By Rabbi Seth Wax / Williams College
I don’t think I ever really appreciated the month of May until my family and I moved to the Berkshires nearly ten years ago. When I lived in Boston and New York, April was the month in which flowers blossomed and trees sprouted leaves. May was just a continuation of that process. Beautiful, but not novel. By contrast, here in the Berkshires, snow often falls throughout April, and it’s in May that spring seems to hit all at once: flowers, leaves, increasing heat, long days, and the possibility of planting outdoors all converge to let us know that we are emerging into something beautiful and stunning.
May is also the time of year during which we are fully in the practice of sefirat ha-omer, or counting the omer. The ritual itself is rather short. After sundown, we recite a blessing and then a formula that corresponds to the specific day and week we find ourselves in. It is deceptively simple, such that it can be too easy to lose a sense of why we say it, and even to forget to say it at all.
Yet according to the teachings of teachers of Kabbalah, especially Isaac Luria (1534-1572) and one of his later interpreters, Shalom Sharabi (1720-1777), there is a powerful opportunity, and even need, for attention and intention not only when engaging this ritual, but throughout this time of year.
That is because the period of counting the omer is a process of slow rebuilding. The process begins on the second night of Passover, following the Seder on the first night of the holiday. The first day of Passover – both the Seder and the following day – marks the time when the Israelites actually left Egypt. Given how deeply the Israelites were entrapped in Egypt and the power of negative spiritual forces called klippot, it took an overwhelming exertion of force by God to pull them out. It also required a deep spiritual transformation on the part of the Israelites: according to Luria and Sharabi, on the first day of Passover, the Israelites were gifted an illumination that helped them to witness how divine presence utterly suffuses the world, breaking through everything that stands in the way of that. This combination of paradigm-shifting transformations in physical reality and in consciousness is what enabled the Israelites to break free from the bonds of slavery.
And yet, as soon as the Israelites were free, that burst of energy dissipated. Like a flash of lightning that sparks and then fades, it was over. While something fundamental about their experience had shifted – they had left slavery, after all – the world was still as it was, as they were, as well. They may have been free, but the flash of insight they experienced on the first day of Passover faded away. The klippot that were overwhelmed the day before had regrouped and continued to wreak havoc and discord on the world, albeit in a somewhat weakened state. The world was still filled with brokenness and oppression, and the Israelites found themselves to be the selfsame people they were prior to leaving servitude.
Each of us likely has experience with something similar: we have a powerful experience of falling in love, reach a spiritual peak, achieve a long-sought accomplishment at work, or any other number of attainments. We bask in its glow, but we find that we are still the same person that we were before the peak. We find ourselves still easily irritated, focusing excessive attention on unimportant tasks or gossip, becoming angry and bitter, and generally lose whatever insights we may have experienced. That can be incredibly disappointing, in light of what we have experienced. If we have had such an amazing experience, why are we still the same?
That is because after every peak experience, such as leaving Egypt or having a spiritual insight, the moment ends. It does not continue. We are still the same person as we were the day before. However, the experience does not fade entirely. It leaves a residue behind: a memory of what took place, an insight into how we might live our lives differently. To access that again, we must embark on a gradual process of inner and outer work. To bring attention to the infinite number of choice points in our lives, making a concerted effort to integrate the insight and experience in our day to day. To do the slow work of growing, inspired by the insight that we were blessed to experience.
That is what Israelites needed to do as they moved through the wilderness, walking towards the revelation of Mount Sinai which we commemorate on Shavuot. And it is what the counting of the omer offers us today. Each week, and each day of that week, through the practice of counting, we are invited to examine and make change to qualities of ourselves: our capacity for love, our ability to set boundaries and use judgment wisely, to connect, to practice commitment and endurance, to feel grateful, among other qualities. Counting each night is a jumping off point for doing the focused, sometimes painful, work of growing as individuals. It is not easy, but the practice of counting the omer provides a structure for embarking on that path.
As we enjoy the onward march of spring in this month of blossoming, may we find inspiration from the intentional counting of days and weeks to enhance our capacity to expand our hearts and stabilize in our minds insights we have received in the past.
Rabbi Seth Wax is College Chaplain and Director of Jewish Life at Williams College.