Omer Day Forty-Two, Malchut sheh b'Yesod ended with Havdallah last night. This point on the Omer journey seems so much like that challenging place in pregnancy of almost unbearable waiting to meet the precious new manifestation of the divine that is preparing to come through. Here Yesod might be understood as the Foundational Urge within which Malchut--Shechinah is preparing to manifest. Yes, She came through as Shabbat. AND Her fullness this cycle within our reality can only fully take on a guiding new aspect for us when the full pregnancy of the 49 days of the Omer comes to fruition.
If that externalization of my internal experience of this point on the path makes any sense at all, then perhaps you, too, see Reb Zalman's streimel in the attached Hubble image that Carola de Vries Robles and I first viewed with a gasp during a film at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Anyway, during his Cosmology course at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Reb Zalman introduced us to the ideas within the book The Holographic Paradigm. My notes show that he pointed out the core holographic conception seemed to him to be consistent with both the Kabbalists' Tree of Life and Viktor Frankl's insistence on holism in The Will to Meaning:
Frankl: “Conceiving of man in terms of bodily, mental and spiritual strata or layers means dealing with him as if his somatic, psychic, and noetic modes of being could be separated from each other”.
Thanks to a tip from Lynnie Mirvis, one of our New Mitzvah Stories for The Whole Family [3] contributing authors, I was able to do a key word search that led to this succinct explanation:
"Frankl saw the problem of developing a unified concept of what it is to be human as not so much being that of a lack of universality, but what he called “the pretense of totality” in relation to different models. Any one model, he argued, was simply too limiting a perspective to capture the totality of what it was to be human...contradictory models could then be seen as that of looking at the same phenomenon from different perspectives."
Frankl: “Imagine a cylinder, say, a cup. Projected out of its three dimensional space into the horizontal and vertical two-dimensional places, it yields in the first case a circle and in the second one a rectangle. These pictures contradict one another. What is even more important, the cup is a open vessel in contrast to the circle and the rectangle which are closed figures. Another contradiction!"
[All quotes in today's commentary are from http://www.talking-therapy.org.uk/counselling/viktor-frankl-and-dimension-ontology/ [4]]
Accordingly, it might be true to say that every day of the Omer is holographically an entire view of the Tree of Life, albeit from a different perch on the branches each day.
Omer Day Forty-Two, Malchut sheh b'Yesod.
