But in order to truly īy Nigel Savage Thursday, | 12th day of the omer hod she’b’gevurah Dear All, Today is Yom Hashoah, and the attack in Poway of course remains on my mind. While we may not be carefully watching our wheat crops grow, tending to their needs and supporting their health, we do have an opportunity to do just that for own spirits and souls. Nowadays, for each of those forty-nine days, Jews around the world engage in a practice called “Sefirat haOmer/Counting the Omer,” where we verbally bless and count each day that passes. At one time, the flour was the revelation. Sinai come to coincide with the holiday’s significance. According to our Torah, this honoring and culmination of the growing season is the reason we celebrate Shavuot, and only later did the slightly more mythical aspects of receiving Torah at Mt. Forty-nine days the wheat would grow and grow, until it was ready to be cut and harvested just in time for Shavuot, when two loaves of bread would be offered at the Temple. It began with harvesting barley during Passover and ended with harvesting wheat at Shavuot. That your family made ĭear Friends, According to our biblical calendar, we are in the midst of the grain harvest, a season of gladness and growth which lasted seven weeks of seven days. The first night – celebrate that you’re alive. Make it a conceptual focus of your second night seder. So our gift to you this year is – don’t bury it. No wonder we don’t properly pay attention to it. Normally, at the end of the evening – with kids running wild, the table in chaos, the meal just finishing, various people conked out because it is so late or they’ve eaten so much or drank so much – right then, we count the omer. Hazon’s gift to you is a frame for the second night, for Thursday night. And there will be lots of riffs on plagues, lots of haggadah supplements to download, and so on.
COUNTING THE OMER 2015 HOW TO
And for most of the Jewish world, as we know, these two nights are indeed going to be different nights, as we figure out how to do seders by Zoom, or in small (very small) groups, and so on.
In chutz la’aretz – ie, outside of Israel – it’s two nights, so next Thursday night is the second night of seder. Only when I was writing a hesped for įriday, Ap| 9th Nissan 5780 Dear All, Seder is one night – in Israel. We died of polio and malaria, we died when the wrong flea bit us, we died of an abscess or a ruptured appendix. Women died far more frequently in childbirth. For most of human history we knew that we were vulnerable, we saw death. But it’s not unhelpful to be reminded of our mortality. I wish for all of us long life, for sure. And the message of the story: when our time is up, our time is up. They go to a different village… and then of course the angel of death is right there, in that different village, waiting to meet them, exactly at the appointed time. Dear All, There’s an old chasidic story about someone who fears that the angel of death is coming for them, at a particular place and a particular time.
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COUNTING THE OMER 2015 SERIES
Tuesday, Ap| 13th Nissan 5780 Please join us for a series of weekly online conversations: “After the Plague: An Omer Conversation Series.” Our first call is noon ET this Sunday with Yossi Abramowitz and Rabbi Susan Silverman.
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