It’s time for the Omer count
That we may begin to wonder,
What is the point
Of counting?
Why are we doing this?
We make note of the number
In relation to the numbers preceding,
Aware of the numbers to come
And to what end?
There is no end!
Counting, once begun
Goes on forever, infinity,
Like God,
So why stop at 49?
Some ancient harvest festival,
But what’s that to us?
Maybe it’s more of a mindfulness thing
Like Shabbat,
When we stop time
And declare it holy.
But this Omer business
Lasts for seven weeks and
Perhaps,
When we're in the middle of it,
We’re feeling very Samuel Beckett:
“I can’t go on,
I’ll go on.”
And then there’s the counting of the days
And days and days,
The numbers themselves have no meaning:
It’s the counting.
And like chanting,
Counting doesn’t work as meditation
Until after you’ve achieved boredom.
Anyway,
It’s not what you’re counting that matters,
It’s the counting itself.
It is its own justification,
And every number becomes a prayer,
A chat with God.
First, second, third, fourth, fifth day,
We give thanks that we can fulfill this obligation,
Fourteenth, fifteenth day,
A holy sequence,
Eighteenth, Nineteenth day,
Yeah, yeah, whatever,
Twenty-third, twenty-fourth day...
Have we achieved boredom yet?
And on the twenty-eighth day of the Omer
With three more weeks to go,
We sigh,
We can’t go on!
We go on.
Amen.
