his middos. The Baal Shem Tov says this in the name of Rabbi Saadia Gaon. In one of the Baal Shem Tov’s earliest teachings, he said in the name of Rabbi Saadia Gaon that the entire purpose for which man was created in this world is to refine his middos. What does it mean to refine our middos? What are we supposed to do? How do we refine them? What does that mean? Every person is born with a temperament, with personality traits, with qualities of the soul, with different middos. That’s our character; that’s our nature. That’s how I was born. So what does it mean to refine our middos? And how are we supposed to refine our

04:11 middos? And how does all of this connect with Sefiras HaOmer? When we say, “Today is one day of the Omer,” “two days of the Omer,” what does this idea of refining our middos mean in our service of Hashem? Today we’ll study a wonderful, illuminating explanation based on a teaching of the Frierdiker Rebbe, which he said in the name of the Tzemach Tzedek. It explains a fundamental, overarching idea in Chassidus concerning the refinement of middos. We’ll try to understand it deeply: what it means, how exactly we’re supposed to work on it, and what this work of refining our middos means in practice, in our everyday lives. The Frierdiker Rebbe says that the Tzemach Tzedek was asked: What is the meaning of Chassidus? What exactly did the Alter Rebbe introduce with his teachings, with Tanya, with Chabad Chassidus? What did he really want to accomplish through this study? The Tzemach Tzedek explained that the main innovation of Chassidus is that a person should change the nature of his middos. He added: Changing one’s natural middos is also very important, but that is not yet the innovation of Chassidus. Chassidus teaches us to change the nature of our middos. At first glance, this sounds like a play on words. What is the difference between one’s natural middos and the nature of one’s middos? And what does it mean that changing one’s natural middos is possible even without Chassidus? Chassidus teaches us this remarkable thing: to change the nature of our middos. What does that mean in everyday life for each of us? When we talk about qualities of the soul, about middos, every person is born with a certain character. Every person is born with certain traits. That’s our character; that’s our nature. Some children are born with a temperament you can already see in infancy: this is a sweet child, a good child,

06:28 a child who readily shares and gives. We can see that this child will grow up to be a generous person. Of course, at that age generosity shows itself in small things—candy and toys—but you can see that this child has a giving nature. Likewise, sometimes you see a child with a stubborn temperament. You can see that this child has stubbornness and firmness. That’s his character. And there are all kinds of other personality traits, such as cheerfulness or seriousness, that a person is born with. As we go through life, we develop, and this is where what’s called changing one’s natural middos comes in. Every temperament, every quality of the soul, has different aspects and sides. Broadly speaking, every quality and every temperament a person has can have both positive and negative consequences. Take, for example, that sweet, good, giving child. There is certainly a very positive side to this: he can grow up to be a generous person who does wonderful acts of kindness. But sometimes we know that this trait also reflects a certain softness of character. It might lead him to follow the crowd. He may lack the firmness to hold back and stand by what he wants. On the contrary, because of his gentle, kindhearted nature and his desire to connect with others, he might spend time with children who will be a bad influence on him and take advantage of him. The same is true of the stubborn, strong-willed child we spoke about. We know that stubbornness and firmness can be used on the side of holiness: to be strong, to be mighty. After all, “Who is mighty? One who conquers his inclination.” But sometimes, when strength goes beyond its proper measure, it becomes negative. It can verge on hardheartedness or on stubbornness in the wrong situations,

08:49 And the same is true of every middah, every character trait: each can be expressed in all kinds of ways. What exactly is a Jew’s task in the world when it comes to refining his character? As brought in works of halachah, works of mussar, and many other places, the task is to refine our middos: to take our character traits and make them more delicate, purify them, and correct them. That means using the traits I have, the character Hashem gave me, in the right direction and in the right way. This is essentially what it means to change one’s natural middos. A person is born, as we said, with natural traits—with a certain temperament and character, with the qualities he was born with—and he needs to change them. That means removing their coarseness, their negativity and their harmful side, and looking for the positive way to direct them properly. But this is still only the beginning of serving Hashem. It is not yet the great innovation the Alter Rebbe meant when he said that Chassidus came not only to correct one’s natural middos, but also to change the nature of one’s middos. What does it mean to change the nature of one’s middos? Here we come to a story the Frierdiker Rebbe told in one of his sichos. There was a chossid of the Alter Rebbe named Reb Zalman Zezmer, one of the Alter Rebbe’s great chassidim. In his town lived a Jew who was a very great Torah scholar and a G-d-fearing Jew. Above all, he was known for his wonderful qualities of love, kindness, and generosity. Everyone knew that his home was always open, that he was always giving, always sharing, and loved to help anyone. He truly was an exceptional person: a great Torah scholar, deeply G-d-fearing, and especially outstanding in his kind heart, his compassion, and his kindness. One day he had a conversation with Reb Zalman Zezmer, one of the Alter Rebbe’s great chassidim, and they spoke

