Sefirat HaOmer

Sefirat HaOmer, the Counting of the Omer, is the Jewish practice of counting the forty-nine days between the festivals of Passover and Shavuot, one day added aloud each night with a blessing. The commandment is given in the Torah, which directs that from the day of the barley offering, the omer, a measure of grain brought in the spring, seven full weeks are to be counted, and the fiftieth day kept as a festival. The counting thus binds the two festivals together across the seven weeks between them, and the practice consists simply of stating each evening which day and week of the Omer it is, prefaced by a blessing.

Traditionally the count marks the passage from the barley harvest to the wheat harvest in the land of Israel, and Jewish tradition overlays this agricultural journey with a spiritual one: the days link the liberation from Egypt commemorated at Passover to the giving of the Torah at Sinai commemorated at Shavuot, so that the counting becomes a preparation, a daily reckoning toward the reception of the law.

The Omer period acquired over time a solemn, semi-mourning character. Jewish tradition records that a plague killed thousands of the disciples of the second-century sage Rabbi Akiva during these weeks, and in memory of this and other calamities the period is observed with restraint: many refrain from weddings, celebrations, haircuts and music for much or all of the count. The exact span of these restrictions varies by community and custom.

The mood lifts on the thirty-third day of the count, Lag BaOmer, on which the mourning practices are suspended and the day kept as a minor festival, associated in later tradition with the mystic Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and celebrated with bonfires, outings and weddings. The Kabbalistic tradition further enriched the counting by associating each of the forty-nine days with a particular combination of the divine emanations, the sefirot, turning the count into a daily meditation on the refinement of one's own qualities. In these layers, agricultural, historical, penitential and mystical, the simple nightly counting gathers much of the texture of Jewish spiritual life.