28 Days of the Omer. That is 4 Weeks.

Malchut shebe Netzach
Nobility within Endurance
Monday evening May 20 and Tuesday May 21

The clouds are big and bright and fluffy and making me think of one of the first conversations Liddy and I ever had. Liddy, if you haven’t met her yet, is my wife.

A cumulus cloud, also known as a fair-weather cloud, can weigh around 1.1 million pounds, which is about the weight of 100 elephants, she told me. Well, she told me about the 100 elephants, the 1.1 million pounds I just looked up.

Looking up at the sky I’m enjoying the way the light is streaming through them. 

Beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. And I do. We do. I’ve just read that water droplets in a cumulus cloud have a density of about ½ gram of water per cubic meter, which is about like a marble of water dispersed in a box big enough for two people to sit in. The weight of a cloud is spread out so thinly that gravity has no effect on them. 

I think that means that every cumulus cloud is 100 elephants dancing in the sky. 

When I was younger, a teenager, a friend asked me what I wanted in a spouse. I answered something like this: I want to marry someone who . . . if I were 9 months pregnant, and we were in a storm, and our house was falling apart around us, and flooding, and there was thunder and lightning, but right then in that moment we were okay . . . sure, not great, but okay . . . okay enough for right then . . . I want to marry someone who would laugh with me in a moment like that, both of us knowing that the whole situation is absurd and hard and shouldn’t be - even though it is, and laughing anyway. I wouldn’t have said it this way, or known to say it this way, back then, but I wanted someone with a strong sense of Netzach - a strong sense of keep on keeping on in all the best ways. 

The elephants in the sky choose new dance partners. They shift and turn.
I have the only dance partner I want. 

As I walk into this day, I listen to a podcast, Judaism Unbound, Episode 431, interviewing Rabbi Jess Belasco. Rabbi Belasco runs the Disability Justice Torah Circle, which hosts classes, facilitates connection, and provides pastoral resources for disabled, high-risk, and chronically ill people who desire Jewish community. In the podcast, and in life, they ask, “What does disability say about Judaism?” a flip of the question of what does the Torah or Judaism have to say about disability. “Disability Justice Torah Circle does two things,” she says, “we read Jewish texts with a disability justice lens. And another thing that we do, and this came out of some of my spiritual struggles early in the pandemic, feeling very alienated from the Jewish text, is that we read disability justice texts with a Jewish spiritual lens.”

Like me, Rabbi Belasco has been extensively trained in how to pull meaning out of texts that feel alienating, but she needed something that was speaking to their experience, that expands our canon and pulls in disability justice texts and puts them in conversation with our Jewish texts. “Every human has a relationship to disability or will have a relationship to disability in their lives,” they say in the podcast. “Disabled people sometimes refer to non-disabled people as temporarily able-bodied people.” Making Disability Justice Torah important Torah for the world, potentially nourishing for everybody.

One of the elephants has wandered off. Another has come and taken its place. Or maybe it’s the same elephant and it has shifted shape.

A week ago I was thinking about how the Desire to Receive for Self Alone is the way some rabbis explain the essence of Malchut, and that Malchut causes the revelation of Light in all of the other sephirot. Primordial Light. Creative Light. The threads of Light that connect every body and everyone and everything in the Universe.  Right now I’m thinking about how 1.1 million pounds of water droplets dispersed in the sky in an elephant of a cloud are unaffected by gravity. I’m thinking about how water droplets that fall through the sky can become the whole ocean, and about how bubbles that rise up through the ocean can become the whole sky. 

“What makes something Torah is not in the text, it’s in the people engaging with the text. It’s a choice we make to engage with something as Torah,” says Lex Rofeberg in the podcast. “It makes perfect sense to me that you would treat disability justice texts that are not necessarily quote unquote Jewish texts - or not intended to be - as a form of Torah.” 

Rabbi Belasco responds, “I’m a very visibly disabled person. . . I grew up with a speech impediment, which you can’t tell because I don’t have it anymore, but it was a big impact on my entire growing up. I also have a tracheostomy and a ventilator and a motorized wheelchair. I’m not trying to create a hierarchy of stigma here, but those are some pretty stigmatized forms of visible disability. When I worked as a nursing home chaplain as part of my rabbinic training, I would be in the nursing home, with the chaplain’s badge on - a staff badge - and I would repeatedly get asked by other staff what room I lived in. There was an assumption that I was a resident, which - nothing wrong with being a resident - but I wasn’t and there’s a lot of ableism in that assumption.”