11:12 about Chassidus. He knew that Reb Zalman was one of the Alter Rebbe’s great chassidim, and he wanted to know exactly what the Alter Rebbe taught. “What is Chassidus?” he asked him. “What did the Baal Shem Tov introduce? What did the Maggid of Mezritch reveal, and what does the Alter Rebbe teach you in Chabad Chassidus?” Reb Zalman gave him a brief answer. He helped him understand that Chassidus—and Chabad Chassidus in particular; Chabad is an acronym for chochmah, binah, and daas—teaches that a person should not only have good feelings and good middos, but that the mind should also govern the emotions. He wanted to understand better what that meant, so Reb Zalman suggested, “Let’s travel to the Rebbe, to the Alter Rebbe, and you can ask the Rebbe there.” Chassidim would go into yechidus and ask the Rebbe questions about serving Hashem. “So ask the Rebbe what it means.” And that is what he did. He traveled to the Alter Rebbe and asked his question: “What does Chassidus give a person?” The Alter Rebbe answered him as follows: “An animal is wild; it has the traits of an animal. When we want an animal to behave in a healthier way, we put it in a pen, in an enclosed place. We watch over it and put a yoke on it so it won’t make a mess or cause upheaval, so it won’t be a wild animal. It will be orderly and do what it needs to do. The cow, the ox, the animals, will behave properly. But even though we’ve enclosed them in a pen, they are still animals. They haven’t become human beings.” The Alter Rebbe told him that the same is true of the soul. As we said, a baby is born with character traits. Those traits can be

13:37 as the verse says, “Man is born a wild donkey’s colt.” A person, too, is wild by nature, so his character traits are wild traits. Then, at a certain point, he works on himself so that his middos become normal and healthy, with a healthy balance. But that still hasn’t made him a human being; at this stage, he is still an animal. He is like an animal in a pen, kept in check and behaving well, but he is still not a person. Becoming a person requires a more fundamental change. Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave a person the power of the intellect—the ability to learn and to contemplate. A Jew has the power to transform his middos, to transform his character traits from the ordinary, natural traits of a person into G-dly middos. As the Frierdiker Rebbe tells the story, when the Alter Rebbe spoke to this Jew, he was so moved that he suddenly realized—as he later recounted—that his whole life, although he had been a wonderful person who never stopped doing good and acts of kindness, all his conduct had really been that of a healthy animal: good, wonderful conduct, but simply his nature. “That’s how I was born. I learned to conduct myself and tried to use my nature properly, but I still haven’t become a person.” Overcome with emotion, that Jew fainted. After they attended to him and so on, he came to and asked, “Rebbe, how do we—how do I become a person?” The Alter Rebbe then told him: “It says, ‘Shema Yisroel.’ A Jew prays every day and says, ‘Hear, O Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is One.’ Shema is an acronym for ‘Se’u marom eineichem’—‘Lift your eyes heavenward.’” A person

15:55 has the power to rise up, to look upward, to leave behind materiality and his natural limitations, to elevate himself and come to recognize the greatness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. That is why Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave you a mind and an intellect: to learn about and contemplate the greatness of Hashem, to rise above nature and its limits. Then a person has the special ability to transform his traits, to go beyond his natural limitations and serve Hashem beyond the constraints of his material nature—even when that nature is good. To serve Hashem, to refine not only your natural middos but the nature of your middos, means that you have the ability to change your very essence. Even if you have to change your nature completely, you can step outside your usual character. As long as you are caught up in yourself, you say, “This is who I am, and this is what I do.” But sometimes a person is called upon to go against his nature. Instead of acting with kindness, sometimes one must also act with gevurah. Sometimes a person needs to do what we learn from Avraham Avinu, who is our example of a fundamental change, a change in the very nature of the soul. What does the Torah tell us about Avraham Avinu? After all, Avraham Avinu was a man who was kindness through and through. What do we see about him? Along with all his kindness, he opened his home—he had an entrance on each of its four sides—and he gave to everyone without limit. But he also taught people faith. “And he called there in the name of Hashem, G-d of the world.” Do not read it as “he called,” but as “he caused others to call.” He urged, taught, and educated people to believe in Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Avraham Avinu was a Jew who was kindness through and through. The Midrash

