Month: April 2019

WES Counts the Omer, Day Eight Chesed B’Gevurah / Lovingkindness at the Core of Strength/Boundaries

WES Counts the Omer: April 27, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21	April 22	April 23	April 24	April 25	April 26
Gevurah	April 27
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

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Important: Let’s make this a conversation. These messages are now being posted each day to wesomer.wordpress.org so that you can comment and respond. I look forward to hearing from you.

Timing: These messages are being sent out before each day begins according to the Jewish calendar, in other words, before sunset in the evening. So, the daytime of each is the following day.

How these messages might be used: The mitzvah of Counting the Omer is done as the day begins, in other words, in the evening. However, you may wish to read or reread these materials on the following day during a time of meditation, study or contemplation. Choose one to think about or you might wish to read them with a loved one or friend. Study them with a chavruta partner. Don’t forget: This period of 49 days is a process, not an end.

————————————————————————

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom sh’monah yamim sheheim shavuah ekhad v’yom ekhad la’omer

Today is the eighth day, making one week and one day of the omer.

Note: As I write the news has just come in about the shooting at Chabad of Poway, six months to the day since the shooting at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. So far, the reports are of one fatality and three injured members of the Chabad community, including the rabbi. Let us hold the members of the Poway community close in our hearts just as we felt for those attending Easter services in Sri Lanka and Jumu’ah services at mosques in New Zealand. And, perhaps we can think about what might we do to combat the rising tide of hatred in our world.

Week Two: Gevurah / Strength and Restraint

This second week of Counting the Omer focuses on Gevurah. In this context, Gevurah is one of those words whose plain translation in English does not convey the layers of meaning implicit in the Hebrew term. Gevurah balances Chesed in Kabbalistic terms and means self-restraint, the strength required to limit our exuberance and our impulses, the strength that enables us to channel our energies most usefully.

Week Two: Gevurah/Boundaries and Limits

It may seem odd to us that the word meaning strength is also translated as boundaries and limits. If you asked most people to conjure up a mental image of strength, they might see someone with very developed muscles. Or perhaps they would see an image of someone performing a difficult and heavy task, such as lifting a piano by one leg. My mother, this year, has become a big fan of the American Ninja Warrior TV series. Last night, a (great looking) tall muscle builder was beginning his run, and the commentators pointed out that his weight—even though it’s all muscle—was going to be a disability in dealing with some of the obstacles. Different obstacles require different skills and abilities.

One way to think about gevurah is “not everything that we can do should we do.” Even when we think we’re acting from feelings of the purest lovingkindness, we must weigh our actions carefully before moving forward.

Susan Schorr

Week Two (2016): Gevurah/Boundaries and Limits

We begin our second week of Omer Counting. Today, we begin the week of Gevurah—the week of exploring boundaries and limits. Earlier this year in values-based discussions at West End, many of us were uncomfortable with the emphasis on boundaries that appeared in the description of several of the values. So this, for us, might be a week to examine why the idea of boundaries was so off-putting to so many of us.

As our discussions proceeded, we exchanged the word boundaries for membranes along with several other alternatives. We recognized that these boundaries do not have to be walls; in using the word membrane, we recognized the various types of membranes that exist–impermeable, semi-permeable and permeable.

In the same way, we may want to recognize that some, perhaps all, of our values cannot be seen as absolutes; i.e., this is the right way to live by this value, that way is bad. Instead, we might want to see our values as existing on continua with markers for “good”/ “bad,” “right” / “wrong,” “useful” / “hurtful” often in flux.

Perhaps this week of Gevurah can be a week when we think carefully about the boundaries in our lives, the ways in which they may protect us, and the ways in which they may harm us.

Susan Schorr

Alan Morinis, “Gevurah: Learning to draw the line on our desires,” (excerpted), http://www.jewishpathways.com

A man who does not restrain his own spirit is likened to a breached city without a protective wall. (Proverbs 25:28)

The middah or soul-trait of gevurah means “strength.” It shows up in many places and many ways, and you can read an entire newspaper as a commentary on the role of gevurah in public and private life. Are the police using too much unrestrained power? Should the government draw the line on certain behaviors that are happening in society? Was the family lax in discipline? Where’s the limit to the display of sexuality on television and advertising?

Take a look at the daily news from this point of view and you will see what an important trait gevurah is, and how illuminating it is to bring this framework to understanding ordinary events.

In Mussar thought, the strength that concerns us is not the power to move mountains, but the strength you need to overcome your greatest challenge: yourself. This is an especially important concern for our generation because we live surrounded by a culture that exuberantly celebrates self-indulgence, the very opposite quality of self-restraint.

The notion of “self-restraint” can scare us off because it makes us feel like we are setting ourselves up to lose something. The truth is that you stand to gain much more than whatever loss you might incur, because even as you muster the strength to say no to the body, no to desire, no to habit… at the same time, you are saying yes… yes to the soul.

Exercising self-restraint has always been difficult. Maybe that’s why a form of the word gevurah – gibor – means “hero” in Hebrew. Self restraint is nothing less than a heroic act!

Source: http://www.jewishpathways.com/files/Strength.pdf

Rabbi Karyn Kedar, Omer: A Counting

God declared that the land was flowing with milk and honey. But it was not. The land had date palms, tall, ready to yield their fruit that could become honey. And it had goats grazing peacefully on the side of mountains, ready to give milk. And we bless God who brings forth bread from the earth. But God does not. Rather, the fields are abundant with golden grain, waiting for harvest, waiting for human endeavor. The sustenance from milk, the satisfaction from bread, the sweetness of honey all require us to see what is, imagine what could be, and create what we can.

This is the secret of our power: To see the invisible! To pull back the veil that obscures all that is good. To bear witness to what is possible despite what others believe is merely probable. To look at what is and see what could be. To see the path to hope, courage, meaning, and purpose.

Magnificence is possible, and joy is possible.

This is the secret of our power: To imagine! And then to create! To step out of the darkness that blinds us to possibility. To see that our accomplishments begin with potential, with an idea, with thought. To envision ourselves as capable of so much more. To behold and then to make manifest.

Day Eight: Chesed of Gevurah, Lovingkindness at the Core of Our Strength/Boundaries

Too often we pride ourselves on being strong, even when we’re only being strong for strength’s sake, for the ego-boost it gives us to think of ourselves that way. Perhaps today is a day to think about the ways that chesed / lovingkindness might help us to identify when our gevurah—our our strength and our boundaries—work to benefit us and others, and when it is a bar to being the person we would really like to be, the friend we would like to be to others and the relative everyone would like to have.

Susan Schorr

Day 8 (2018): Chesed of Gevurah, At the Intersection of Lovingkindness and Strength

It’s hard to write about the strength, self-restraint and boundaries this year without wincing, given political issues of the day. Today, we begin our week of thinking about these issues with considering the ways that lovingkindness might alter those decisions and actions of ours from what they might be if only strength and boundaries were taken into consideration.

In my 2016 introduction to this week of Gevurah, I wrote, “Perhaps this week of Gevurah can be a week when we think carefully about the boundaries in our lives, the ways in which they may protect us, and the ways in which they may harm us.” We might use today to think about the ways that lovingkindness might encourage us to move or maintain those boundaries.

Perhaps one way to approach this is to reconstruct our use of Rabbi Kaplan’s directives for how to wrestle with the liturgy and prayers of our tradition. He laid out a four-step program: 1) Keep as is; 2) Keep the form but imbue it with new meaning; 3) Keep the meaning but instill it into a new format; and, finally, only if the other steps have not worked, discard it altogether.

What if we asked ourselves does this boundary serve only to protect me without any concern for the other person? Does this opportunity for self-restraint express the best of who I am or only my most self-absorbed self? Am I flexing metaphoric muscles only to impress others rather than using my strength to help them? And, perhaps we might also ask, am I using acts of lovingkindness to avoid dealing with important issues in my own life?

Susan Schorr

Day 8 (2017): Chesed of Gevurah, Lovingkindness at the Heart of our Strength

In the piece that I wrote last year to introduce the theme of this second week of Counting the Omer, to introduce Gevurah, I recalled West End’s discussions about boundaries. We shied away from the ideas of walls (and how much, this year, do we all shy from building walls [sorry, brief political moment, I’ll try to limit them]) and instead spoke of membranes that might be impermeable, semi-permeable and permeable. Perhaps that is where our Chesed comes into this idea of Gevurah—when we allow our lovingkindness to make our boundaries breachable, to allow them to become semi-permeable and permeable.

As Reconstructionists, we know that our religion continues to evolve and that our understanding, our study and our practices are in process, with regular growth and minor adjustments. Perhaps we might wish to understand our values as also in process. This is not to suggest that they are “situational” and change at the drop of a hat. But they evolve.

Many years ago, I was in conversation with West End’s then-rabbi about our practices in the case of a member’s death when one of the members of the couple was not Jewish. The rabbi was very clear about when we would support a shiva minyan and when we would not. Since I held different views, I decided to continue the discussion by personalizing it. “Okay,” I said, “what if it is [a particular non-Jew, heaven forbid] who dies and [name withheld] wants to sit shiva, are you saying we wouldn’t support that?” “Well, of course, we would,” replied the rabbi. “And, what if the situation is reversed,” I asked, “and it is [same name withheld above] who dies and [the particular non-Jew] wants to sit shiva, what would we do?” “Well, of course, we would be there,” responded the rabbi.

Sometimes, a way to test the membrane of an ethical value is to put actual names on a situation and see if that alters what you think is the “right” behavior. Sometimes, we find that our views and values have evolved without our noticing and sometimes we find that our values remain unshaken. Evolution can be a very slow process and we should remain impervious to the siren call of change for change’s sake. However, Judaism would urge us to heed the call of chesed and find ways to permeate our restraints and limits with lovingkindness.

It’s interesting. We worry that in our modern era, we have become too loose about maintaining our ethics but Judaism has always evolved in response to the tensions of the world in which Jews found themselves.

Susan R. Schorr

Day 8 (2016): Chesed of Gevurah, Lovingkindness in Our Boundaries

Too often, we make judgments quickly and too often, we make judgments harshly. We draw lines—lines separating us from others, lines drawing us away from how others have acted. What would it be like if every time we judged, we then stopped to ask if our judgment might be lightened or changed by allowing chesed / lovingkindness to also have its say?

