Strolling along the quiet streets of Berkeley a few weeks ago, I could almost pretend that everything was normal. The sun shone brightly on cozy California bungalows, their carefully tended gardens popping with color — purple lupine and hanging wisteria, brilliant orange poppies, lemon trees heavy with fruit and, wafting over it all, the impossibly sweet aroma of pink jasmine.
The night before I had listened to Rachel Goldberg speaking with Dan Senor on a podcast titled “The Paradox of Pesach 2025.” Goldberg is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, killed in captivity in Gaza last August. She spoke about the tears that were shed at her family’s seder table last year and questioned how we might sit at the seder this year, celebrating redemption from bondage while hostages are still being held in the tunnels beneath Gaza. We should not only be eating the traditional symbolic foods of Passover at our seders this year, Goldberg suggested, “We should be passing the salt water around the table, drinking from the bowl of tears.”
Though Goldberg didn’t speak of the many thousands dead and injured in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in the past 18 months, nor of the relentless political turmoil here in the United States, the implication of her message was clear. How could we proceed with our joyful Passover celebration of freedom in the face of such carnage, such bondage, such loss?
In truth, the Jewish people’s foundational story, the story we’re enjoined to tell each year around our seder tables, is a tale of dire loss on every level — of dignity, of livelihood, of connectivity and love, of hope and freedom. Our prescient ancestors somehow knew that in order to spark the fires of liberation, to move ourselves from unholy servitude to sacred lives in service of loving and just community, we would need to retell this story year after year — and not only to speak it, but to eat and digest it, to experience in our very bodies the wrenching pain, numbness and despair of those enslaved Israelites. We would need to reawaken to the realization that the essential themes of Passover — resistance to tyranny, breaking through the internal bondage of enslavement, the blossoming of faith, and care for the stranger because you have been that stranger — are urgent in every generation. We would need to tell the story as if we ourselves were there, because we are.
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The great 16th century kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria, envisioned the whole Exodus saga as a mystical reawakening of da’at, consciousness, in the Divine (and human) body. In his telling, Egypt — in Hebrew mitzrayim, literally “the narrows” — is the neck, the narrow passageway between head and heart. He saw Pharaoh as the oref kasheh, the stiffened nape of the neck, blocking the fructifying flow of shefa, or spiritual energy, choking off awareness and silencing the voice. For Luria, Egyptian exile represents an eclipse of consciousness. The first night Passover seder then is a practice of massively expanding consciousness in what the mystics term itaruta dil’eyla — “arousal from above.”
But that new awareness quickly fades. Look at how quickly the Israelites backslide after the Exodus. And so, on the second night of Passover we begin to count the Omer, a 49-day period leading up to Shavuot and the time of the wheat harvest in ancient Israel. The practice of the early kabbalists was to pair each of the 49 days with a combination of two sefirot, or Divine qualities, that make up the roots and branches of the kabbalistic Tree of Life: lovingkindness, strength, compassion, stamina, surrender, foundation and presence. In Luria’s mystical imagination, this seven-week theurgical vigil over the wheat crop transforms into a period of rooting the newly planted, liberatory consciousness of Passover deep in the soil of our beings, preparing each of us to receive the Torah anew on Shavuot.
I’ve always thought of the Omer as a time to clear any residual slave-sludge from my spiritual wiring in preparation for receiving the great download of Torah on Shavuot. Just as we clean out all vestiges of leavened products in preparation for Passover, I saw the daily counting as a way of cleansing and emptying my inner space, readying myself to receive instruction. As the singer Batya Levine chants, “May I be empty and open to receive the light.”
But this year I feel the need not just to empty, but to gradually fill myself with new awareness, to anchor in those Divine qualities. If a week of sweeping away all leaven symbolizes freedom from the puffed up and excessive, then maybe the Omer is a time to fill ourselves with that which truly leavens, lightens and raises up. Perhaps it is for this reason that alongside the first fruits of the summer harvest that were brought to the ancient Temple as an offering on Shavuot, the Israelites also brought two loaves of fully risen, fine wheat bread.
As we seek to heal from the losses and traumas of these last months, to raise our voices, rise up and rebuild our communities, we, like the Israelites of old, need all of our strength and resources. We need not only the cleansing of the Passover period and the spiritual discipline of the Omer, but the fullness of these Omer qualities and the burgeoning beauty of our spring gardens. We need the second line of Batya Levine’s prayer chant: “May I be full and open to receive.”
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 3, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
