Bracha
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al s’firat haomer.
Blessed are You, LORD God, ruler of the Universe, who hallows us with the mitzvot, commanding us to count the Omer.
Today is the forty-sixth day — six weeks and four days of the Omer.
Today’s Reflection
Often my life seems like it’s freight train speeding out of control, and I’m hopping from one crisis to the next with little built-in downtime. Since the pandemic hit, that fast pace lifestyle and the busyness I wore like a badge of honour, has subsided a bit for me. But as the world is opening up again, my calendar (and my work travel) is ramping back into full speed again, and I have to create boundaries for my work/life. I want to carry forward into this new post-pandemic world a sense of built-in pauses to help me slow down and give me time/space to recover and rejuvenate.
Today’s reflection is about how prayers are like these built-in moments where we ground ourself and connect with the Divine. Dr. Wolfson explains, “This is the reason for reciting one hundred blessings every day: to slow us down so we can appreciate what surrounds us…Each blessing is a rendezvous with God, a way to heighten a personal relationship with heaven as we enjoy the evidence of God’s presence on earth” (Kedar, pg. 154).
In these small moments of prayer, 100 times a day or even once, we let in our hearts and our minds the sense of the sacred, the Divine presence. Rabbi Kedar writes, “It is the light of the sacred, the tears of a child, and a simple act of live, intertwined in an unexpected moment. It is a prayer so gentle and sincere that all that is left for us to say is ‘amen’ (Kedar, pg. 155).
And so it is. Amen.