The 17th day of the Counting of the Omer begins on Thursday night. Tonight we count two weeks and three days of the Omer. It falls in a week when we read in the Torah about sharing the produce of the earth with others.

This is the day of Tiferet within Tiferet, balance within balance. On this day, I am thinking about how keeping my life in balance is directly related to working to create balance in the world around me. Paradoxically, I find that when I focus on making the world better, it is my own inner life that is healed.

In the early 1980s, I remember seeing a documentary film called Koyaanisqatsi with a beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass. The strange name of the movie comes from a Hopi word meaning, "Life out of balance." The film contained no narrative or dialogue, no words at all, just images of American life, from the beauty and grandeur of mountains, deserts and valleys, juxtaposed against the hectic, fast-paced, and frenetic life of cities and suburbs. 

To me, the film was a beautiful metaphor for a Jewish teaching about balance within balance that comes from this day of the Omer and from this week's Torah portion (Emor). We have an obligation and a need to live in balance within ourselves and with the world around us. If we take everything around us just for ourselves, we will exhaust the earth, wreak havoc upon our society, and corrupt our own souls. The Torah commands:

This teaching is complemented by the teaching in next week's Torah portion about the Sabbatical year, in which the fields must be left fallow every seven years. Just as we have to share the earth with others to live our lives in balance, we also have to allow the earth itself to be rested and restored for the world to be in balance.

On this 17th day of the Counting of the Omer, I make a commitment to act to keep myself in balance, to keep my relationships with others equitable, just and balanced, and to respect the natural world around me. May this be a day in which you bring balance to your life by balancing your sacred relationships with others and with the world.


For the introduction to the Counting of the Omer, click on this link:
The First Day of the Counting of the Omer

The counting of the forty-nine days (a week of weeks) from Passover until the day before the festival of Shavuot has been imbued with different meanings over the course of Jewish history. In the days of the First Temple, its was primarily agricultural—a way to set the date of harvest festivals. The later rabbis of the Talmud made it a period of semi-mourning in memory of Torah students killed by the Romans. In Kabbalah, the Counting of the Omer became a mystical journey through forty-nine gates of divine emanations to reach the transcendent moment in which Torah is received from Mount Sinai on Shavuot. 

Last year, I wrote a post for each week of the Counting of the Omer to describe my journey through the mystical associations of each day. The first week is devoted to the divine emanation of Chesed, or "lovingkindness." The second week is focused on G'vurah, understood as "strength" and "discipline." The third week is Tiferet, the emanation of "harmony," "balance" and "splendor." The fourth week takes us to Netzach, meaning "eternity" and "endurance." The fifth week is about Hod for "humility." The sixth week is based in Yesod, the emanation of "foundation," "groundedness" and "connection." Finally, the seventh week we reach up into Malchut, "sovereignty," "nobility" and "leadership."

Today is the thirty-third day of the Counting of the Omer, the fifth day of the fifth week. It is a semi-holiday called Lag B'Omer. The "Lag" is an acronym in Hebrew for the number 33. (The letter Lamed = 30; Gimel = 3). Like the Omer period itself, Lag B'Omer has many meanings. In Israel, it is celebrated with bonfires and outdoor games. Lag B'Omer also is regarded as the yahrtzeit, the anniversary of the death, of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. That association gives Lag B'Omer great mystical importance.

According to tradition, Rabbi Shimon was the author of the Zohar, the greatest book of Jewish mysticism. He also is the central character of the book. A famous passage in the Zohar  (III, 287b -296b) tells how Rabbi Shimon made his final revelation of the Torah’s secrets to his disciples on the night he died, Lag B'Omer. The passage is known as the Idra Zuta, and it describes how Rabbi Shimon did not just die a normal death that night. He left this world in a torrent of supernatural fire that surrounded him as the words of his revelation came pouring out of him in ecstasy. His disciples heard his words, but they were unable to reach him through the fire.

"The light that is revealed is called the Garment of the King," declared Rabbi Shimon from the midst of the divine fire. In language that is obscured by mystical terms that each resonate with multiple meanings, Rabbi Shimon says that all that we know and experience about God is nothing more than an outer garment that hides an unrevealed truth beyond our conception. "The light within, within is a concealed light. In that light dwells the Ineffable One, the Unrevealed."

Finally, Rabbi Shimon's revelation was crowned with the greatest truth of all about the "High Spark," the most hidden truth that lies at the foundation of all reality. Rabbi Shimon cried out, "There is nothing but the High Spark, hidden, unrevealed!” If we were able to truly know and understand God, we also would know that there is nothing but God. Everything that appears to exist is merely a ripple upon the surface of God. That is the great truth, the only truth, that lies at the center of all.

On this day every year, tens of thousands of people travel to Meron, the place where Shimon bar Yochai is said to be buried, to celebrate the revelation of all revelations.