Counting the Omer: The Earth Remains

Happy Earth Day! The Reform Jewish Movement is deeply committed to protecting the environment. Learn more at www.rac.org/enviro.
One of you at RS recently shared the need to add recycling bins to the bathrooms in our homes.  What other new ideas are you all trying to implement that will help to protect our earth?  On this 8th day of the Counting of the Omer, we honor the sacred creation God renews each day.

Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohenu Melech ha-olam asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu al s’firat ha’omer.  Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, who makes us holy with sacred actions and enjoins us to count the omer.

Hayom shimonah yamim, shehem shevuah echad veyom echad la-aomer. Today is 8 days, which are one week and one day of the omer.

Happy Earth Day–Your RS Clergy

Counting the Omer: What’s Left is Love

loveA story is told of a rabbi who lay on his deathbed, smiling.  “Why” his students asked, “just moments away from death, are you smiling?”

“Because,” the rabbi replied, “For the first time, I understand the words of Vahavta: You shall love the Eternal with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul.  Now on my deathbed, I see that when all else is stripped away, what’s left is love.”

The Song of Songs, the biblical scroll traditionally read on Passover, teaches: “Love is as strong as death” (8:6).

In our counting of the omer during this week focused on loving-kindness, may try to strip away ego, distraction, all else but love.Continue reading

Counting the Omer: Destiny and Free Will

When we consider the meaning of our actions and of our days, many wonder: Destiny or free will?  Judaism says both!

A story is told about Rabbi Akiva’s daughter.  When she was born, astrologers told Rabbi Akiva that on her wedding day, she would be killed by a poisonous snake and die.  Years pass and the evening before the daughter’s wedding day arrives.  Exhausted after the rehearsal dinner, she climbs into bed, pulls her hairpin from her head, and sticks it in the wall for the next day.

The next morning, as Rabbi Akiva’s daughter is getting ready for her wedding, she pulls her hairpin from the wall and sees a poisonous snake impaled on the end!  She shrieks as she realizes how close the snakeContinue reading

Counting the Omer: Every Day Matters

Looking for a spiritual practice?

“The laws regarding the Omer are very strict: every day matters and not one may be missed.  Not to waste a single day should be our ideal in life…In general we could perhaps say that a day is wasted when we’ve done nothing that brings happiness or good to others and nothing that brings a sense of purpose to ourselves” (Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, The Eternal Journey: Meditation on the Jewish Year).

Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohenu Melech ha-olam asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu al s’firat ha’omer.  Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, who makes us holy with sacred actions and enjoins us to count the omer.

Hayom chamisha yamim la’omer.  Today is the 5th day of the omer.

Have a sweet Pesach!  Rabbis Kuhn, Maderer, Freedman and Cantor Frankel

 

Many thanks to Karyn Kedar for publishing her new book, Omer: A Counting, in which she included the Wittenberg passage.

Counting the Omer: Loving the Vulnerable in the Ukraine and Beyond

As we explore hesed in this first week of the Omer, stories of loving-kindness can inspire our own.  For 100 years, the JDC has extended loving-kindness across the globe, in its relief work for the most vulnerable.  On behalf of the Jewish community, they serve people of all backgrounds, bringing aid and building bridges.  An archive of images of their work includes this photograph, depicting the JDC-financed the 1929 “Drop of Milk” initiative which provided milk for infants in need in the Ukraine.  And relief efforts in the Ukraine continue to our day.  Dov Ben-Shimon from the JDC will speak on “Hunger and Thirst in the Jewish World: Poverty, Food Insecurity and the Search for Community” at RS Wednesday, April 30, 7:00 pm to paint a picture of the important work they are doing today.

What can you do to extend hesed to the most vulnerable in our society?Continue reading

Counting the Omer: Turning Around

4310495369_9d6d48aec2_oOn this 3rd day of the Omer, in our week of hesed (loving kindness) focus, consider the true meaning of the word hesed.  It’s connected to love; yet hesed is less about feeling and more about action.

