Counting the Shape of Change
In the Jewish calendar, we find ourselves in the midst of the Omer—a 49-day period that began on the second night of Passover and carries us toward the festival of Shavuot, the moment of revelation at Mount Sinai. Each evening, we mark the passing of another day: today is one day of the Omer, today is two days, three, four, five—forty-nine days in all, a careful accounting of time as we move from liberation toward revelation.
Passover, of course, tends to hold our attention. The drama of the Exodus, the plagues, the splitting of the sea—these are the moments that capture the imagination. They are vivid, cinematic, immediate. The Omer, by contrast, is quieter. It asks less for spectacle and more for steadiness. Less for awe, and more for attention.
And yet, there is something profoundly meaningful in this practice—perhaps especially in a time like ours, in which our attention can feel like it is constantly being grabbed by every headline, political commentary, or even just the demands of our every-day lives. Even if we do not observe it in traditional or formal ways, this Omer period invites us to attend to—and appreciate—the smaller, subtler, in some ways less spectacular but in truth no less sacred aspects of what it means to be alive. Of what it means to grow and learn and change.
The other evening, I was out walking just as the sun began to set. The sidewalk still radiated heat from the day, and it seemed that everyone was out enjoying the lengthening daylight. Each time I reached an intersection the view of the sky opened up in front of me. As I crossed the street, I noticed the wash of colors: cotton candy pink and baby blue.
As I continued my walk, I began to notice the ways the sky was shifting. It was almost imperceptible at first: pale blue deepening into something richer, muted pink darkening into magenta, like I had just turned the color saturation up a notch on my phone. And then, each block, the changes intensified: soft streaks of purple began to emerge, all that was pale became neon, and then, at some point, it was as if the whole horizon had caught fire in fuchsia and dazzling gold.
Every time I looked up, it was as though a new painting made of water vapor and light arranged itself in the sky. Above me, a hundred works of art formed and dissipated in the span of a few minutes. Through the simple act of looking up from the path I was on to take in the moment—I got to experience the world becoming new again and again, in real time.
There are times when our lives—or our world—can feel unmoving, as though nothing will ever shift. And yet, the Omer invites us to pause, to look up, to notice that change is always, already, underway. It does not always arrive in dramatic moments that announce themselves like the sea splitting or mountains quaking. Instead, change more often moves like the sky at dusk—subtle, continuous, almost imperceptible. And so we count, one day, and then another; one block, and then the next. And in that small act of looking up, we begin to see what was there all along—
that something is always shifting, always opening, always becoming.
Change, this season reminds us, is most often not linear or neat. It has always felt a bit strange to me, then, that this time of wilderness wandering is paired with a practice of counting. Because counting seems to promise something very different. Numbers suggest order. Sequence. Clarity. In math class, there is a right answer, a most direct route—an efficient way to get from beginning to end. We count—1, 2, 3—expecting that each step will bring us closer, that the path will clarify itself, that progress will be measurable, predictable.
And yet, when held alongside the story of the Israelites’ journey, something doesn’t quite add up. The Torah tells us: vayasev Elohim et ha’am—God led the people around, in a circuitous way. Not the straight path, nor the efficient one, but a journey that bent, that circled, that took time. What could have been brief becomes something slower, more meandering, less certain—not because something has gone wrong, but because this is what the path toward revelation, toward wisdom, requires.
During this period, then, rather than a way of tracking progress, perhaps counting becomes more of a practice of release. A release of the need to arrive. A release of the need to know. A release of the expectation that the path will unfold in a way we can predict or control. One day, and then another, as we soften our grip on where it is we think we need to be—especially when things unfold in ways that do not conform to our expectations of progress.
As we release, the shape of our movement begins to change. It becomes less linear, less directed, and more like the movement described in the Torah itself: vayasev—circuitous. The same root—סבב, sovev—means to turn, to circle, to go around. The Hasidic tradition draws on this language to describe a quality of presence that does not push us forward, but moves with us in this circling way—holding us even when we cannot yet see where we are going. This kind of movement cannot be rushed. It does not bring us to our destination by the most direct path, but shapes us along the way—until we become the kind of people who can arrive at all.
While the splitting of the sea can feel like a distant, almost fantastical story—something far from our own lives—the Torah of this in-between time, the Omer, lives closer to our own experience. We know, in our bones, that growth does not happen neatly. Change does not arrive on schedule. We return, again and again, to familiar questions, patterns, places within ourselves. What we thought we had resolved reappears. What we believed we understood shifts and opens to something new. The path is continually made and remade as we go.
If we but gaze outside our window during these early springtime days, we’ll see this truth reflected back to us everywhere we look. A vine that does not grow in a straight line, but reaches, curls, and twists—dancing in the air as it searches for something to hold onto. Roots do not descend neatly into the earth, but wander and spread, finding their way toward water and sustenance through paths unseen. A spider, spinning its web, does not create it once and for all. The web meets wind, branches, passing bodies. It tears. It falters. And still, the spider begins again—thread by thread, adjusting to what is there, building in relationship to the conditions it finds.
None of this is inefficient. None of it is a mistake. It is how life moves—responsive, adaptive, shaped by encounter. Not a straight line toward completion, but a continual process of reaching, releasing, and remaking.
Where are there places in our own lives where we feel this kind of movement—subtle, nonlinear, unfolding in ways that are not entirely predictable? Where are we being asked to stay with something, to be held by it rather than resolve it? What might it look like to mark this moment, filled with glory or grace or grief—not as something to get through, but as something to enter?
The practice of counting the Omer does not offer easy answers. It does not promise that the path will become clear. Instead, it offers a rhythm. One day. And then another. We count the days. And call this, too, a kind of arrival.