18:14 But the Midrash tells how people would come to him, and he would feed them, give them drink, provide them with a place to sleep—everything. But at the end of the day, he would present them with a bill: “This is how much you have to pay. You ate well, and you’re in the desert, so the price is high.” Then they would start arguing, and Avraham Avinu would ask them to acknowledge, praise, and bless Hakadosh Boruch Hu for everything Hashem had given them. That is the story the Midrash tells. And here Avraham, the man of kindness, suddenly became a man of strength. He demanded that people not be satisfied with just eating and drinking, but that they also grow spiritually, seek the truth, seek Hakadosh Boruch Hu, and discover faith. For that, Avraham Avinu had to use not only the attribute of kindness, but also the attribute of strength. Later still, we see how Hakadosh Boruch Hu tested him with the great test of the Akeidah of Yitzchak. Think about who Avraham was: a man whose entire being was kindness. As the Midrash says, Avraham Avinu was generous with his body, his money, and his soul. His whole essence was kindness, the attribute of love and kindness—“Avraham, who loves Me.” And suddenly Hakadosh Boruch Hu asks him to take his only son, Yitzchak, to the Akeidah. That required Avraham to turn completely from kindness to strength, to an entirely different character trait that did not fit Avraham’s nature. Here Avraham Avinu had to go against his nature. That happened only because Avraham Avinu had come to understand: I do not serve Hashem only in ways that are comfortable for me, easy for me, or that I naturally like. What is the Divine will at this moment? For this, a Jew needs to rise higher. “Lift up your eyes on high”—rise to a higher place. Learn to turn a trait of the soul from one extreme to the other. Only then does your true service of Hashem as a Jew begin. How

20:25 is it written regarding the Akeidah of Yitzchak? Hakadosh Boruch Hu says to Avraham Avinu, “Now I know.” Now I see “that you are G-d-fearing.” Now I see that you fear G-d. Think about it: Avraham Avinu was 137 years old at the Akeidah of Yitzchak. He had served Hashem for 137 years—years of kindness, years of love, years of serving Hashem. He had his bris milah at age ninety-nine and faced ten tests. He reached the highest levels in serving Hashem, and still there was no certainty. Only at the Akeidah of Yitzchak: “Now I know.” Now I see “that you are G-d-fearing.” The question is: What happened now? The Alter Rebbe explains: As long as Avraham Avinu’s service of Hashem followed the path of love and kindness, it was not yet certain that this was true service of Hashem for him, that he had truly broken free of his natural limitations. He had changed his natural traits, certainly, but he had not yet changed the nature of those traits. He had not yet transformed his very nature. He had not yet truly gone beyond himself. True, he did a tremendous amount of kindness. He also taught people faith, and doing that required strength—but it was strength within kindness, not strength in its own right. We still had not seen Avraham Avinu turn his traits and characteristics from one extreme to the other. When the Akeidah of Yitzchak came: “Now I know that you are G-d-fearing.” You serve Hashem. You are truly willing to go beyond yourself completely, to break free completely of the wonderful qualities you have, just because Hakadosh Boruch Hu asks you for a different quality, a different way of acting—one that does not exactly fit your usual nature. There is a wonderful story in the Gemara that the Alter Rebbe also relates in connection with this. The Gemara tells of one of the great Tannaim, Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, who

22:26 was one of the Ten Martyrs, a Jew who literally gave his life to spread Torah at a time of Roman decrees. The Gemara even tells how he was burned al kiddush Hashem. He was one of the Ten Martyrs, whom we mention in the Yom Kippur prayers. The Gemara relates that Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon asked Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma—also one of the great Tannaim, mentioned in Pirkei Avos—a question before he went to his death: “What about me in the World to Come?” Listen to that question. A person is giving his life after everything he did for Judaism. He is about to be burned al kiddush Hashem, and he is uncertain whether he will have a place in the World to Come. The Gemara says that Rabbi Yosi asked him, “What mitzvah came your way?” Tell me, what mitzvah have you done recently? So he told him that some of his personal money had become mixed with money for tzedakah. His Purim money had become mixed with tzedakah money, and he gave it all to tzedakah. Rabbi Yosi told him, “If so, you are assured of a place in the World to Come.” When you hear this story in the Gemara, you have to ask: What? What exactly happened here? Was he lacking mitzvos? Was he lacking good deeds? Look at what he was doing right then—giving his life for Judaism. Wasn’t that enough? Instead, Rabbi Yosi found some mitzvah involving money that got mixed up and was all given to tzedakah. What is he trying to say? The Alter Rebbe says: This is exactly the point we were discussing before. Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon had the trait of strength. That was his nature. He was the kind of person for whom suffering and hardship, this sort of service, were not difficult—service associated with the path of strength. Demanding of himself that he study Torah with self-sacrifice, even at the risk of his life, was

