Omer Days 33-36

Posted by Rabbi Goldie Milgram |

 


 

 




On the Omer Calendar previously provided, you will find the colors and ancestors that correlate with each of the omer qualities. Here my step-granddaughter Mayyim contemplates those colors with me. We are completing the lower triangle of the Tree of Life within and Beyond (as above, so below) today.

At sundown we enter Shabbat (Malchut, Shechinah) within Hod. Mmmm.

Netherlands mystic, Tzeitl Locher, writes that Yesod is correlated with Mother Rachel's first child, Joseph--in Hebrew Yosaif, and that his name means "there is more to come."
 

Our Omer walk began immediately after reading Tzeitl's magnificent full Omer visualization aloud. While Omer Walking in trance, I saw the much-adopted "rainbow" tallit created by the sage Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, on which each band of color has been carefully developed to go with the tradition of associating a specific color with each node on the Tree of Life, i.e., each week's dominant Omer quality. Almost immediately in my range of altered vision that tallit turned into Joseph's coat and then back to the tallit. These images alternated many times until the bands of color became dramatically, soul-soakingly luminous. A ripping sense within occurred and then all seemed a dazingly pure white light.

The mystical sages always look for the "penimi", the inside face of Torah, i.e., the face of the divine. My interpretation is that the visualization led to a vision teaching that the coat of many colors that today is secreted within the sephirah  "hod" until sundown, as it approaches Shabbat/Malchut beomes a tallit--the mystics understood the tallit as Shechinah/Shabbat/Malchut.The divine was flowing through Joseph's life (and ours) all along, manifesting his story and ours. It's hard to describe how the light entering my form received me as a As the light nursing life form, and a perhaps-remembered indescribly wonderful sense of non-dual All and Non-being poured through, a Cosmic mikveh of light.

Is this what happened for the Kabbalists? We can't know. Perhaps a hint left for us might be in the Friday night Kiddush, which contains two mitzvot--one is zeicher maasei b'reishit--remembering how it was at the beginning." Perhaps this is one way they were able to perceive a fraction of that beginning, until, like scientists using high powered scopes to perceive ancient events--the Kabbalists, too, became Shechinah. The sages suggest that through praying down through the entire Tree of life, we erase the potential for dualism by effecting unification of the divine name--as Hosea wrote it becomes possible at our small level "to know YHVH".
Image Credit: "Pensive" (c) 2016 Barry Bub.
Shabbat Shalom to each and all.