Blessing
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the counting of the Omer.
Barukh atah, A-donai E-loheinu, Melekh Ha-ʿolam, asher qid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu ʿal S’firat Ha-ʿomer.
Count
Today is forty six days, which is six weeks and four days of the Omer.
Meditation
Exodus 20:8-11
8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Devotional
If you read Exodus 20 carefully and closely reading from the last verse to the first verse, you will observe that you are moving from the bottom of Mt Sinai up into God’s presence. You are passing from earth into the clouds and sky into heaven where God resides. First God strips away the behavior that got Adam and Eve exiled from the garden in Eden. Then God opens up the heavens for us to see the world for what it is and to see how the world works. Exodus 20:8-11 reminds us how God made the world and the importance of work but also of rest. There is a time to work and a time to rest and to enjoy the work of your hands. The Ten Commandments follow the ten statements of God in Genesis 1 when God created the heavens and the earth. Here at Mt Sinai God is creating a new Adam, a new people, Israel, which is to possess the divine wisdom and understanding used to create the world (Deuteronomy 4:4-8). God reveals how the world is made and how to work it wisely. Fighting with others can lead to complex systems of oppression such as slavery, which exploits the lives of others such as their right to just labor and rest. The world is defined by recurring patterns. Our lives can be so mangled by exploitative relationships and systems that we become overworked without and break what should be helpful patterns of work and rest. Many of us live in systems that steal our land and our calendar. To know God is to break these systems and reset our lives with the proper balance of work and rest. Israel was to rest every week. Every seven years as the Sabbatical Year and every 49 years, the Year of Jubilee designed to disrupt broken human relationships that inevitably form over time. Take your rest. Protect your downtime. God honors your rest and demands that you rest.