24:31 part of his nature. He did not feel that he was doing something against his nature, so he wondered whether he was truly serving Hashem or whether it simply came naturally to him. It was his character; it fit his personality. But in the story of giving tzedakah, there was a trait opposite to his usual nature: the trait of kindness, as opposed to strength. Here he broke through his own character. By nature, he was a meticulous person, a person of strength, someone willing to suffer—a more ascetic kind of person. For someone like that to suddenly act in the opposite way and give—even though, on careful consideration, he might have found all sorts of explanations under halachah for being exacting here and not giving it all—and instead take it all and give it to tzedakah: he broke through his nature. That is what it means to change the nature of one’s traits. For this we need Shema Yisroel. We need contemplation and study; we need to rise to a higher level, where a person breaks free of the limits of nature. This is the power of chochmah, of the mind ruling the heart. The heart, even when it is in a good spiritual state, is more limited. The heart is more the “I”—the natural self, the person as they are by nature from birth, as we said. So even when you work on your character traits and refine them, if you remain within your natural character, you have still not served Hashem in the deepest way. When the mind takes charge of the heart—the intellect, the study, “Lift up your eyes on high”—the power of the intellect is that a person can rise above their nature, learn about Hashem’s greatness, and see the greatness of the Infinite. We can understand that, as Jews, we truly are connected to the Infinite. We have the power to illuminate the world, transform the nature of the world, and reveal the Infinite down here in this world. And this is expressed

26:30 In working on our character traits, we need to change not only our natural traits, but the very nature of those traits. That is what the days of Sefiras HaOmer are for. Chassidus explains: when a Jew says, “Today is one day of the Omer,” what is the essence of counting the Omer? A day is light. We need to bring the light of the mind—the light of understanding and wisdom, which comes through learning and contemplating Hashem’s greatness—into the traits of our animal soul. Sefiras HaOmer means illuminating the Omer. Chassidus teaches that sefirah is related to sapir, a sapphire: brightness. It means bringing light into the Omer. The Omer offering was made from barley, which is animal food. Barley represents the animal within a person. There can be a good animal too, as we said: a living creature gets up in the morning, behaves well and does good things, but it has still not turned from an animal into a human being. Sefiras HaOmer means transforming our animal nature and our character traits, so that they are guided by wisdom and understanding. This is the work of Sefiras HaOmer: changing our very nature. That is how a Jew prepares for Shavuos. What does it mean in daily life? Each of us knows that, in serving Hashem through Torah and mitzvos, some things come more naturally to us, while others are harder. Take simple examples from everyday life. Some people have no problem sitting down to learn or praying on their own. But doing a favor for another Jew, or going out to find another Jew and asking whether he would like to put on tefillin or

28:47 learn Torah—that is hard for them. A person may naturally prefer to keep to himself. He feels shy about approaching someone else and disturbing him; he does not feel comfortable with it. This is where changing the nature of our character traits comes in: transforming the nature of the soul, stepping beyond our self-centeredness—even spiritual self-centeredness, the tendency to be a good Jew on our own—and going out to seek another Jew. Sometimes it is the opposite. Ask some people to do favors, to go out and take action, and they take pleasure in it. They love doing acts of kindness. But ask them to sit down, tie themselves to a bench or a chair, as the saying goes, and learn for half an hour, and they find it hard. Their minds always want to jump up and do something. Sitting down to daven with focus, or to learn a little, is hard for them too. So each of us can find things in our daily life that call for changing not only our natural traits, but the very nature of those traits. To truly do that—to break out of our usual character and change our nature—we need the light of the inner dimension of Torah. That is what “Raise your eyes on high” is telling us: lift ourselves up, connect to something higher, and understand that my soul is truly a part of G-d above. I come from a place that is not bound by the limits of nature. We have just left Egypt, including the spiritual constraints of our own natural limitations. So now we can count the Omer, refine our character traits, work on ourselves, and transform ourselves from one kind of being into another—from an animal into a human being. Then we are truly ready for Matan Torah, to receive the Torah, when Hakadosh Boruch Hu gives us anew “I am Hashem your G-d”—the Torah and mitzvos we receive at Mount Sinai. May Hakadosh Boruch Hu give each and every one of us the strength to count

30:52 the Omer and correct our character traits. This is the main work of serving Hashem. Chassidus teaches that, in these days, this work prepares us for the complete Geulah through Moshiach Tzidkeinu, when we will merit to conquer all the nations of the world—which symbolize the negative character traits—and transform them into Eretz Yisroel, speedily in our days, amen.