Susan Schorr

Day 8 (2015): The Chesed of Gevurah, Lovingkindness in Justice and Strength

A week ago, the message about Gevurah of Chesed was about the boundaries in lovingkindness, those we need to protect ourselves and those that keep us from doing what we might. Today, we invert that to talk about finding the lovingkindness in our strengths and our boundaries. That seems the harder task. When we are focused on being strong and disciplined, it can seem a reversal to focus on love and kindness. Rabbi Simon Jacobson below suggests that we focus on the way the discipline we impose on ourselves and on others is an expression of love.

I’d like to offer another approach based on something I read in a posting on a Huffington Post blog. Perhaps the lovingkindness we seek to find on this day in justice and strength is the help that others can give us so that we can be strong. And the lovingkindness that we can offer to others is to bolster their strength. When the Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites, Joshua led the fighters while Moses held high the “rod of God” from the top of a nearby hill. In Exodus 17:11-12, it says “whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; but whenever he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands grew heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur, one on each side, supported his hands; thus his hands remained steady until the sun set.” Even Moses needed help from his brother and brother-in-law to be as strong as the Israelites needed him to be.

Susan Schorr

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations

The underlying intention and motive in discipline is love. Why do we measure our behavior, why do we establish standards and expect people to live up to them ― only because of love. Chesed of gevurah is the love in discipline; it is the recognition that your personal discipline and the discipline you expect of others is only an expression of love. It is the understanding that we have no right to judge others; we have a right only to love them and that includes wanting them to be their best.

Ask yourself: when I judge and criticize another is it in any way tinged with any of my own contempt and irritation? Is there any hidden satisfaction in his failure? Or is it only out of love for the other?

Exercise for the day: Before you criticize someone today, think twice: Is it out of concern and love?

Source: http://www.meaningfullife.com/torah/guide-personal-freedom/

Rabbi Lauren Ben-Shoshan, “Counting of the Omer,” Posted April 25, 2016 to RavBlog, Reform Rabbis Speak

These days, with four small children in our house, I count a lot. I inventory lunches and shoes and loads of laundry. I track little back packs and waters bottles and ouchies. I measure fevers and hours of screen time and outside play. I tally toys and turns and the children themselves every few minutes. Every day fills itself with small, sometimes forgotten numbers.

When each of my children were born, we counted their lives according to hours, or feedings, or dirty diapers. As they aged, the measuring stick dilated into weeks or months, but never much longer than that. Ella, my first child, was only sixteen months when Aidan was born; and the twins, Daniel and David, followed just twenty four months and one week later. Now, for more than half a decade – since my pregnancy with Ella – I counted our lives in days, sometimes in weeks, and occasionally, in months. But the twins marked the last pregnancy my body can healthily carry. As they age, the measuring stick lengthens and stretches with their no-longer-so-little bodies. And steadily, my subconscious practice of counting the time since their birth in days, then weeks, then months faded into the bittersweet ease of measuring their lives in years.

The practice of the counting of the Omer reminds us of each day’s preciousness. Some days are more exciting than others (I’m looking at you, Lag B’Omer) but every day merits a blessing. Marking and measuring the small things, the circadian passage of time, is what makes up the majority of our lives. Bigger milestones come and go, and I am grateful for them. But the counting of the Omer reminds me again of the joys of measuring our time in smaller increments.

Source: http://ravblog.ccarnet.org/2016/04/counting-omer/

From Rabbi Jill Hammer’s “Omer Calendar of Biblical Women”

Chesed she’begevurah
Love within Strength

Eve (Chava) (Genesis 2-4)

Eve is a new creature, dwelling in a perfect garden full of fruits of all kind, but she and her male partner have been limited in one way: they are forbidden to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. When Eve disobeys God and eats the forbidden fruit, she and Adam are punished with mortality and exile. Yet the fruit Eve picks also gives her wisdom and self-knowledge. All the humans that ever come to exist are born because of Eve’s decision to disobey God. Out of the gevurah, the judgment, that God decrees comes the chesed, the ongoing expansion of the generations that descend from Adam and Eve.

Eve’s life continues to hold limitations. She has to work hard for her living and suffers pain in childbirth. Her second-born son is murdered by her first-born son. Yet she does not give up the potential for love. She goes on to have another child, and she names him Seth, meaning foundation or gift. She is able to feel love and gratitude in spite of what she has suffered. Chesed shebegevurah is the knowledge that our lives are limited, finite vessels, but they are still full of love.

Source: http://www.ritualwell.org/ritual/omer-calendar-biblical-women

WES Counts the Omer, Day Seven Malkhut B’Chesed / Majesty at the Core of Lovingkindness

WES Counts the Omer: April 26, 2018

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21	April 22	April 23	April 24	April 25	April 26
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

————————————————————————

Important: Let’s make this a conversation. These messages are now being posted each day to wesomer.wordpress.org so that you can comment and respond. I look forward to hearing from you.

Timing: These messages are being sent out before each day begins according to the Jewish calendar, in other words, before sunset in the evening. So, the daytime of each is the following day.

How these messages might be used: The mitzvah of Counting the Omer is done as the day begins, in other words, in the evening. However, you may wish to read or reread these materials on the following day during a time of meditation, study or contemplation. Choose one to think about or you might wish to read them with a loved one or friend. Study them with a chavruta partner. Don’t forget: This period of 49 days is a process, not an end.

————————————————————————

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom shiv’ah yamim sheheim shavuah ekhad la’omer

Today is the seventh day, making one week of the omer.

Day Seven: Malkhut of Chesed, Majesty at the Core of Lovingkindness

I always worry when talking (writing) about God for a Reconstructionist audience. Let’s be clear—I am a profound believer in God. But it is a god I would describe as the force that connects us all to each other as well as the impulse within us that urges us to be better, do more for others, live up to our fullest potential.

Today is our day to think about the god or godliness that lives deep within us and is what impels us to lives of lovingkindness—towards others and towards ourselves. Perhaps we hear it as a still, small voice. Perhaps we know it wearing the persona of a parent or teacher who taught us about goodness and godliness. Perhaps we experience it as waging a battle against our darker, damaging impulses.

The question for today might be what can we do to strengthen it? How might we make it easier for us, each day, to be the people to whom we aspire? How might we develop a habit of performing acts of lovingkindness?

Perhaps there is a small action we could build into our lives. On Friday afternoon, as Shabbat approaches, are there homebound friends who might appreciate a telephone call? When we cook or bake, perhaps we could an extra amount and then choose someone(s) to receive the gift of cookies, or soup, or whatever? Are there people we see every day that we might stop and chat with for a few moments, instead of just passing by? When we get ready to leave home, might we put a dollar into a pocket, ready to give to someone homeless or in need? (And, if you don’t like giving to people on the street, what if, every day, you put a dollar into a jar which you could then convert at the end of each month into a donation to an agency serving the homeless?)

Susan Schorr

Day 7 (2018): Malkhut of Chesed, At the Intersection of Majesty and Lovingkindness

Rabbi Rami Shapiro teaches that when God initially proposed creating humankind, the plan was “to make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:27) but then God created us “in God’s image, in the image of God God created him; male and female God created them” (Genesis 1:28). He continues:

“Being the image of God means that we are God manifest. . . . Being the likeness of God means that we have the potential to act in a godly manner. It means that we can, regardless of our ideology, theology, and politics, engage each moment and each other with lovingkindness. According to Genesis, God intends for us to be godly, to honor the image by living out the likeness. . . . [We are the] Image of God but not yet the likeness of God. You are born the image of God, but living out the likeness of God is a choice.”

Perhaps this might be a day to think about the extent to which, each and every day, we make the choices that realize the possibility of living out the likeness of God. Do we ask ourselves are we acting in a godly manner in our dealings with each and every other person? Do we look at every encounter as an opportunity to increase the amount of godness/goodness in the world?

Susan Schorr

Day 7 (2017): Malkhut of Chesed, Majesty at the Heart of Lovingkindness

On this last day of the week, the tradition is to bring Godliness—however we may define that word/concept—into our thinking about chesed/lovingkindness. “Know before whom you stand” our tradition teaches. Perhaps we might reconstruct this idea, moving away from standing before an external and supernatural force and bringing the idea inside to . . . oh, let’s adapt Rabbi Kaplan’s phrase . . . the power that makes/urges us to become the best that we can be.

What if we imposed the idea of lovingkindness on however we define God for ourselves? In other words, what if we assessed our personal definition of God on the basis of the extent to which it impelled us towards acts of lovingkindness? And if we discovered that our personal definition of God was not profoundly linked to whatever compels/impels us towards acts of lovingkindness, we might want to commit to perhaps seeking to redirect our understanding of God and Godliness.

Susan Schorr

Day 7 (2016): Malkhut of Chesed, Majesty and Lovingkindness

Last year, on the seventh day (see below) I touched upon what has been a major theme of my personal thought—how important it is that we, as Reconstructionists, have a god-image that works for us. And by this, I mean one that serves to impel us towards becoming the best that we can be, the fulfillment that Rabbi Kaplan spoke of as our goal. Just as tradition taught—that humankind is created betzelem Elohim—in the image of God and following Mel Scult’s suggestion to invert theological statements, I believe that often we create our understanding of God in our own image. But too often, I think, we work only from the image of ourselves that we might see in a mirror, without depth or substance.

We may say that we believe in God, or godliness, but our faith-process is insubstantial. We know we believe and we seem to discover the outlines of that faith in an almost helter skelter fashion. We have faith but it is not one that we have thought through. Perhaps we would be better served if we saw our God-belief as a process, constantly changing and evolving, and worked actively to direct that evolution so that our God-belief could be a beacon waving ahead towards our goal of what we understood to be the best of what we might become. Then, we might truly become the loving and kind individuals that we aspire towards.