“I remember the specific moment I decided I had to start a COVID spiritual practice group. It was the middle of April 2022. Mask mandates were dropping in a lot of places that had maintained them until then. I think that the federal mask mandate on airplanes dropped that week. And I remember there being a particular YouTube video that was going around that was like . . . there was a plane on which during the flight there was an announcement that the federal mask mandate for airlines had dropped. And on the plane everybody ripped their masks off and cheered - in the middle of the flight,” says Rabbi Belasco.

I imagine what the clouds above me might look like outside the window of a plane, out over the wing. I imagine being the only one left in a mask on a plane of cheering maskless people. Actually, I saw several videos in April 2022. The video I linked has a few. I imagine what the land below might look like, what I might look like to someone up there. A speck. I can see a hundred-elephant cloud from where I stand. I can’t see a cloud the weight of one human. A plane flies overhead. I can’t see the people inside, but the thing is, I know they are in there. I can be aware of the people I can’t see 42,000 feet in the air.   

Rabbi Belasco continues, “Which . . . people had gotten on that flight thinking there was still a mask mandate. I was like, I have to start a COVID spiritual practice group and I have to start it next week. The sense of, how are we going to survive this, not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally. Just the depth of the abandonment. You know, the story that I just told is a story about a secular space and airline, but I was seeing the same things happen in the Jewish communities around me. I was arguing for COVID precautions at events that I wanted to go to that summer and I was losing those battles. And I knew that friends were losing them. And I was losing communities that I wanted to be part of. I don’t mean that there is no possibility for repair. That’s not what I mean. But the experience for disabled people of having communities turn away from their physical safety and ability to be part of the space . . . I think for a lot of disabled people and some other people, even if the pandemic were to magically end tomorrow and COVID were no longer a risk, I don’t think people would know how to go back to those spaces.” They pause. “A lot of disabled people don’t have the kind of sense of invincibility health-wise that I think a lot of non-disabled people do. And I’ll say for myself as a disabled person - and I know I’m not the only one - I know that I don’t have a lot of margin. I know that being affected by another chronic illness - which could easily happen to me if I got COVID - would have a huge impact on my life.”

The hundred elephants have become thousands. Maybe a storm is coming. I notice others have gathered near me to attend to Rabbi Belasco’s words.
Isaac, blind. Jacob, limping. Leah, her eyes troubling her. Chushim, Jacob’s grandson, Hard of Hearing. Moses, thinking of his speech impediment. Samson, with a cane. Echud, paralysis in his right hand. Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s grandson, in a wheelchair. And not only them, but so many ancestors and contemporaries and descendants with disabilities that are visible and disabilities that are not.

“I think there is a huge amount of spiritual richness that can be brought to bear when we bring disability experience into conversation with Jewish tradition,” says the rabbi. “What makes me excited is bringing that together. What makes me sad is when Jewish tradition kind of gets . . . it feels to me like the word is fossilized. If the tradition is excluding people and not supporting our society and turning toward this moment in all the ways we need to, then it’s not doing its job. How can we support it in doing its job?”

Liddy has been teaching.
She teaches English to adult immigrants. Since the pandemic, she has been teaching online and I have been teaching and working online. We are two in a house that sometimes feels like an ark in a storm . . . or a flood. We had dogs by two, and we may again one day, but for now we have one. Nashi, named for Nachshon, who walked into water up to his chin. Leukemia and the treatment that saved my life left me disabled. It’s not visible, and because of that it took me years to understand my post-cancer experience of the world as an experience of disability. Years. Years, and I still wrestle with what it means that I am disabled. In our cultures, majority culture in the U.S. and in Jewish culture, having a disability, being disabled can be an absurd situation that is harder than it should be. Harder than it needs to be. 

