Menachot 66

The omer, a meal offering that was presented in the Temple on the second day of Passover, permits the consumption of the new crop of barley and triggers the countdown to Shavuot. The counting is described in Leviticus 23:15–16: “And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the sabbath, from the day that you brought the omer of the wave offering; seven complete weeks shall there be: to the morrow after the seventh sabbath shall you number 50 days and you shall offer a new meal offering to the Lord.”

Yesterday, we learned that the rabbis understand the “morrow after the Sabbath” to refer to the second day of Passover rather than the first Sunday of Passover — an interpretation that sets the rabbis apart from other rival Jewish groups and assures that the holiday of Shavuot always falls on the same calendrical date, the sixth of Sivan.

On today’s daf, we learn about the counting itself:

Abaye said: It is a mitzvah to count days, and it is also a mitzvah to count weeks.
 
The source of this teaching is the verses from Leviticus quoted above which refer to the duration of the ritual as both 50 days and seven complete weeks. As a result, when we count the omer today, we state both days and weeks. For example, on the seventh day of the omer we count: “Today is seven days which is one week of the omer.”
This is how Rav Ashi counted the omer. But the Gemara notes that not all talmudic rabbis did it that way:

Ameimar counted days but not weeks. He explains: Since there is no longer an omer offering, the counting is performed only in commemoration of the Temple.
 
The sages in Rav Ashi’s beit midrash, who count days and weeks, are apparently following the practice as it was established when the Temple stood. Ameimar, on the other hand, believes that since the destruction of the Temple we continue the count only to commemorate the Temple ritual. Therefore, we do not need to replicate the Temple practice; it is sufficient to count only the days, not the weeks.

Many Jewish rituals are commemorations. For example, as the text of Friday night Kiddush says explicitly, Shabbat is a commemoration of both the creation of the world, from which God rested, and the exodus from Egypt, which allowed the Israelites respite. The mahloket, rabbinic dispute, on today’s daf is about how closely the commemorative act should resemble the original. While the sages who studied with Rav Ashi continued to maintain the ritual as it had been performed, Ameimar felt that it was not incumbent on us to be as exacting. Counting the days alone is sufficient.

Let’s leave today’s daf and consider a different example. During the Passover seder, Jews eat matzah and bitter herbs together. Some have the tradition of adding haroset to make what is known as a Hillel sandwich — a commemoration of the paschal offering ritual that was established by Hillel the Elder, who would take a bite of the meat from the Passover sacrifice and eat it with matzah and bitter herbs. But we don’t add the more obvious item from our seder plate: the meat of the shank bone, which is a more explicit representation of the paschal sacrifice. The rabbis settled on that practice because of the principle of marit ayin — they did not want any seder to give the impression that it was acceptable to offer a paschal sacrifice in the absence of the Jerusalem Temple. While there is no discussion in the Talmud that suggests this to be true, I wonder if, when asked, the sages in the study hall of Rav Ashi would advocate for adding from the roasted meat on the seder plate to the Hillel sandwich, in order to conform more closely to the original practice.

Read all of Menachot 66 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on March 18, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.