Our Gemara on Amud Beis notes a parallel between the meal offering of the Sotah and the meal offering of the Omer (from barley and brought on the second day of Pesach), in that they both are brought through hagasha (a ritual of bringing the offering to the altar).

What connection is there between the Omer and Sotah offerings? The Zohar (Emor, end of Ra’ayah Mehemna) compares the Omer to a Sotah, literally. They are non-coincidentally both made of barley, representing animal food and animal-like consciousness. The Omer was after Pesach and represented the beginning of the Jewish people preparing for the Torah, which would happen after counting the forty-nine days until Shavuous. This would be a shedding of animal-like qualities in favor of Torah morality. The Jewish people became wedded to God, as the Sotah’s marriage bond is renewed if she is found to have been faithful.

The unification between God and Man is not merely metaphorically represented as the marriage between husband and wife; it reflects a deeper pattern in the universe that both of these represent. The harmonious unification of different forces is everything. We cannot fully understand it, but God, who is everything and above it all, made room for the material world and its existence—letting it exist separately. Creation always arises from the coming together of opposites. This is true for sexual reproduction, the brainstorming of ideas and thoughts, and ultimately God’s encounter with us and our encounter with Him by having been created to stand alone and separate from him. (See Tanya, Part II, Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, Chapter 7 and our discussion which will be published in a few days in Blogpost Psychology of the Daf, Menachos 62.) 

We were created to be independent and possess free will in order to voluntarily find and reconnect with God. The human soul deeply longs for this reunification, and this is because in its root is a mystical truth and force that pervades creation. We are separate in order to become together.

Humans, made in God’s image, have this paradoxical pattern in their personalities. We can only create by making space for the other and then unifying the opposite forces in an act of volitional turning toward one another in love. Just as there is something almost impossible about the ability of man and woman to find each other and make peace with their differences, God and man seek to unite even when the gaps seem insurmountable.