Liddy is master-level in the sephira of Netzach and in the middah of menuchat hanefesh - equanimity or tranquility of the soul. She has a strong ability to keep on keeping on. For me, over fourteen years, she has learned to dress wounds and change bandages and hook me up to TPN and help me breathe through panic attacks and walk with me up subtle inclines while agreeing that they are ‘very steep hills’ and adapted and adapted and adapted the foods she makes and bakes and worn masks and taken precautions and kept distances and walked slowly and most importantly walked with me.
I don’t take it for granted. 

The weight of the droplets of water in a cloud are spread out so thinly that gravity has no effect on them.

It is not that way for us.
We feel gravity.
We feel gravity and we laugh and we walk. 
Our desires, the Malchut of our desires - each to receive for our selves alone, and each for the other to receive, draws in and reveals the light through all of the sephirot. 

I take her hand as the clouds sound their trumpets and rumbles and the weight of it all begins to fall from the sky. 

See you at Sinai.

How to say the blessing:
Choose the language that resonates with you the most.
Non-gendered Hebrew based on grammar system built by Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin,
available at www.nonbinaryhebrew.com 

Gender Expansive:

הִנְנִי מוּכָנֶה וּמְזֻמֶּנֶה …

Hineni muchaneh um’zumeneh …

Here I am, ready and prepared …

Feminine:

הִנְנִי מוּכָנָה וּמְזֻמֶּנֶת …

Hineni muchanah um’zumenet …

Here I am, ready and prepared …

Masculine:

הִנְנִי מוּכָן וּמְזֻמַן …

Hineni muchan um’zuman …

Here I am, ready and prepared …

All Continue:

… לְקַיֵּם מִצְוַת עֲשֵׂה שֶׁל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר כְּמוֹ שֶׁכָּתוּב בַּתּוֹרָה וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת
מִיּוֹם הַבִיאֳכֶם אֶת עֹמֶר הַתְּנוּפָה שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימוֹת תִּהְיֶנָה. עַד מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת
הַשְּׁבִיעִית תִּסְפְּרוּ חֲמִשִּׁים יוֹם וְהִקְרַבְתֶם מִנְחָה חֲדָשָה לַיי

… lekayyem mitzvat aseh shel sefirat ha-omer, kemo shekatuv batorah: us’fartem lakhem mimacharat hashabbat, miyom havi’akhem et omer hat’nufah, sheva shabbatot temimot tih’yena, ad mimacharat hashabbat hash’vi’it tis’peru khamishim yom, vehikravtem minkha khadasha l’adonai.

 … to fulfill the mitzvah of counting the Omer, as it is written in the Torah: And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Shabbat, from the day on which you bring the sheaf of the wave-offering, you shall count seven full weeks. Until the day after the seventh Shabbat, you shall count fifty days, until you bring a new gift to the Eternal.

Gender-Expansive Language for God

בְּרוּכֶה אַתֶּה יי אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ חֵי הָעוֹלָמִים אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשֶׁנוּ בְּמִצַוְּתֶהּ וְצִוֶּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר

Brucheh ateh Adonai, Eloheinu khei ha’olamim, asher kidshenu bemitzvoteh v’tzivenu al sefirat ha’omer. 

Blessed are You, Eternal, Life of all worlds who has made us holy with Their commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.

Feminine Language for God

בְּרוּכָה אַתְּ יָ-הּ אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ רוּחַ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוְּתָהּ וְצִוָּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר

Bruchah at Yah, ru’akh ha’olam asher kidshanu bemitzvotah v’tzivanu al sefirat ha’omer

Blessed are You, Yah, our God, Spirit of the universe who has made us holy with Her commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.

Masculine Language for God

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam asher kidshanu bemitzvotav v’tzivanu al sefirat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has made us holy with His commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.

Count the day and week

Today is the _________ day, which is _________ weeks and _________ days of the Omer.

Today:

הַיּוֹם שְׁמוֹנָה וְעֶשְׂריִם יוֹם
שֶׁהֵם  אַרְבָּעָה שָׁבוּעוֹת לָעוֹמֶר.

Hayom shmonah v‘esrim yom
shehem arba’ah shavuot la’omer

Today is twenty-eight days of the Omer.
That is four weeks of the Omer.
Sefirat HaOmer Blessing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8hCiPI1tMQ