Photo by Paz Arando on Unsplash
Omer – Starting the Count!
By Rabbi Jesse Paikin, Executive Director, Base
In astrophysics, there’s a concept known as “Gravitational Time Dilation,” which describes how gravity warps time so that it passes more slowly the stronger the relative gravity (The film Interstellar does a dramatic job of exploring this). I think about this concept now as we traverse into one of most spiritually intense periods in Jewish time – the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot. These two holidays hold immense gravitational weight on the Jewish calendar: Pesach celebrates the freedom of the Jewish people, and Shavuot commemorates the giving of the light of Torah. In a sense, all of Judaism orbits around the concepts each of these holidays embody: redemption and revelation.
Because these are such important ideas, they can also be quite intimidating. These holidays carry such weight and take an immense degree of personal, physical, and spiritual energy to observe (cooking for days for seders, staying up all night studying Torah, reflecting on our commitments to freedom and learning… it’s a lot!). Meanwhile, our human minds are so easily distracted that we might blink and miss the whole point of this season. Time often feels like it moves strangely, and particularly in this season, we might feel out of sync.
The kabbalists (medieval Jewish mystics) anticipated this psychological reality. They took the Torah’s basic instruction to count each of these 49 intermediate days using a sheaf of grain – an “Omer” – and transformed this practice of Counting the Omer into a time of heightened potential for inner growth. They assigned each day a unique attribute – middot – for spiritual reflection and character development. In a sense, they were recognizing that we might get lost in time in between the poles of Pesach and Shavuot, and so they innovated a ritual practice to ground ourselves.
Each day of the Omer presents an opportunity to align our spiritual clocks so that we can embody what it means to carry the weight of being a free people with a responsibility to lives enhanced by the gift of Torah.