Susan Schorr

Day 7 (2015): The Malkhut of Chesed, Majesty of Chesed

“Da lifnei mi atah omed”

Know Before Whom You Stand

Let’s face it, calling it “majesty” cleans up the connection of this theme with the idea of God as King (or sovereign, if you prefer). And we could say that this is a day on which we celebrate our intention for chesed/lovingkindness to have primacy in our lives.

But I’d like to suggest that we also use it as a day for thinking about what does have primacy in our lives. And for thinking about our own personal definitions for YHVH. Traditionally, YHVH was perceived as a god of compassion and justice. In what ways does our own YHVH compel us toward acts of lovingkindness toward others, and, what may be harder for some, in what ways does it impel us towards of acts of lovingkindness toward ourselves?

Susan Schorr

From Evan Almighty (2007)

God: How do we change the world?

Evan Baxter: One single act of random kindness at a time.

God: [spoken while writing A-R-K on ground with a stick] One Act, of, Random, Kindness.

. . .

God: Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413099/quotes

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations

Mature love comes with ― and brings ― personal dignity. An intimate feeling of nobility and regality. Knowing your special place and contribution in this world. Any love that is debilitating and breaks the human spirit is no love at all. For love to be complete it must have the dimension of personal sovereignty.

Exercise for the day: Highlight an aspect of your love that has bolstered your spirit and enriched your life…and celebrate.

Source: http://www.meaningfullife.com/torah/guide-personal-freedom/

From Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Counting the Omer: A Personal Journal

REB YERACHMIEL’S NOTEBOOK

God said,

“Do not make idols to yourselves. And do not erect a monument to yourselves. And do not put a stone mosaic in your land for bowing over. For only I am the Eternal your God.

What idols have you made to yourself?

How can you tear them down?

What monument have you erected to bring others to honor you?

How can you remove it?

Where are you surrendering yourself to an image of yourself?

How can you free yourself?

Click to access rs-omer-journal.pdf

From Rabbi Jill Hammer’s “Omer Calendar of Biblical Women”

“One day Elisha passed through Shunem. A great woman lived there, and she invited him to eat a meal…”

–II Kings 4:8

The Shunammite (a woman of the town of Shunem) is a wealthy married woman living in the time of the kings of Israel and Judah. The Shunammite suggests to her husband that they build the prophet Elisha a chamber on their roof so that he has somewhere to stay when he travels. Elisha asks how he can help her, but her regal reply is: “I live among my own people.” I want for nothing, she implies. She does lovingkindness out of a sense of abundance and majesty: malkhut sh’b’chesed.

Elisha knows that the Shunnamite has no child. He prays for her to become pregnant. The child grows older, but one day he is out in the field with his father and he develops sunstroke. He runs back to his mother and dies on her lap. Without a word to her husband, the Shunammite rides to the prophet. She bows before him, yet she does not plead for her child. She only says: “Did I desire a child of my lord? Did I not say to you: ‘Don’t delude me?'” Elisha goes to the home of the Shunammite and lies face down upon the child “with his mouth on its mouth, his eyes on its eyes, his hands on its hands” until it revives. Without a word, the Shunammite bows, takes up her child and departs.

The Shunammite has great chesed: she is kind to the prophet, loves her son deeply, and cares for her husband. Yet her chesed is always full of malkhut, majesty. She helps others, relies on herself, and when she needs help she asks for it with dignity. We are most like the Shunammite when we give and receive love gracefully.

Source: http://www.ritualwell.org/ritual/omer-calendar-biblical-women

WES Counts the Omer, Day Six Yesod B’Chesed / Foundation at the Core of Lovingkindness

WES Counts the Omer: April 25, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21	April 22	April 23	April 24	April 25
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

————————————————————————————-

Important: Let’s make this a conversation. These messages are now being posted each day to wesomer.wordpress.org so that you can comment and respond. I look forward to hearing from you.

Timing: These messages are being sent out before each day begins according to the Jewish calendar, in other words, before sunset in the evening. So, the daytime of each is the following day.

————————————————————————————-

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom shishah yamim la’omer

Today is the sixth day of the omer.

Day Six: Yesod of Chesed, Foundation at the Core of Lovingkindness

As I read what I’ve written for this day in past years, I talk about family, friends and teachers. This year, in thinking about the foundation for our acts of lovingkindness, I want to talk about home. When we look at the core of our lovingkindness, part of the framework may well have come from the sense of wholeness we felt at home. Many of us grew up in homes in the best sense of that word but perhaps some of us grew up in houses that were never truly homes. And, perhaps some of us experienced periods in our lives when there was neither home nor house.

What do I mean by a home? Well, the first definition on merriam-webster.com is “one’s place of residence” while further definitions include words like congenial and comfortable. What I mean is a place of safety, first, but also a place of love and warmth, a place where there is a shared commitment to the well-being of all who live there.

My guess is that even those of us who grew up in a home that was the best it could be experienced moments when we stayed somewhere that was anything but a home. An unexpected stay at a hotel or motel, chosen out of necessity that we couldn’t wait to leave. A camp bunk that seemed filled with loneliness and homesickness. Sharing a residence when it was hard to breathe sometimes for fear of what another in the place might do. Losing a home due to a natural disaster and not being sure what was next. Being forced to leave a home not knowing where you were going.

According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, there are 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide and an additional person is forcibly displaced every 2-3 seconds. This is the highest level of displacement ever recorded.

Perhaps today is a day to think about what we might do to help another find a home. On April 9, Helen Stein sent to WESSACNews a list of ways to help refugees seekers at the U.S. southern border. If you didn’t get it, let me know and I’ll be happy to forward it to you. HIAS has a list on its website (www.hias.org) of ways to Take Action for Refugees. The International Rescue Committee (www.rescue.org) website has a page on “How to help refugees in the United States: 12 ways to stand for welcome.

These are just a few ways to help, any online search will provide you with tons more.

Susan Schorr

Day 6 (2018): Yesod of Chesed, At the Intersection of Foundation and Lovingkindness

I read what I have written for this day in previous years and realize that I tend to go back to childhood in understanding the foundation of our impulse to chesed, lovingkindness. I know that I was very lucky in having two parents who modelled acts of chesed for me on a daily, or near-daily basis. For example, to this day, every time I see an unfortunate on the street, I know that it is remembering my father’s example that makes me stop and give whatever I have in my pocket.

Both seders this year were great but there was particular joy and laughter on the second night when I welcomed friends from West End, including five incredibly well-behaved children. They all participated in one way or another, including nearly four-year-old Micaiah Kimmelman-DeVries who knows more than 80% of the Mah Nishtanah by heart. So, let me take this opportunity to thank Micaiah, Rafa Piatigorsky, Iris Kubicek, and Chloe and Jordan Grooms, for everything you added to the seder, and to thank their parents for the exceptional job you have done/are doing in raising them to be such kind and caring people.

And, as we think today about the ways in which we were taught the importance of chesed—acts of lovingkindness—we know that, for many of us, the foundation to that learning was built in childhood by our parents and/or other adults in our lives. So, perhaps today might be a day to acknowledge that gift and then ask ourselves to what extent are we “paying that gift forward”? We may not all have children, but we all know children. Are we modelling a life of chesed for them?

This reminds me of a story from West End’s founding year. As you may know, West End was made possible through the generosity of founding member Aaron Ziegelman. Our first chair (we didn’t have a president then) was Len Goldner and his younger child, Ben, was five that year. Ben’s allowance was 52 cents and each week, as part of their Shabbat evening practice, Ben would be given his allowance of two quarters and two pennies. Then he would contribute the two pennies to the cigar box which the family used as a tzedakah box (as a point of information, I add that the cigars were bought to celebrate the birth of Ben’s older sister, Claudia). When West End was about six months old, there came a Friday when Ben hesitated before making his contribution. After thinking it over, he took one quarter and one penny and put them into the tzedakah box. Looking up, he announced, “Tonight, I am Aaron Ziegelman!” Now, that is a clear example of modelling generosity.

And perhaps today as we think about the impact we may be having on children we know, we might ask whether we encourage them to join us in performing acts of lovingkindness? Do we tell them stories that illustrate the way people can help each other? Do we make opportunities for them to act with kindness towards others? Do we show them the many ways that values can be expressed as actions?

Susan Schorr

Day 6 (2017): Yesod of Chesed, The Foundation at the Heart of Our Lovingkindness

The foundation at the heart of our lovingkindness often dictates the extent to which we may put ourselves out, or go the extra mile, for someone else. For many of us, we began to build our responses to others in childhood, modelling our behavior on our parents, teachers and the other adults in our lives. If they were open and giving, perhaps we learned to be the same. If they were closed and “clutchy,” we may have adopted that behavior. As we grew older, perhaps we selected people we encountered and copied their responses to individuals’ needs as well as global concerns. For some of us, these patterns of behavior may have built up without conscious effort; for some, perhaps there was an intentional development of a sense of empathy and desire to help.

How strong is the foundation of our lovingkindness? When we look into our own hearts, do we find a strongly glowing fire of concern or a collection of weak, although well-intentioned, sparks? Have we been able to habituate extending a helping hand or does every instance require a renewed intention? We all live busy, over-extended lives. When we look back—over a week or a month—did we turn aside from our daily rounds and look perhaps at a burning bush of need or seek to understand another’s concerns? And, then, did we hope that someone else would let us off the hook by acting? Or, did we find the time to perform an act of chesed?

Susan Schorr

Day 6 (2016): Yesod of Chesed, The Foundation of Our Lovingkindness

We, most of us, pride ourselves on being loving and kind people, as well as people who perform acts of lovingkindness. Today is a day to look hard at ourselves and try to judge the extent to which lovingkindness is really found at our core. Do we do what we do just to make ourselves feel better? Is every act of kindness merely an excuse for self-back-patting? Do we, sometimes, act in response to how we might be seen by others if we didn’t act, perhaps a chesed-based form of keeping up with the Jones? Are we merely investing for our own future needs, figuring if we help this one today, someone (perhaps even that one) will help us tomorrow?

Today is a day to look at the foundation of our acts of chesed and try to identify those perhaps building blocks, perhaps only bricks or rubble, which set our egos aside and impel us to act with no thought of what benefit to ourselves might result. And then perhaps to try to figure out how to build from that so that it becomes a larger and stronger foundation for our actions.

