Rabbi's Blog

Omer: The 49 Day Journey

We all know the experience of counting the days that lead to some exciting event, or to some dreadful one. I know young people who will tell you exactly how many days there are until summer camp begins or until school ends for the summer. People celebrating a major life cycle event are also likely to know how many days are left. This is part of the mystique of the Omer, the ritualistic counting of days from the second night of Passover to Shavuot, from the Festival of Freedom, to the Festival of Revelation. Shavuot, the festival whose name means weeks, is the fiftieth day on this journey, where we commemorate the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. For the rabbis, these days serve as preparation in the transition from celebrating our freedom to a renewal of the covenant, through Torah. In the Torah itself, however, these days are agricultural in their nature, marking the delicate journey from the barley harvest to the wheat harvest. Each day, the priest would take an omer, a measure of barley, and present a ‘wave offering.’ This sacrificial act carries an intense prayerful energy in its kinetic quaking that seems to say “please, may we have enough of the right kind of moisture in our world so that our crops will grow and sustain us.” The Biblical omer ritual was about physical survival, while the rabbinical omer was about spiritual survival. For the Kabbalists, there is a whole other dimension to these days. Each one of them is like a discreet psycho-spiritual map of the soul to be refined through the integration of the special qualities of each of these days. Each of the seven weeks has its own energy and attribute: hesed (loving kindness), gevurah (restriction), tiferet (harmony), netzach (victory), hod (humility), yesod (foundation), malchut (manifestation). We move from hesed of hesed to malchut of malchut, with each day being an opportunity for refined spiritual attunement that prepares as to stand at Sinai as whole beings, ready to receive.

There are pretty cool apps out there to help us count in meaningful ways if any of you feel moved to download them to your smart phone! However we experience this seven week journey, there is something rich and spiritually adventurous in the ritual of counting off these days in order to make our days count.