A favorite heirloom from my teacher and mother Phyllis Nevins z”l is an olive wood Omer counter that she bought in Israel. Each night we twist a little wood peg to advance the scroll to announce the new day in handsome STaM letters. Today is the seventeenth day of counting Omer, which is two weeks and three days in our passage from Passover to Shavuot. In Parashat Emor, the great list of festivals includes the commandment “to count for yourselves seven perfect weeks…you shall count fifty days.” (Lev. 23:15-16) In Deuteronomy (16:9) the commandment is repeated, “seven weeks you shall count for yourself.” Noting the dual emphasis on counting days and weeks, the Talmudic sage Abaye teaches that it is a mitzvah to count both by days and by weeks (b. Rosh HaShanah 5a; Hagigah 17b; Menahot 66a). This teaching is recorded as normative practice in the Mishneh Torah and Shulhan Arukh, and it is now standard practice wherever the Omer is counted.
However, in addition to the normative counting by days and weeks, there is a mystical progression that is counted of the seven lower aspects or “sefirot” of Kabbalah, from Hesed to Malkhut. Each week is associated with a different aspect of the divine personality, and so too is each day, so that you get interesting combinations of qualities. The general motion is from top down, so that one imagines drawing divine energies from heaven into the world, until God’s unity is manifest on earth. Once each week there is a doubling of sefirot, as the weekly and daily sefirot come into alignment. Today, for example, is both the week and the day of “Tiferet,” the glorious balancing of compassion and judgment that functions as the centerpiece of the entire Sefirotic system. Tiferet is also known as the Holy Blessed One (הקב״ה) and the broader drama of the season of counting is to reunite the divine qualities of Tiferet and Malkhut, which is also the mystical project of each Shabbat. The climax of the Sefirotic count comes on the fiftieth day, or Shavuot, which the kabbalists teach us to view as the marriage of Tifereth and Malkhut. As the Zohar says, “After seven weeks elapse, the Holy King comes to couple with Assembly of Israel, and Torah is given. Then the King is adorned with complete union, and oneness prevails above and below.” (Zohar III: 96b; p.120 in volume 8 of Daniel Matt’s edition).
What are we to make of this medieval Jewish mythology? Is it meaningful and productive for us to think of our own religious practice as some sort of normative theurgy, where the people of Israel is responsible for reuniting a fractured God so that blessing can flow into the world? What are we to make of the gendered and frankly sexual aspects of this mythology? While reading the Torah as an esoteric text about this divine drama can be fascinating, what does it mean for us? When we do mitzvot, are we really functioning as some sort of aphrodisiac for divine coupling? Isn’t this perspective deeply patriarchical and, for that matter, heteronormative? What place does it have in our own religious life? Continue reading →