Susan Schorr

Day 6 (2015): The Yesod of Chesed, Connections as a Foundation to Lovingkindness

When we do a kindness for a friend or family member, we always know that our actions are based on the relationship we have with them. Today, we are called to think about the bonds that link us to everyone else (all of humanity!) as a basis for the acts of kindness that we might be doing. Feeling in communion with strangers can be hard but, as Jews, our ability to feel empathy is critical to our Chesed actions. The Haggadah that we just read makes this clear that we are to help those who are in need or oppressed because we know what it feels like to be helpless, in need and oppressed.

Some days it may seem easier to feel connected to people suffering halfway around the world rather than people right in front of us. One member of the West End community found herself at the seder in a long conversation with a member of the host family who is mentally ill. Her heart broke as he talked about his isolation from his family, from the people he lives among and from people on the subway. How many of us avoid conversations with people who are different or frightening. I offer you another mensch reading from West End’s collection:

In our small downtown synagogue in the District of Columbia, we have a wide range of members ‑ people in high positions in government, “ordinary” people, students … and Jewish street people. We also have a rule: Once you volunteer to take on a responsibility, it’s yours forever.

On a recent Shabbat, the member who sets out the kiddush and makes sure that the shul is cleaned up afterward wasn’t there. In his place, his son, Manny (not his real name), stayed after the kiddush to clean up spilled wine and crumbs. While he worked, Jessie, one of the street people who regularly attend our services, a perpetually disheveled woman who tells her sad story over and over, stood by him and bent his ear with her ramblings. Most people shy away from Jessie (not her real name). Not Manny. He patiently acknowledged that he was listening, and made Jessie feel important for those few moments. Asked about his mitzva, Manny said, “It’s curious how her mind works. I really didn’t mind listening.” But I think he’s a mensch.

Shirley Feigenbaum, “A Mensch Primer,” in The Jewish Monthly, Jan., 1985, p.15

Susan R. Schorr

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations

Day 6 ― Yesod of Chesed: Bonding in Loving-kindness

For love to be eternal it requires bonding. A sense of togetherness which actualizes the love in a joint effort. An intimate connection, kinship and attachment, benefiting both parties. This bonding bears fruit; the fruit born out of a healthy union.

Exercise for the day: Start building something constructive together with a loved one

Source: http://www.meaningfullife.com/torah/guide-personal-freedom/

From Rabbi Rachel Berenblatt, posting to her Velveteen Rabbi blog, April 10, 2015

Day 6 of the Omer

DAY 6 – ROOTS

Plant your feet and burrow rootlets down
through the carpet. Find reservoirs,
water permeating the bed of an ancient sea.

Plant your flag in this moment, claiming here
and now: they are yours to clutch in your fist.
And who planted you? Who shaped the seed, who

guarded its growing? These too are roots:
grandmother who tasted the home she remembered
in sticky apricot kolaches at the county fair,

grandfather who hid his ornate Latin diploma
inside the lining of an overnight bag.
And if your seder bears little resemblance

to the one your father remembers, all Yiddish
and chanted pell-mell, that’s okay.
Old rootstock can bear bright new branches

can flower forth in wild profusion
with the etrog fragrance of Eden,
the spicebox scent of Shekhinah.

Source: http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2015/04/day-6-of-the-omer.html

From Rabbi Karyn Kedar, Omer: A Counting

When we are young we are led to believe that our legacy lies in our successes and our failures. And so life becomes a game, a sort of tally of victories and failures. We keep score of triumphant moments and try to minimize, leverage and rebrand the not-so-successful moments. All the while we hope and often pray that the endgame will be to our advantage and we will be proclaimed a great success. But that is only partially true.

Our most abiding legacy lies within the strength of our character. And it may just be an ironic twist of fate that character is best built and measured when we experience conflict, adversity, and failure. Not that success is without its test of courage and integrity. But when we fail—and we all do—we experience a profound moment of loss, which is layered and nuanced. In failure, we may lose the game we are playing, our work, our livelihood, a relationship, a power struggle. And even more crippling, we may lose confidence, a positive self-image, optimism, stability, good cheer, which knocks us off balance, off our mark. Herein lies the test of character: in the effort to regain composure, balance, direction, our footing. How we react, respond, rebound is a measure of our inner strength, our character, our fortitude, our inner vision of what is possible despite the outer collapse of what was.

It is in the motion of regaining balance that the strength of our character is formed, forged and molded.

Source: Kedar, Rabbi Karyn D. Omer: A Counting. New York: CCAR Press, 2014, p. 26-27.

From Central Synagogue, “Preparing for Enduring Disagreements: An Omer Reflection Guide”

The Talmud offers the following story, about a man who had travelled south from his home in the North of Israel to work for several years for a landowner there:

At the end of the three years, the man requested his payment from the land owner. The owner told him he had no money. The man asked if he could pay him in property and he answered that he had no property he could give him. The man asked if he could pay him in material goods or food. The owner answered that he had no material goods or food that he could give him. The man walked away dejected and returned to his home empty handed.

Several months later that owner travelled north to the man’s home. He asked him, “When I said I had no money to pay you, what did you think?” The man answered, “I thought you must have invested all your money in goods for your business.” “You are correct,” the owner answered and then asked, “When I said I had no property to give you, what did you think?” The man answered, “I assumed you must have dedicated your property to the holy Temple in Jerusalem.” “Yes,” answered the owner and then asked, “When I said I had no material goods or food to give you, what did you think?” The man answered, “I also thought that you must have pledged them to the priests.” “Correct again,” answered the owner. “Because you judged me favorably, may God judge you favorably.”

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 127b

trans. David Jaffe, Changing the World from the Inside Out

For Your Reflection:

Is there some aspect of curiosity or imagination that is required to give someone else “the benefit of the doubt”? Do you tend to be someone who jumps to conclusions? How might developing the habit of curiosity affect that tendency?
In this story, the man is commended for his silence. But one could argue that he should have asked “why?” at the outset, rather than walking away. When you feel wronged, how likely are you to inquire about the reasoning behind the other person’s actions? To what extent do you make up your own story about their motivations?

WES Counts the Omer, Day Five Hod B’Chesed / Acceptance at the Core of Lovingkindness

WES Counting the Omer: April 24, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21	April 22	April 23	April 24
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom hamishah yamim la’omer

Today is the fifth day of the omer.

Day Five: Hod B’Chesed, Acceptance at the Core of Lovingkindness

Not to pat myself on the back, but I just reread the pieces I’ve written for Day Five in years past and I really liked them. So, I hope you are reading some of the prior messages on each day.

When I think about acceptance/glory at the core of lovingkindness, I am reminded of a recent conversations about those individuals (particularly those family members) at our family gatherings who are difficult. Speaking to my relations, we talked about this year’s seders and those from years past with those relatives who, year after year, seemed to cast a blight on the proceedings. And then I had a conversation with one of my mother’s therapists who went to two seders and two Easter celebrations. And they each had their own little amount of family craziness. So, it’s not just us.

Perhaps one aspect of Hod b’Chesed is that we make the effort to maintain the tradition of spending holidays and holy days with certain relatives or friends, even when they’ve always been difficult, or even if recent changes in their health mean that they present new challenges. I wonder how many of us breathe a sigh of relief and think, “well, at least it’s only once (or twice) a year.”

Perhaps this is a year to wonder how these events are perceived from the other side. Do they wonder how it is that year after year they raise objections to which no one seems to pay attention? Are they trying to find a way to say, “this is too hard for me now?” And, are there family members who years ago were slotted into a particular cubbyhole so deep that no one really makes the effort to have a real conversation, contenting themselves with just a few platitudes?

And, how might we do better next year, perhaps even by adding an additional opportunity to see them this year? Take a walk together or perhaps even plan a visit to a botanical garden. Visit a deli and indulge in a guilty pleasure like pastrami. Perhaps we could add a regular telephone call to our relationship. Or, we could read a book together and talk on the phone after each chapter. There are many ways to touch someone.

Susan Schorr

Day 5 (2018): Hod of Chesed, At the Intersection of Acceptance and Lovingkindness

We want our acts of lovingkindness to matter. I’m not talking about gratitude; I’m talking about having what we do make a difference. When we reach out a hand, we want the other person to grab on. When someone tells us about a problem, we want to find a way to solve it (or at least help find a solution). When we pay a shiva call, we want to be counted in the minyan. But it doesn’t always work like that.

What if three people all reached out hands at the same time and yours wasn’t the one taken? What if the problem seems insuperable, or you just have no idea how to help? What if we’re the fourteenth person to arrive, or even the eleventh at the shiva house? Or, what if you are, like me, a woman and the mourners are only counting men?

We have control over our own actions; not over those who will respond to them. And we’re human—which means limited and far from all-powerful. Perhaps today is a day to think about the ways in which our desire to do acts of lovingkindness will often be challenged by our own limitations, all of the ways in which we’re just not as strong, or as capable, or as knowledgeable as we’d like to be. Of course, there have been times we’ve surprised ourselves, and done more than we thought possible. But there is a reality that must be accepted. No matter how much we love them, we won’t be able to fix everything for our family and friends. We have to accept that and perhaps within that acceptance find a commitment to keep trying to help whenever and in as many ways as possible.

Susan R. Schorr

Day 5 (2017): Hod of Chesed, Acceptance at the Heart of Lovingkindness

Before I can talk about Acceptance/Splendor at the Heart of Lovingkindness, I want to reference what I wrote two years ago for the Fifth Day of the Omer. I wrote of looking at an upcoming task and saying, “I could use help with this and I will accept help with this.” On Sunday, when I sat down to hem table runners for the seder, I discovered that my beloved sewing machine was broken. Suspecting that I would need to purchase a back-up machine while it was being repaired, I researched places that could repair and replace. The best choice was all the way out on Flatbush, almost to Sheepshead Bay. So, I made a call. I write this not to pat myself on the back that I made the call but to acknowledge my gratitude (hodayah, a word related to Hod) to Alan Gotthelf who answered the call and willingly agreed to drive me there and back this past Thursday. Truly, Alan was awesome (also a word related to Hod).

