Making It Count: Area Jews Find Meaning in Omer Rituals

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A multicolored mosiac depicts a blue sky with sporadic clouds and colorful steps leading up to a burning bush and the Ten Commandment tablets at the top of Mt. Sinai.
“Climbing Mt. Sinai – Counting the Omer,” created by Rabbi Gila Ruskin, is a mosaic Omer counter. | Courtesy of Gila Ruskin

In 2000, Brandeis University health policy researcher Brian Rosman created homercalender.net. The concept is simple: You visit the site for each of the 49 days of the Omer and find a bespoke image of Homer Simpson corresponding to each day and its accompanying blessings. 

For the eighth day of the Omer on April 13, one can “count the Homer” with a picture of the Simpson patriarch sipping Duff Beer from a beer helmet.

The practice of counting each day of the Omer, the period between Passover and Shavuot, obviously predates the earliest days of the internet. The ancient tradition is a period of self-reflection and grounding, and with it comes a myriad of ways to observe. After all, it’s more than just the count that counts.


“I find it a deep mindfulness practice that calls me present to count each day,” said Rabbi Yael Levy, the rabbi emerita of Mishkan Shalom and creator of Jewish mindfulness teaching program A Way In.

Levy counts the Omer in the traditional way: First saying a bracha, then counting, then meditating on the day’s aspect of human nature and emotion. She’s gone on trips to the desert to count the Omer and has friends who mark the days by wearing a different color.

“It’s important to play with these things,” she said. “It’s important to enjoy them.”

Counting the Omer can have numerous spiritual benefits, Levy said. The ritual has origins in agriculture, with “Omer” meaning “sheaf,” the measure of grain taken to the Temple in Jerusalem. The Omer was an opportunity to pray daily for a good harvest and rainy season.

Even though many Jews, like Levy, are no longer agricultural people, the ritual can reconnect people to the earth.

“May we be aligned with ourselves in relationship to the earth and all people that are caring well for the earth, so the earth is able to yield this produce, and rain comes in its time,” Levy said.

Susan Windle, a Philadelphia-based writer, authored “Through the Gates: A Practice for Counting the Omer,” a collection of letters and poems she wrote in her first few years of counting the Omer.

A Jew by choice, Windle began counting the Omer in 2008 at a spiritual training before she converted and found that the practice caught her
by surprise.

“The reason I do this is because I literally fell in love with the practice and with the people that I was practicing with,” she said.

Windle wrote a poem that she shared with friends, first one for every week of the Omer, and, in the following years, one for every day. 

Each of the seven weeks of the Omer corresponds to one of seven sefirot, or divine emanations outlined in Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Each day of the week corresponds with a middot, or Jewish virtue. The days and weeks of the Omer form a matrix and create a specific theme or attribution of God, to focus on for each day.

The Omer can also be a chance to build community. Rabbi Gila Ruskin, formerly a congregational rabbi in Baltimore, had a congregant create an interactive Omer counter out of plywood that sat on the synagogue bimah. 

Inspired to create her own, Ruskin crafted a counter out of mosaic tiles, with each sefirah and middah of the Omer marked on a different color-coded tile, forming a set of stairs leading to Mount Sinai. She covered each tile with drywall tape and, every day, the children from the congregation would tear off a piece of tape to reveal the tile underneath.

Though Ruskin led a Reform community with little background in Jewish mysticism, the ritual still had spiritual meaning.

“The concepts of liberation and revelation are not just religious concepts,” she said. “There’s something that we all have in our lives.”

Counting the Omer can be accessible to any Jew who wants to practice it, Ruskin argued. For those not familiar with or interested in its religious origins, the Omer can simply be a lesson in how to wait patiently and thoughtfully.

“Any of us could be in a situation in our lives, where we’re waiting for something, that you’re waiting for a diagnosis; you’re waiting for a baby to be born; you’re waiting for your mortgage to come through. … There’s so many different situations, and it’s good to have a ritual to do when you’re in the process of waiting,” Ruskin said.

Though Jewish tradition dictates that if one forgets to count the Omer one night, they can pick it back up without saying the blessing for the subsequent days, Windle suggests beginners don’t focus on the technicalities of the ritual.

“Don’t worry if you miss a day because other people are counting and holding it up for you,” Windle said. “Be gentle, enjoy it, explore it. See what happens.”

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