Alan Morinis tells the following story: “I once heard Rabbi Abraham Yachnes clarify the extent of the stretch that is necessary to have an action qualify as hesed. He said that if you are walking down the street and someone is walking beside you carrying a large box, and you offer to help the person carry the box, that’s nothesed. You’d simply be a terrible person not to help someone in that situation. What counts as hesed is when you are walking the opposite way from someone carrying a burden and you turn around to help carry that load in the direction he or she is going. That’s hesed.”

When was the last time you turned around?Continue reading

Counting the Omer: Love Goes Up, Fear Goes Down

For this week’s daily counting of the Omer, we focus on loving-kindness, hesed.  Today, consider this teaching about embracing compassion and peace from our congregant Dr. Andrew Newberg’s book, How God Changes Your Brain:

Focus on compassion or an image of peace as your breathe deeply and relax.  Hold this though for at least 12 minutes a day, and in a matter of a few months you’ll begin to build and strengthen new neural circuits of compassion, and these will interrupt the neurological tendency to shy away from people who appear different from you…If you consciously interrupt pessimistic thoughts and feelings with optimistic beliefs–even if they are based on fantasies…Fear, anxiety and irritability will decrease, and a sense of peacefulness will slowly take its place…it’s a simple seesaw effect.  Love goes up, and fear goes down.  Anger goes up, and compassion goes down.Continue reading

Counting the Omer: The Interconnectedness of all Things

Our counting of the Omer deepens the journey from Passover to Shavuot.  Join us each day with a teaching, blessing and announcement of the count. We begin with a week inspired by hesed, loving-kindness.

In New American Haggadah, Nathaniel Deutsch comments that a small act of love can lead all the way to God.  “As Franz Rosenzweig explains in The Star of Redemption, his masterpiece of Jewish theology, ‘there is no act of neighborly love that falls in the void…because of the unbroken interconnectedness of all objects.’  In this way, the commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18) is intimately and profoundly linked to the commandment to ‘love the Eternal your God with all you heart, all your soul, and all your might” (Deut. 6:5).

When was the last time you experienced the interconnectedness of all objects?

Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohenu Melech ha-olam asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu al s’firat ha’omer.  Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, who makes us holy with sacred actions and enjoins us to count the omer.

Hayom yom echad la’omer.  Today is the 1st day of the omer.

Have a sweet Pesach!  Rabbis Kuhn, Maderer, Freedman and Cantor Frankel

Counting Up to Sinai: The Omer

Do you ever feel so focused on what is to come, that you miss what is before you?  When my family joins together for a meal, we laugh, we share, and we usually spend some time… talking about the next meal.  This readiness to discuss the next meal grows, not only from a stereotypically Jewish obsession with food; but also from a tendency to be in the next moment as much as we are in the present moment.  In its deep wisdom, Judaism does connect us to the lessons of the past and the hopes for the future, but Judaism also roots us firmly in the present.

In this present moment in Jewish time, we enter the season that begins with the second day of the festival of Pesach and continues until the festival of Shavuot.  This period is called the Omer, a term describing the measure of grain connected with the harvest of our agricultural biblical roots.  During this period of the Omer, there is a Jewish tradition to count, day by day, as a way to anticipate the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai, which Shavuot celebrates.Continue reading

What Has Been Put Before You?

Last year, I began to receive emails and facebook posts with an attached icon of the superman logo–the big red S in the five-sided border, that announces the presence of the man of steel.  Several of my rabbi friends had replaced their regular headshot photos with this Superman graphic, to demonstrate support for our rabbinic colleagues Phyllis and Michael Sommer.  The Sommers’ 8-year old son Sam was battling leukemia.  Harnessing his strength and superpowers, Sam took on the identity “Superman Sam” as he faced chemotherapy, radiation, relapse, and a bone marrow transplant.

Superman Sam’s parents harnessed their strength and superpowers into a blog, accounting their experiences of medical challenges, family, hope and love, and providing a space for others to share.  Superman Sam’s story, and his parents’ beautiful words, have spread beyond their community, to families across the nation.  Parents of children with cancer have commented that with the presence of the Sommers’ blog, they feel less alone.  Parents of children with other challenges have commented that the Sommers’ hope brings them hope.  And readers from all walks of life have commented that the Sommers’ story brings them perspective.  With their words, Phyllis and Michael have created a tremendous circle of people, bound by inspiration.  Continue reading