Perhaps today is a day to think our acceptance of the responsibility for lovingkindness towards others and, even, ourselves. And by this, we mean for performing acts of lovingkindness. If we sit at the seder and in services; if we listen with great concern to news stories about the ills and sorrows of the world; if we pass our days surrounded by family, friends and strangers, with their own concerns and needs; and, if after all of this, we do not feel impelled to act—maybe only to perform one small act of caring and love for another—then, perhaps we have missed the lesson about Hod/Acceptance at the Heart of Chesed/Lovingkindness.

Susan R. Schorr

Day 5 (2016): The Hod of Chesed, Living with Acceptance and Lovingkindness

Although we talk about acceptance with Hod, it always makes me think of hodayah, gratitude, which led me to thinking about how we accept the bad times. It’s easy, I think, to be loving, gracious and giving when everything is going well. But, it is much harder to maintain those qualities when we’re confronted by life’s challenges and losses. This week at Marjorie Ziegelman’s funeral, the rabbi spoke about Margie’s upbringing during the Depression and about how Margie accepted life with openness and gratitude during the highs and the lows. That seems to be the essence of Hod b’Chesed.

Susan Schorr

Day 5 (2015): The Hod of Chesed, Accepting Lovingkindness When It’s Offered

How many of us go on automatic pilot when someone reaches out to help us, almost without thought, rejecting the other and saying “No, thank you, that’s okay,” or “No, thank you, I can do it myself,” even when the help might actually be helpful. Sometimes we’re so busy protecting our boundaries or asserting our (perhaps imaginary) independence that we don’t even stop to consider the offer. We’re not, none of us, so strong or so powerful that another’s arm isn’t sometimes useful. And, we’re not, none of us, so weak or so challenged that accepting help must damage our identity or self-image. Perhaps today can be a day to look at a daily task, or an upcoming to-do list, and say, “I could use help with this and I will accept help with this.”

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations

Day 5 ― Hod of Chesed: Humility in Loving-kindness

You can often get locked in love and be unable to forgive your beloved or to bend or compromise your position. Hod introduces the aspect of humility in love; the ability to rise above yourself and forgive or give in to the one you love just for the sake of love even if you’re convinced that you’re right. Arrogant love is not love.

Exercise for the day: Swallow your pride and reconcile with a loved one with whom you have quarreled.

From Rabbi Min Kantrowitz’s Counting the Omer blog, posted March 30, 2013

Day 5 of the Counting of the Omer 2013

Hod she b’Chesed
Splendor within Lovingkindness

Of the many interpretations of Hod, the one that most resonates is splendor — the amazing variety of everything in creation. Today we focus on diversity within lovingkindness…the many ways love is expressed in the world. The current discussions about the definition of marriage reflect the fact that loving relationships are heterogeneous. It was not too many years ago that marriage between two people of different races was illegal; now it is not. Families built by adoption were rare, but families created through surrogacy were just a dream. When we recognize the many ways endless compassion and caring are manifest in the world, we open ourselves even more in the journey toward revelation in which we are engaged this Omer season.

Source: http://www.rabbiminkantrowitz.com/blog/2013/03/30/day-5-of-omer-counting-2013-hod-she-bchesed/

From Rabbi Jill Hammer’s Omer Calendar of Biblical Women which can be found on http://www.ritualwell.org

Hod shebeChesed
Glory within Love
The Mother in Solomon’s Trial

Two women, prostitutes, bring a case before King Solomon. One woman tells him: “This woman and I live in the same house, and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house… This woman also gave birth to a child… During the night this woman lay on her child and it died. She got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I was sleeping, and laid him in her bosom, and she laid her dead son in my bosom. When I arose in the morning to nurse my son, there he was, dead, but when I examined him in the morning light, it was not the son that I had borne.” The other woman denies the story, saying that the living child is hers. Solomon proclaims that his judgment is that both the dead child and the living one shall be divided with half of each child given to each mother. One woman— it’s not clear who— cries, “Give her the live child, and do not kill it!” The other woman callously insists, “The child shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” Solomon declares that the live child shall be given to the woman who was willing to give it up, “for she is its mother.”

Hod, glory, is sometimes explained as “yielding.” The mother in this story shows chesed toward her child because she is willing to yield it so that it may live. We act in her spirit of hod shebe’chesed when we act in the true best interest of those we love, even when it is most difficult.

Source: http://www.ritualwell.org/ritual/omer-calendar-biblical-women

WES Counts the Omer, Day Four Netzach B’Chesed / Endurance in Lovingkindness

WES Counting the Omer: April 23, 2018

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21	April 22	April 23
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom arba’ah yamim la’omer

Today is the fourth day of the omer.

Day Four: Netzach of Chesed, Endurance at the Core of Lovingkindness

When I used to think about endurance, it used to be that I was always reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. But these days, I’m more likely to think about Leonard Cohen, whose prophetic message is fundamentally about endurance/netzach. I wrote last year about my study of Leonard Cohen, which has continued (I’ve now read four biographies and the fifth is sitting waiting for me). Thinking today about Netzach/Endurance at and Chesed/Lovingkindness, I am reminded of his song, “Hallelujah.”

As you may know, Leonard Cohen worked on “Hallelujah” for about five years and reportedly ended up with more than eighty verses, from which he took the four that he recorded. However, most people are more familiar with what might be described as the alternate version of the song. When John Cale recorded “Hallelujah,” he used the first two verses and then chose three additional verses from the collection that Leonard Cohen sent him when he asked to see the discarded verses. It is the John Cale recording that is used in the movie, “Shrek,” and it is that version that K.D. Lang sang at the 2010 Olympics opening ceremony.

The last three lines of the Cale version are: “And it’s not a cry that you hear at night / It’s not somebody who’s seen the light / It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

A cold and broken Hallelujah is very different from how Leonard Cohen had the song end: “And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” In other words, no matter how it turns out, even at the end of my life, I’ll still praise God. Since many of us may not believe in the same God as Cohen, replacing his God with Godliness, we might want to reconstruct those last lines to say: throughout my life, even when it all seems to be going wrong, I will continue trying to do my best, and continue trying to act from a place of godliness, of lovingkindness.

If that is the goal, we might want to ask how are we doing? Can we affirm that, even in the sloggiest moments when doing the right thing seems hard and heavy, we still operate from a place of love (for ourselves and others)? Are there burdens we put down, thinking only to rest for a moment, that we haven’t gotten back to pick them up again? Are there people we hope still understand that we really will be there for them as soon as we can? And is it really true that we couldn’t have gotten back to them sooner?

When you look back, will you be able to say—no matter how it turned out—Hallelujah, my actions were my praise of You (however you understand that You)?

Susan Schorr

Hallelujah

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Day 4 (2018): Netzach of Chesed, At the Intersection of Endurance and Lovingkindness

As many of you know, I have spent the past months studying Leonard Cohen. You may have heard me describe him as the bleakest prophet of hope; I would also say he is the prophet of keeping on keeping on. In his poetry and his songs, he returns over and over again to the essential importance of the day-to-day doings of our lives, recognizing the importance of the work—the effort—over the outcome. You might say that he focuses on process over product. Perhaps he is a proto-Reconstructionist. More importantly, this emphasis of his reminds me of what the man (angel?) says to Jacob with the dawn breaking. They have wrestled all night long and when the being “saw that he had not prevailed against him [Jacob],” he said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”

If we have been told explicitly that the being had not prevailed and they’re still wrestling, how has Jacob prevailed? It seems that a likely response is by not giving up, by continuing to struggle all night long even though he did not prevail. In our efforts as God-Wrestlers (to use the term popularized by Rabbi Arthur Waskow), we may understand the need for endurance as focused on our day-to-day lives, or in the big-picture work of tikkun olam.

Perhaps today is a day to think about the importance of keeping on keeping on in the small ways that we reach out to each other. It can be very easy to let other things get in the way of the small things—calling a housebound congregant or friend on Friday afternoon to wish them Shabbat Shalom; making the time to ask someone, “How are you?” and really wanting a real answer, not just a pro forma “I’’m fine”; remembering the birthday of a great-aunt or distant relative and other little acts that tell people we honor them as human beings.

Susan Schorr

Day 4 (2017): Netzach of Chesed, Endurance at the Heart of Lovingkindness

It’s wonderful when we perform an act of lovingkindness and see an immediate benefit realized by the other we’re trying to help (and, of course, this may produce an immediate sense of satisfaction that we can experience). For many of us, it can be much harder when we feel ourselves slogging away, effort after effort, without any sense that we’re doing any measurable good at all. Perhaps one way to address this fourth day of the omer is to think about the need sometimes for endurance in our acts of lovingkindness.

I am reminded of a story that I’ve seen in various versions, including a Shell Oil ad many years ago. An elderly man is working his way down a beach littered with hundreds of starfish and picking them up, one by one, to toss back into the ocean. A snarky teenager stops him and says, “Don’t you realize there are hundreds here. Your efforts won’t make a difference!” The man looks at him as he saves one more starfish and says, “It makes a difference to this one.” We may not know whether we make a difference, or we may be convinced that what we do is only a small drop of succor in an ocean of need, but each small drop still counts. After all, filling an ocean of a thousand miles still begins with a single drop.

Susan Schorr

Day 4 (2016): The Netzach of Chesed, Enduring Lovingkindness

For many of us, we find it easy to respond to the immediacy of acute circumstances—paying a shiva visit after a death, visiting a friend in the hospital, writing a check after a natural disaster destroys a community. But how many of us remember that all of these situations create continuing need? Do we call the bereaved a month later to ask how they are? Do we bring a meal to the former patient now recovering at home? Do we track recovery efforts to identify what more we could be doing? And what about the chronically ill or housebound within our community and our families? Do we reach out on any kind of regular basis, staying in touch and perhaps lessening, even slightly, their aloneness?

And what about enduring lovingkindness toward ourselves? Over the past several years, West End has had a monthly middah practice. Studying these middot is all well and good, but are we working to inculcate them in any real way into our daily lives? Even a one or two percent improvement in any one might be a phenomenal gift of lovingkindness we could give ourselves. Perhaps this might be a day to think about choosing one for a year-long focus. Or making that call to a friend we’ve been putting off for far too long.

