Counting these 49 days may sound simple, but in my experience, it’s one of the most difficult rituals to actually complete. As I count, I notice how much I want to speed through challenging moments or hold onto pleasant ones. The 49 days of the Omer, unlike other periods in our lives, cannot be rushed or drawn out: we count 49 days. Then we stop. That is the practice.
Read MoreWe journey toward the lives we had incrementally, as we navigate, outside our community, a world that still mostly hasn’t had access to the vaccine. While it would be so easy to put our hopes and expectations on hold until everything was exactly the way we wanted it to be, our tradition challenges us to instead use this time intentionally. Torah could have simply instructed us to observe Shavuot — the day we commemorate our gathering at Sinai, right after Passover, our moment of liberation — but it instead instructs us to build in 7 weeks, between these two central moments in our people’s story.
Read MoreAs I strolled through the greenhouses at Longwood Gardens the other day, brilliant blossoms of yellow and white and blue dazzled my senses. The sun on my pale skin told me it had been snowing only yesterday, and reminded me how suddenly the seasons change—and how sensible, in this time of powerful transformation it is to celebrate Passover, our (perennial) liberation from slavery in Egypt. But this riot of color also made me wonder: How does the Omer—this period of quiet, patient waiting—connect to the process of liberation and the revelation that we experience at the end of the Omer on the holiday of Shavuot?
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