The Collaboration Between Judith Margolis and Sarah Schneider in Creating the Beautifully Presented Omer Counter, Countdown to Perfection
Sarah Yehudit Schneider
Judith and I started learning together some years ago, because people kept commenting on how her art had so many religious symbols and biblical allusions. She was just painting from her innards, and didn’t realize that her images often had religious significance. So she would show me a series of paintings and I would find texts (mostly from the Zohar) that mentioned the very same symbols that appeared in her artwork. The Zohar was especially suited to this work. It’s a unique document in our tradition. Most other rabbinic tomes are analytical in style… categorical…They speak to the head, whereas the Zohar communicates in symbols and dream sequences that go straight to the soul. It is said that the soul is fluent in symbols. It absorbs information that our intellect is blind to. The Zohar is awesome in its reverie and its refusal to be fenced in. Lag B’Omer, R. Shimon’s hilula, is a fitting day to sing praises of his magnum opus.
So that is how our relationship began—really from the beginning as a meeting of worlds, of the subterranean, subconscious watery creative depths of (Judith), with the more heady mesoret of holy texts and their compendium of religious symbols (aka, me). And the Zohar was our intermediary because it really does straddle both worlds.
We learned in this way for a couple years and somehow in the natural course of things, Judith asked if I knew of any tools that might help her get more out of this omer period…and to become more aligned with the energies that are up and happening in that time.
And at that point I shared with her a manuscript of meditations on the omer that I had written quite a few years back. But first/now a bit of context.
Everyone knows that Pesach is the birthday of our nationhood. Before that we were a loose-knit extended family of tribal affiliations. As a nation we were conceived by A&S, traveled through the fallopian tube (so to speak) with Y&R and implanted in the dark womb of mitzrayim when Yakov descended there with his 70 souls. We gestated in that womb for 210 years. The plagues were the birth pangs. We crowned on seder night but were not actually born till shvii shel pesach when the sea parted, creating a birth canal, which we passed through and were born, on the other side, as a higher order unity called kenesset Yisrael, the nation of Israel. At that point hotzeiti, HaShem took us out of Egypt. Halleluka. But the job remained to take Egypt out of us. And that was the task of these 49 intermediate days that prepared us to receive the Torah at Sinai.
And so it goes every year, as above so below. These vast historical processes play out as a yearly cycle on a mini scale.
Our mystical writings teach that from the moment we are born, our soul contains all the wisdom and insights that we will eventually absorb throughout the course of our life. Yet these “lights” are not yet integrated into our personality. They exist in potential but are not actually part of us yet. The part of our soul that is not yet integrated is called makif, which means literally, hovering, because it hovers around us, waiting for our vessel to stretch to be able to hold and contain more of its lights. As above so below… On every Pesach some new increment of this hovering soul, some new chunk of consciousness, gets born and slowly integrates through the course of the year.
For what does it mean to be born? It means that a soul comes into a body? So each year, on Pesach, a new increment of soul is born in the sense that it now (for the first time) comes down into our body, and brings with it, all the lights and insights and lessons that we will absorb, through it, this coming year. Now, if Pesach marks the birth of this new chunk of soul, then Iyar is its infancy. And, as every parent knows, that is a labor-intensive time—newborns and young children require nearly constant care and attention. And so here, now, in our yearly cycle, we have the daily mitzvah of counting the omer. Iyyar is the only month in the year where every day has a special, time-bound mitzvah to perform. This newborn chunk of soul is receiving daily tipul.
And now, back to the omer meditations.
There’s a healing modality called Network chiropractic, where you just exert the smallest amount of pressure on the client, but in just the right places…and miraculously the body responds. I had one experience with this and it was mindblowing. I thought the lady was a quack, I mean it seemed like she was doing nothing to me, just basically touching me in random spots. But when I got up from the table I was shocked. A chronic issue with my leg was completely cured after, literally, one session.
So that was the theory behind the omer meditations. Day after day It’s all happening way too fast. It takes way more than 24 hrs to address even one of these middot. So the intention here was to create a single sentence that encapsulates the aspect of the soul that is the focus for that day.
In that spirit, the meditation for Hod s’b’Hod is: The Glow [ha’a’rat panim] that comes from whole hearted acquiescence to Truth is truly God’s Glory revealed below.