Susan Schorr

Day 4 (2015): The Netzach of Chesed, Endurance in Lovingkindness

Rabbi Simon Jacobson in his omer meditations focuses this day on whether our love is enduring and suggests that the exercise for the day be to reassure a loved one of the constancy of our love. That’s all very well (and I’m not saying don’t do that) but it seems to me that the lovingkindness that we are trying to make a greater part of our lives is particularly found in the ways we express care and concern for those we don’t love, or perhaps don’t even know. An example of this was found in the reading from the West End collection that I included in yesterday’s message of the teens slowing down to accompany an older person to shul. So, our question for today might be how do we take this practice from isolated instances to a constant in how we live our lives. Towards this, I offer this quote from Mother Teresa:

People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

From Rabbi Yael Levy’s Daily Omer Teachings:

Defining the path

Creating practices that guide us

in giving and receiving the Divine love

that flows through us and all the world

Practice for today: Loving Kindness (Metta) Meditation

We say this prayer for ourselves and others. Begin with yourself.

Then pray – one at a time – for nine more people, making a minyan of blessing.

May I (you) be blessed with love,

May I (you) be blessed with peace,

May I (you) be blessed with well being.

With all my heart I seek the One. (Psalm 119:10)

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations

Day 4 ― Netzach of Chesed: Endurance in Loving-kindness

Is my love enduring? Does it withstand challenges and setbacks? Do I give and withhold love according to my moods or is it constant regardless of the ups and downs of life?

Exercise for the day: Reassure a loved one of the constancy of your love.

From Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, Counting the Omer: A Kabbalistic Meditation Guide

In Exodus 15, miracles occur, waters part and we cross the sea. We gain freedom and celebrate. Yet, just three days later, the people complain, grumbling to Moses, saying: “What shall we drink?” Did they already forget the miracles in only the fourth day of freedom. Today, the fourth day of counting the Omer, we are reminded that forward movement requires a combination of trust and effort. Every journey, including this practice of counting the Omer this year, contains some doubt. With trust, endurance counters doubt. Netzach represents the endurance that keeps us going.

Netzach within Chesed can be imagined as love and compassion infused with the energy of movement, as in memorable lovemaking, or demonstrating for fair labor practices, or spiritual dance. Netzach is divine fuel, the endurance that helps compassion continue to flow, or a kind of spiritual oil that smooths the tough places;. Today we focus on celebrating the steadfastness of God’s flow of loving energy. Today we contemplate the enduring power of compassion, and commit ourselves to using it wisely.

Jewish tradition teaches us to pray with kavvanah, to do actions of lovingkindness with kavvanah, and to perform commandments with kavvanah. Kavvanah can be described as mindful, directed alertness, a kind of inner dedication, which we can use to deepen prayer, actions and meditation, to keep our attention in line with our intention. The enduring energy of Netzach is like a flow of kavvanah; constantly illuminating the path of compassion, as each of us, in our own way, seeks God.

WES Counts the Omer, Day Three: Tiferet B’Chesed / Beauty in Lovingkindness

WES Counting the Omer: April 22, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 2 1	April 22
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom yom shlishi la’omer

Today is the third day of the omer.

Day Three: Tiferet of Chesed, Beauty at the Core of Lovingkindness

Today is our day to think about beauty at the core of lovingkindness. This morning I did my roots which led me to think about the ways we each make choices about how we will present ourselves to others. Of course, there are characteristics that we can’t change (or that we think about changing but haven’t gotten to yet) but there are all kinds of decisions that are bound up in how we think about ourselves. Do we choose clothing that is bright and eye-catching or basic and classic? Are our shoes chosen for impact or comfort? Is our goal to stand out or to fade in? Do we wear wigs or dye our hair; do we wear our hair as it has aged with us or has aging meant that we have no hair?

One summer, I captained my camp’s volleyball team and was delighted to find that my sun-lightened dark brown hair had all of these golden red streaks. I loved the look and seven years later on my nineteenth birthday began dying my hair red, which, it has always seemed to me, expressed a soul-truth about me. What decisions have you made that let your soul-truth be seen by others? Or do you firmly squelch those random thoughts about a change in appearance or persona?

Fundamentally, the beauty and lovingkindness we can bring to the world begin in those soul-truths. And if all we do is stomp on them and keep them shut deep inside of us, we run the risk of creating a wound that may scar all that we do. Perhaps today is a day to think about taking one step, even a small one, to release the beauty in our soul so that it gets expressed in our care of ourselves or our acts of lovingkindness for others.

Susan Schorr

Day Three (2018): Tiferet of Chesed, The Intersection of Beauty and Lovingkindness

When we hear the word beauty, what we tend to think of requires aesthetic judgments that may be very personal. After all, aren’t we taught that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Apparently, this is one of those places where the teachings of our two civilizations are in conflict.

It’s interesting that the Hebrew word tiferet is used for beauty and balance. Perhaps this is meant to suggest an understanding of beauty that is beyond what looks beautiful to me, or to you or anyone else. When we apply this to our own behavior, perhaps we might be encouraged to go beyond what merely looks good to what is truly good. Sometimes it may require more work to delve below the surface and plumb the depths for truth but it must always be worth it to make the effort.

Perhaps today is a day to think about what might be areas where we stop at the surface of how we might act with lovingkindness and settle for what we find there. Perhaps today is a day to challenge ourselves to dive deeper and find the beauty of what we might be doing that may live below.

Susan Schorr

Day Three (2017): Tiferet of Chesed, Beauty at the Heart of Lovingkindness

The Kabbalistic tradition teaches that this third attribute of tiferet (beauty) is the balance found in harmony between the two earlier sefirot of chesed (lovingkindness) and gevurah (strength). Perhaps inspired by the impulse to lovingkindness, it seems to me that there is often an inherent beauty found in acts of lovingkindness. We add to the beauty of the world when we provide a shoulder to a crying friend, when we link our arms to dance in celebration of another’s simcha (happiness), when we hold a sleeping child, when we rush to help another in need. As Jews, we gather in beautiful community at shiva minyanim (services of mourning) and britim milah (circumcisions).

Perhaps this is a day to notice the beauty we create in all of the ways we live our lives not seesawing between chesed and gevurah but by finding a way to combine the two and bring our strength to acting with love and kindness towards those we love, those we like, those we merely encounter and even those that we meet only in news reports and nonprofit organizations’ literature.

Susan Schorr

Day Three (2016): Tiferet of Chesed, The Beauty of Lovingkindness

We live in a world where beauty often seems fleeting. When we read poetry or the prayers of our tradition, they find beauty in nature, in all of “God’s Creation.” And yet, if we believed in the supernatural God spoken of in our tradition, it seems clear that creating beauty is easy for that God, a mere snap of the fingers for the sunsets; a moment of concentration for the endless vistas, mountains and the like. How much more of an accomplishment it is when we can create beauty! And yet, how often do we pause to ask, “Will what I create be beautiful?” “How can I make what I am about to do beautiful?”

And “How can I add beauty to the act of lovingkindness I am about to perform?” I am reminded of the moment in the movie, Despicable Me, when Gru has made each girl’s breakfast in the shape that will best please her. My sister Betsy tells about helping out in a soup kitchen with her son Josh, as his bar mitzvah project. Josh would work at the yogurt table and as each person approached, he would list the flavors available and ask which one they wanted. Such a simple act and yet such a simple way to honor the humanity of each of those people. Betsy could tell from their responses to Josh how often they were just given what was available without anyone making the attempt to find out what they wanted.

Susan Schorr

Day 3 (2015): The Gevurah of Chesed, Celebrating the Beauty of Lovingkindness

Rabbi Yael Levy suggests below that we use this day to make a commitment to notice and name something beautiful. May I suggest that we find a way to share the beauty with someone who may not have noticed what you have. And, don’t forget that beauty is found not just in things that we can see. What about the beauty found in an act of lovingkindness?

Tiferet also brings with it the ideas of harmony and balance. From the lovingkindness that we began with on the first day, to the boundaries that we acknowledged on the second day, we can also use today to think about the harmony that we want to achieve between the two.

Susan Schorr

From Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s Omer Counting Journal

Source: https://rabbisremembering.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/rs-omer-journal.pdf

Reb Yerachmiel’s Notebook

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I would beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves . . . Don’t search for the answers. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually—without even noticing it—live your way into the answer.”

What are your questions?

How can you live them?

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.

Amichai Lau Lavie, Counting the Omer. Fifty days, fifty fragments: one a day, one solid journey.

Posted April 10, 2012 on the gather the broken blog. gather the broken is a shared omer counting 5772, drawings from Jacqueline Nicholls, commentary from Amichai Lau Lavie focused on counting the omer by taking note of the small fragile broken things. not throwing them out, or being in a rush to fix, but finding something beautiful and precious in these items that cannot be used, or discarded.

day 3 of 50

Jacqueline: broken bobbin

tightly wound & tangled

can’t risk using it

Amichai: tangles. tightly wound threads of our existence. Muscles too tight, relationships so complicated, obligations and priorities compete for our attention, confuse our choices. If only we could calmly, slowly, unwind the whole thing, all those tangled bits of this and that, start from scratch, get a new beginning. But the thread is already in the eye of the needle, not seen in the image, but present in the big picture: we have to work with what we got. Maybe that’s where this count comes in.

Day 3. It’s already a total commitment, this daily practice. Left the mountain and the forest for the hills of Jerusalem driving through the wide open desert drenched with light and tangled territorial disputes. We can’t start from scratch. Need to make this land happen for all of us, with kindness. Come to this difficult disentangling of holy landscapes from the heart.

Tiferet of Hesed – Heartfelt Kindness. Threads of peace.

Massage part 2 was powerful. sobs and shrieks and understanding about where to go next on this journey of kindness to the stuck: I will go on a journey to a locked gate.

WES Counts the Omer Day Two Gevurah of Chesed / Strength at the Core of Lovingkindness

WES Counting of the Omer: April 21, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 20	April 21
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom yom sheni la’omer

Today is the second day of the omer.

