October 10, 2008

From Teenage Romance to Deeper Understanding: The Spiritual Journey of the Omer

May 2008/Nissan 5678

by Mishael Zion

 

As you wake up to a new day, in the shower, brushing your teeth, you find yourself going over the events of the previous evening again and again. You have only just met, but what a night! There was something special in the air which made not only for a great date, but for what seems now like a life changing experience. That feeling of a real connection to someone, so rare and hard to come by. Last night was magic…

But what now? How do we pick up from here? As “the morning after” settles in, you realize that it’ll be impossible to expect those same high energies to continue to your next meetings. Routine will take over, and time passing will introduce the boring and the mundane. How do you turn the magic of one night into a day-to-day relationship?

 

If we take the Jewish Holiday cycle as a spiritual-psychological journey, then the above would be a good description of the "morning after" Seder night. God, that ultimate suitor of the people of Israel in Egypt, took us out on an amazing date that lasted all night, swept us off our feet, out of the constraints of Egypt and into a land of freedom and opportunities, full of promises and hope. But what now? How do we deal with all those high hopes and expectations? How can we ever hope to match the enthusiasm and skill of this suitor, how can we make this magical night into a sustainable and real part of our lives?

 

This is where the curious tradition of Sefirat HaOmer, the counting of the Omer, comes in. The roots of this tradition are found in a biblical agricultural tradition involving counting 50 days from after Pesach, when the wheat and barley season begin, until the festival of Shavuot, at which point a "new offering" of grain, omer, is given at the Temple.

 

The Kabbalistic and Hassidic masters turned the count to 50 into a spiritual journey that takes a person from Exodus to the moment of covenant between God and the Jewish people at Sinai. After the impossibly intense experience of the Exodus, a “down period” must surely follow. We cannot expect our relationship with God to be based only on romantic gestures and mind blowing miracles. If we want to turn this relationship from a one-night-stand into a deep, mutual relationship, we must start building it from the ground up, one day at a time. We need to get to know each other from all our different aspects, slowly revealing ourselves to this new partner – and to ourselves, learning ourselves anew and building a mutual unity.

 

This is what the process of counting the Omer offers. Using the seven Kabbalistic attributes of the divinity, and multiplying them by themselves, we receive a list of 49 of the most minute psychological characteristics. These seven attributes, called in Hebrew Sephirot, go by many names: Love/Benevolence, Strength/Constriction, Balance/Compassion, Persistence, Surrender/Sincerity, Foundation/Potency, Sovereignty. No matter the names, between them they try and reflect the whole spectrum of both the Divine, and the Human, character. Each day, we are invited to check ourselves within that attribute, and thus each week we have processed and shared - with ourselves and with our significant others – a new part of our personality.

 

As we reach the 49th day of this internal and mutual journey, at the top of the mountain, we gain view of the Huppah, the wedding canopy, that God has prepared for us. 50 days after Pesach we celebrate Shavuot, during which we commemorate God's marriage to the Jewish people, and the granting of the ketubah, the marriage contract – the Torah. As we know, marriage must come in its own time. Had we eloped with God into the desert and gotten married immediately after the Exodus, it would not have been a marriage borne of mutuality, one based in a deep understanding of ourselves and of our partner. Still amazed by the intoxicating vapors of Gods miracles in Egypt and at the parting of the Red Sea, we would have entered this covenant lacking the right understanding. The journey of the Omer brings us sober and fully aware of the incredible covenant that our marriage with God at Sinai was. It also gives us the right to make the Torah our own, arguing, reinterpreting, rehashing and refining God's contract, in a process that hasn't ended to this day.

 

 

 

Mishael Zion, 26, is a Jewish Educator from Jerusalem. Studying and teaching at the Shalom Hartman Institute and at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Mishael searches for ways in which Judaism and Halakha can become a toolbox for building a meaningful Jewish identity. He is co-author of HaLaila HaZeh: An Israeli Haggadah (Hebrew, 2004) and A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (English, 2007).