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Between 2 of the 3 major Jewish festivals of the year - Passover & Shavuot - there are 49 days. This is not by coincidence, as the Jewish people left Egypt (on the 1st day of Passover) & traveled in the Egyptian desert for 7 weeks until they received the Torah on Mt. Sinai (on the day of Shavuot). There is a mitzvah to count each of these days, as we re-live the anticipation and character improvement our ancestors went through before receiving the divine Torah. But the number 49 is not by accident. Jewish mysticism teaches us that every soul is made up of 3 intellectual faculties & 7 emotional faculties, called "sefirot". The 7 emotional aspects of the soul are Kindness, strength, harmony, endurance, humility, bonding, and sovereignty. Furthermore, each emotion is made up of the other 6. So it's not simply that you have the ability to be kind or strong/severe, but rather that you have the ability to sometimes express true kindness to someone by being stern with them, a simple example being to scold a child who runs in the middle of the street, so as to teach them safe behavior. So that's how we get to 49: Each day during these 49 days, we count one of the emotional aspects we need to work on improving, each one made up of 7, totaling 49.
The fact that our souls are even made up of intellectual & emotional faculties in the 1st place, is because "G-d Created man in His image.." (Genesis 1:27). We have this spiritual DNA because G-d, on some level, includes these abilities within His Being. Towards the end of the earth's creation, the Torah says a verse that we recite over wine every Friday night: "Sheses yamim asah ado-nai et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz" - "6 days G-d made the heavens and the earth." Now the proper wording, seemingly, would have been to have said: "B'sheses - IN 6 days G-d Created..." That in that amount of time G-d Created the world. However, Kabbalah teaches that this wording is exact: "6 days G-d Created" means that the spiritual energy behind each day itself created the day. The 6 emotional attributes of G-d created & infused each day with its particular energy. It's not by chance that Tuesday - when the dry earth was separated from the waters - was the 3rd day of creation (represented by the 3rd attribute of Tiferet - harmony between 2 forces). Each of the 7 days, since the beginning of time, is infused with that particular, unique spiritual energy.
But what about the 7th day, the day of Shabbat where G-d Ceased creating? That day would correspond to the 7th emotional attribute known as Malchut - sovereignty. On a spiritual level, the 7th day of creation, Shabbat, seems completely untenable; impossible. As we have seen, G-d was actually emotionally invested in creation, infusing energy into each day to give it life in a particular way. But unlike a carpenter or weaver who takes materials and forms them into finished products and then can walk away from the objects intact, G-d was Creating the very material itself! The universe needs G-d's continual investment. So how can we survive on a day when (Kabbalah teaches us that) G-d Pulls Himself & His emotional faculties inward, to a higher level? The answer is a powerful one that we can meditate on every Shabbat to appreciate the day that much more. G-d doesn't remove His spiritual energy & emotional faculties from the universe, but rather elevates the universe together with Him inwardly. We, and all of the world around us, from the food we eat to the sky we see, is all uplifted to the level of G-d's intellect - above the emotions - a higher level than the weekday energies.
May we appreciate the power of these 24 hours from Friday night to Sat. night, when every song we sing and thing we touch and sense, can be appreciated on a completely higher dimension.
Shabbat Shalom!
*To learn more about the 10 Sefirot, see here