Day Two: Gevurah of Chesed, Strength/Limits at the Core of Lovingkindness

Jane Weprin-Menzi tells me that at last night’s Nadler-Miller seder, WES founding member Myron Bassman related an insight of mine from many years ago: We can connect the three matzahs to the three Patriarchs in which case it makes sense that we break the middle matzah because Isaac is the broken Patriarch. We find the afikomen to make Isaac whole again.

Well, I don’t remember saying it but I like the insight and it seems to me that it connects us to this second day of Gevurah of Chesed. We are all broken in one way or another, or in many ways. Just as the Ark of the Covenant contained both the second intact set of tablets and the first broken set, it is important that we search for our broken places so that we can embrace the broken pieces of ourselves with love. In all our actions, may we allow that embrace of our own brokenness to help us bring love and compassion to others, particularly the most broken among us.

Susan Schorr

Day Two (2018): Gevurah of Chesed, At the Intersection of Strength/Limits With Lovingkindness

I sit here still glowing from last night’s seder. I hope yours was as much fun as mine was. I hope both of them (if you went to two) were filled with good company, inspiring moments, wonderful singing and tradition balanced with engagement.

Today, we are asked to consider the intersection of Chesed (Lovingkindness) with Gevurah, which can be translated as strength, limits or boundaries. Let’s think about the ways in which we may want or need to limit the lovingkindness that we create in the world. As some of you may know, I have an eye muscle problem which limits my depth perception. Many years ago, I had a friend who would always grab my arm when we got to the edge of the sidewalk and were about to step off the curb. He meant very well but I hated it. Sometimes the best way we can help someone else is to ask if they want our help. Jumping in and assuming we know what will be best for them can turn out to be absolutely the wrong thing to do. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talks about the importance of restraint as helping us acknowledge that not everything we can do, we should do.

Perhaps today can be a day to think about the ways we sometimes allow our desire to help to sweep us across boundaries we should be respecting. Perhaps there is an apology we need to make, perhaps we need to make clear that we respect someone else’s right to tell us “no,” even when all we’re trying to do is be helpful. Equally today might be a day to think about the people around us to whom we might want to say, “I’m here if there’s ever anything I can do to help you. Please let me know what you need.”

Susan R. Schorr

Day Two (2017): Gevurah of Chesed, Strength at the Heart of Lovingkindness

Happy Passover / A Zissen Pesakh to all. I hope your seders were wonderful—inspiring—tuneful and just fun.

Today is a day to think about gevurah in chesed (lovingkindness). In Kabbalistic terms, gevurah often is thought of as restraint, the ways that setting boundaries balances chesed. But gevurah also means strength and we might want to use today to think about the strength that bolsters our acts of lovingkindness. Sometimes when we pass a particularly wretched homeless person, it may be that inner core of strength that helps us to recognize and respond to the essential humanity being degraded. Or, when we are faced with the hard work of thinking past the numbers in the headlines, it is the strength that girds our sense of compassion that enables us to look at a picture of a father holding his twin 9-month old sons’ bodies and ask ourselves “what can I do?” As the image rends our hearts, it is the strength at the core of our lovingkindness that says we can make a difference if we choose to act. Perhaps we can spend today choosing at least one of the tragedies of today’s world and performing (or planning to perform) one small act designed at making the world a better place.

At our seders, we said “L’shana ha-ba’ah b’Yerushalayim,” –Next year in Jerusalem, which may have been a literal wish for our ancestors. For many of us, however, Jerusalem expresses not an actual place but, instead, an ideal. For us, this wish may be heard as a wish that next year things will be better than they are this year. Perhaps a messianic era will have dawned, perhaps not. But we can hope that more people will live in freedom, that fewer will be hungry, that more will have shelter and that fewer will be oppressed.

Susan R. Schorr

Day 2 (2016): Gevurah of Chesed, Limiting Lovingkindness

On the Kabbalistic image of the sefirot, the characteristics shaping the relationship between the Eternal and humankind, chesed (lovingkindness) on one side is balanced by gevurah (strength or restraint). We may have a problem with this because we’re told about a God of love and we hear a God of all love. We don’t like recognizing that love and lovingkindness require restraint and boundaries. And yet, many of us believe that balance and harmony in all things is to be preferred. Any fanaticism—being so committed to something that everything else is seen as secondary—is to be avoided. Perhaps this is a day to try to figure out how to be loving and supportive without being overwhelming; how to reach out to others while still allowing them to extend a helping hand to us; how to love another in such a way that we allow him or her to decide whether to grow or hibernate, whether to fly or burrow, whether to laugh or cry.

Susan Schorr

Day 2 (2015): The Gevurah of Chesed, Understanding the Boundaries of Lovingkindness

Lovingkindness often requires us to take that step that takes us across either the boundaries that another has set up or the boundaries that we have established for ourselves. Lovingkindness that has us giving so much that we ourselves are now without is not the goal. How do we overcome our fears? How do we define the necessary boundaries so that we can continue to give? How do we give with a full heart if we are too busy focusing on not crossing boundaries?

Three years ago, Rabbi Josh Feigelson wrote this in Sh’ma:

Although we say, “Kol dichfin yeitei v’yechul,” “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” do we really go out and find hungry people to feed? In the rarest cases, perhaps we do. But for most of us, we let the imaginative play of the seder remain a work of theater. We let the words affect our inner lives, but we rarely act them out in real time; we don’t search for hungry people to share the Pesakh meal. Our empathy remains a work of imagination, its ethical impulse confined to the theater of the seder night.

Perhaps we’re concerned for our safety. But more likely (at least for me), we fear confronting the gap between the hungry person’s reality and our own. The real fear, then, is the moment I realize that I’m not as good a person as I thought, as I hoped I was. It’s the moment I thought I was a generous Jew, and it turns out that when confronted with real hunger, real need, I don’t have what it takes. I can’t bring the hungry person into my own home to feed him.

Excerpted from Rabbi Josh Feigelson, “Let All Whe Are Hungry Come and Eat—Really?” Shma, March 2012, p. 7

Susan Schorr

Rabbi Rachel Berenblatt, “And the Day Came . . . “, blog posting April 22, 2016

Rabbi Rachel Berenblatt posted a magnificent essay to her blog on Friday for Pesakh. Here is the beginning of what she wrote and a link to her post:

I’ve been sitting with this Anaïs Nin quote for a while. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was greater than the risk it took to bloom.” It feels especially resonant to me as Pesach draws near. The Pesach story is one of risk-taking.

The Pesach story says: in every life there are familiar constrictions. Sometimes we suffer them. Sometimes we accept them grudgingly. Sometimes we embrace them. Sometimes we grow so accustomed to them that we forget they’re there.

And in every life there are awakenings. We realize that we don’t need to stay where we are. We realize that we could choose to risk the unknown, even though it’s scary, even though we don’t know what lies ahead. The Pesach story says: take the leap. Step into the sea and trust that it will part for you.

http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2016/04/and-the-day-came.html

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations:

Day 2 ― Gevurah of Chesed: Discipline in Loving-kindness

Healthy love must always include an element of discipline and discernment; a degree of distance and respect for another’s boundaries; an assessment of another’s capacity to contain your love. Love must be tempered and directed properly. Ask a parent who, in the name of love, has spoiled a child; or someone who suffocates a spouse with love and doesn’t allow them any personal space.

Exercise for the day: Help someone on their terms not on yours. Apply yourself to their specific needs even if it takes effort.

Rabbi Barry Leff, Day Two: Gevurah of Chesed, www.neshamah.net, posted April 5, 2015

Chesed, the trait of the week is love. Today the aspect of love we consider is gevurah, which is “strength,” but also understood as judgment, restriction, discipline. In the creation of the world the expansive force of chesed, love, needed to be balanced, restrained, by gevurah.

The Talmud teaches “love without rebuke is not love.” Sometimes love needs to be tempered or strengthened with discipline. Loving your children often means setting boundaries. Sometimes love calls on us to say things that might be difficult to say. How does “strength” play into our love? Are we strong enough to say things to those we love that may be difficult to say or difficult to hear, if they are in fact things that need to be said? On the other hand, are we strong enough to refrain from saying things that would not be helpful? The Talmud also teaches that we only rebuke someone when we believe they will listen, they will be able to recognize and accept “constructive criticism.”

[A message for Day One which I wanted to share with you.]

Rabbi Cindy Enger and Rabbi Jill Zimmerman, Day One: Waking Up, Journey of the Soul: Making the Omer Count 2018/5778, The Jewish Mindfulness Network

Every journey begins with a call: the moment when we become aware. Whether the “call” is internal or external, quiet or quite loud, there are moments in our lives when we actually wake up. For the Israelites in Egypt, after 400 years of slavery, a new Pharaoh came into power and suddenly, they realized the burden of their oppression. They groaned; they cried out. And thus, their journey to freedom began.

The Passover seder is a night of questions. In the Torah as well, at the beginning, God poses the first question to Adam and Eve after they ate forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. “Ayeka?” God asked them. “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Instead of answering, our ancestors, the first humans, offered excuses and hid.

Rabbinic commentators teach that God was not asking a question of location but, rather, attempting to engage them in a conversation about their existential condition. “Where are you, really?” we might say. In their hiding, Adam and Eve remained unaware. What about us?

In The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz comments on the voice in the garden and brings us into the story as well. He writes, “The voice in the garden is still reverberating throughout the world and it is still heard, not always openly, or in full consciousness but nevertheless, still heard in one way or another, in a person’s soul. … To anyone, at any time whatever, the question may be flung: where are you?” (emphasis added)

The question to each one of us on this first day of the Omer is, “Ayeka?” Where are you? First we consider: do we hear the call and the question? Are we listening? Second, we look within: Are we willing to answer the call addressing us in this moment? Today is an opportunity to check-in and listen.

What is stirring inside of you that brings you to this journey right now? Where are you now? What truths do you bring with you as this journey begins?

WES Counts the Omer, Day One Chesed of Chesed, Lovingkindness at the Core of Lovingkindness

First Day of the Counting of the Omer 2019 / 5779

WES Counts the Omer: April 19, 2019

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 19
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut

The Blessing for Counting the Omer

Masculine (Traditional):

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetizvanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Feminine:

Beruchah at yah, eloheinu ruach haolam, asher kidshatnu bemitzvoteha vetizvatnu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, God, Ruler/Spirit of the Universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments and commanded us to count the Omer.

