The Omer as a Route Map: A Visual Midrash

Counting the Omer, the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot, is a practice redolent with meaning. There are so many different ways to engage with the experience.

One way to receive the Omer is as a gift of daily measured quantities of spiritual nourishment. My response to this bounty this year was to hand-make a series of seven weekly paper craft pieces. Each one emerged on the afternoon immediately following Gilad Shavit’s wonderful morning guided Omer breath-work, meditation and reflection workshops. His offering was called from “Constriction to Revelation”, and it included the seven extraordinary morning sessions, plus 49 recorded daily meditations, each one themed on the quality/sefirah/middah of the week in each of its seven nuanced valences.

This opportunity to explore, engage and breathe through the Tree of Life was profound. It expressed through me with the series of visual midrashim below.

It is important to me to make these psycho-spiritual visual mnemonics in one sitting, in the energy of the moment, completely in synch with our calendar. Thus, each one emerged on those seven Sunday afternoons, which happened to correspond to Tiferet/Beauty/Harmony/Truth within the broader quality of the week. Footsteps to Sinai:The Omer as a Route Map (which is displayed here first), came to me on the 49th day as a reflection of my own experience of the daily count as a step by step journey to the foot of the mountain.

I create each piece with patterned papers, stencils, stamps, die-cuts, embellishments including gemstones and various paper-crafting/collage techniques. My most important tools are scissors and paste. Each piece is 30 x 30 cm and mounted on card stock. I choose the papers according to what I have to hand at the time, and to what emotions they evoke in me. In this series, my choices were governed by whatever I had to hand that closely mirrored the colour and mood of my experiences in the meditation and breath-work sessions. I added text in Hebrew and English, to emphasise what I wanted to remember of Gilad’s offerings and of my own musings at the time. The translations into English are often my own.

These are the titles and themes of the seven pieces that follow Footsteps to Sinai: the Omer as a route map:

1. Chesed: Allowing the flow - the impulse to give.

2. Gevurah: Holding the impulse - God as “enoughness”, riffing on boundaries.

3. Tiferet: Being “am segulah” - between ego and self-abnegation, living the truth of the middle pillar without reactivity.

4. Netzach: The time is now - being wilful vs being a channel, seizing the moment with compassion rather than force, zerizut as an expression of dignity.

5. Hod: Softening into what is already there - saying yes to life as it is.

6. Yesod: Channelling foundation - questioning the direction of my creative life force energies and whether I stay present while still “being in Egypt”?

7. Malchut: Speaking the world into being - Awareness of Presence filling all the earth.

Of course, we don’t have to wait until the Omer to open to these divine middot which course through us all. May these visual midrashim prompt others on their own journeys of re-connection to the Tree of Life.

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Chana-Toni Whitmont is a collage artist, crystal sound practitioner, creative, teacher and student whose practice and passions are born from her spiritual connection to her Jewish lineage and the ebbs and flows in the annual calendar cycle. She lives on magnificent Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal Country (also known as Bondi), on the Pacific coast of Australia.