All:

Hayom yom echad la’omer

Today is the first day of the omer.

Day One 2019: Chesed of Chesed, Lovingkindness at the Core of Lovingkindness

I look at the messages I’ve written for this first count in prior years and they are full of seder plans. This will be a strange year for me; I’ve been diagnosed with an infection and put on lockdown until I am not contagious. So, for the first time in my life, I will not be attending any sedarim. This has made me realize how much, for me, the seders are not about the ritual or the opportunity for learning and not even the brisket; they’re about sitting around a table with family and friends. The specific rituals of the seders are the building blocks of the important ritual of feeling connected to a continuum in my life comprised of all of the seders I’ve ever attended.

I remember my earliest seders at my grandmother’s in Brooklyn and all of the years with my father leading our seders. My father would always talk about the evening as a night of questions but when teenager me seemed to have an endless flow of questions, year after year, he started collecting alternative haggadot to pile up at my place at the table to keep me busy. In the 1990s, I began the process creating a family haggadah; my family limited me to only changing 10 percent each year from the Reconstructionist haggadah we had always used. I remember when my sister Margie’s helper seat next to Dad the leader transitioned into Margie as co-leader. And three years ago, my sisters and I created a new practice—maintaining the first seder for all of us as a family and each of us building our own seder practice(s) for the second night.

This year, I had planned to ask everyone on the second night to share with us their family’s stories of how they arrived in this country. Most of us either came here ourselves or are only first, second or third generation American. We are a nation that acknowledges our origins. This is why our national model moved from melting pot to salad bowl.

Anyway, you may ask what this all has to do with chesed of chesed, lovingkindness at the core of lovingkindness. According to statistics I heard some years ago, more Jews participate in a seder than any other Jewish ritual or practice. If it is the fundamental Jewish practice for us, then we might apply our Reconstructionist prism on it and ask how does it work for us? What do we accomplish by our participation? Perhaps the seders bind us to each other—the Jews around our tables, the non-Jews who join us at the seders, the Jews participating in the same ritual around the world and the Jews who participated in this same ritual through the centuries. And maybe it is our connection to each other that is at the core of our feelings of lovingkindness for each other.

Susan Schorr

Day One 2018: Chesed of Chesed, Lovingkindness of Lovingkindness

I’ve just reread my messages for the past two years, which are included below. I am keenly aware that of how much work that I have to do tomorrow before I can sit down to enjoy my second seder which will be filled by West Enders (current and former). This is why I’m writing this message at 3 am.

The first week of the Omer Counting is our week of chesed, of lovingkindness. That seems a tough nut to crack straight off. After all, don’t we tend to want to see ourselves as operating as much as possible from a place of lovingkindness? If we could be doing better, wouldn’t we be doing so already? And yet . . . and yet . . . We all, or at least perhaps most of us, know that we could do better in letting lovingkindness be the guiding force to our actions.

Today is a day on which we might want to think about whether if we find and enhance the lovingkindness that we are within the lovingkindness that we do, we might do better and be better. Perhaps one way to start is to choose one particular aspect of how we interact with other people on which to focus. Rabbi Karyn Kedar suggests pausing every time before we speak to ask if what we’re about to say reflects our highest aspiration. As we seek to find the lovingkindness of lovingkindness, perhaps a place to start is with our speech. After all, how many times a day do we snap at someone? How many times a day do we let impatience or anger rule what we say? How many times a day do we speak to hear the sound of our own voices?

Perhaps today might be a day actively to let the things we say reflect the godness/goodness we know to be inside of us.

Susan R. Schorr

There is a little verse that is traditionally said before the major part of the prayer service: “God, open up my lips that my mouth may declare Your glory.” What if every time we went to speak, we said that phrase first? If before I answered my spouse, I asked if what I am about to say reflects my spiritual aspirations? If before I went to share a story about another person’s life, I asked whether it would reflect the holiness in the world? If before I engaged in idle conversation, I said, “God, when I speak, may it declare Your glory?” If you paused before you spoke, would your conversation be different? Would it force you to elevate your thinking toward glory? (Rabbi Karyn Kedar, “Think Before You Speak,” God Whispers: Stories of the Soul, Lessons of the Heart, p. 79)

Day One 2017: Chesed of Chesed, Lovingkindness at the Heart of Lovingkindness

I sit here between the stresses and the joys of the first night’s seder and the stresses and hopes for the second seder still to come. I worry that my days are spent busying myself with the stupid stuff and not finding enough time in which to grapple with the challenge to find ways to act with lovingkindness, never mind just taking the time to act in a loving manner. Perhaps the issue comes down to the old keva-kavannah tension. Perhaps the chesed of chesed, the lovingkindness at the heart of lovingkindness is making sure that there is real kavannah/intention fueling what I do so that I do not let those acts of lovingkindness I do accomplish devolve into keva/rote without real kavannah/intention behind them. Or, are we better people when acts of loving kindness become automatic for us? Is it more important to say thank you with real intention or to just make sure you say thank you at all?

Susan R. Schorr

Day One 2016: Chesed of Chesed, Lovingkindness in Lovingkindness

It seems very fitting that the first day is Chesed of Chesed so that we can begin by looking at the core of the best that we do. How many times do we do an act of lovingkindness and then immediately congratulate ourselves on being so good, or charitable, or caring? Our tradition teaches that these acts are not merely acts of goodness; they are acts of godness. Some might say that these are moments when we allow the spark-spirit of godliness in each of us to shape our actions. Instead of being pleased with ourselves for each isolated act, we should be ashamed by how little time each day we spend acting in a godly manner.

We are living in a time when hatred and anger seem to be winning the battle over everything else. Even the Democratic candidates who started out so civil to each other have descended into invective. One of my favorite books as a child was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. For anyone who is not familiar with it, it is about the battle between good and evil. At one point, our space-travelling protagonists are given a chance to look at the darkness that covers many planets. When they are shown Earth, it is partially covered. I worry that the darkness is winning on our planet. We who see ourselves as working for the light need to find ways to allow the godliness/goodness that is our core to guide a greater percentage of our actions.

Susan Schorr

From Rabbi Simon Jacobson’s Daily Omer Meditations:

Day 1 ― Chesed of Chesed: Loving-kindness in Loving-kindness

Love is the single most powerful and necessary component in life. It is both giving and receiving. Love allows us to reach above and beyond ourselves, to experience another person and to allow that person to experience us. It is the tool by which we learn to experience the highest reality ― God. Examine the love aspect of your love.

WES Counts the Omer: Introduction

April 19, 2019

Dear Friends,

I hope you are willing to join me again on the journey through Counting the Omer (marking the 49 days between Pesakh and Shavuot) as a spiritual practice.

In the Torah, it is written, “From the day on which you bring the omer of elevation offering—the day after the Sabbath—you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week—fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to Adonai” (Leviticus 23:15-16). The omer was a measure and the Israelites were commanded to bring an omer of barley, the first fruit to ripen in the spring, on the second day of Pesakh. Then they were to count the days, seven weeks of seven days, until Shavuot on the fiftieth day.

With the continuing support of Viviane Topp and Sandy Warshaw, I will be sending you a daily email that will provide you with a kavanah (focus/intention) for that day’s counting and selections from my collection of omer resources.

Each day’s message also will be posted to the WES Community Omer Journal (https.wesomer.wordpress.com). I hope that you will consider posting responses, comments and thoughts. Or, if you’d prefer to write your own piece for a particular day of the omer postings, please do so and send it to me by noon on the day before. I’ll include it with what gets emailed and posted. Each day has its own place at the junction of one or two of the seven sefirot which are listed below.

By the way, the custom is to never say “Today is the __ day,” in preparation for the counting. Instead, if someone should ask you, “what are we up to?” the response is supposed to be, “Last night, we counted __” so that you don’t say the number until you are actually saying the blessing and acknowledging the day.

As always, all comments and suggestions are welcome.

My best wishes for a sweet Pesakh and sedarim that are enlightening, educational and just plain fun.

Best, Susan

An Introduction to Counting the Omer

Many years ago, West End founding member Bill Mehlman (z”l) would argue that counting the omer as an agricultural ritual was irrelevant to our modern, grocery-store-based lives. Setting aside any argument about the importance of us remembering that the food we buy still is grown in fields, I continue to argue today, as I did all those years ago with Bill, that counting the omer is an important exercise.

When I was graduated from high school, my yearbook quote was “The easy thing is to achieve one’s freedom. The hard thing is to know what to do with it” by Andre Gide, from The Immoralist. Or, as I found it recently, “To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.” And, if I had to choose a quote today, I might very well choose the same one.

Counting the omer makes explicit the connection between the Israelites leaving Egypt—becoming free—and the giving of Torah at Mt. Sinai—being given a manual about what to do with one’s freedom.

Through the centuries, rabbis, scholars and mystics have enhanced the mitzvah of the counting by giving each day a spiritual focus. For Kabbalists, each of the seven weeks of the counting of the omer is associated with a particular sefira (face or attribute of God). The same seven sefirot (plural of sefira) are also attached to days of the week. So, each day within the counting has its own character, formed by the intersection of the week’s sefira with the sefira of that day of the week. The seven attributes are:

Chesed: lovingkindness, the outpouring of love in the universe
Gevurah: strength, justice and discipline, as well as separation and struggle
Tiferet: Beauty and compassion, the balance found in harmony between chesed and gevurah
Netzach: Victory, endurance, the force that acts on the world and gets things done
Hod: Glory, acceptance, receiving from the Divine with openness and humility
Yesod: Foundation, intimacy, the generative foundation of the universe representing its connections
Malkhut: Royalty, majesty, leadership, the dominion represented in the unity of all.

We will be working our way through the forty-nine days, with each day given a focus according to the chart below, which shows the seven attributes identifying both their rows and the columns:

WES Counts the Omer 2019 / 5779

	Chesed	Gevurah	Tiferet	Netzach	Hod	Yesod	Malkhut
Chesed	April 19
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkhut