a perfect 49

 Saturday night I was able to cross an item off my lifetime to-do list.

A little background is in order. In Judaism, the second night of Passover begins a seven week period called the omer. It is a religious custom to count the days of omer. On the first night (which is the second night of Passover, one first says a blessing, and then states that it's the first day* of the omer. Translated to English), it is roughly:

Blessed art thou, Lord, or God, king of the universe, who sanctified us with his commandments, and commanded us to count the omer. Today is the first day of the omer.

This nightly ritual continues. So, for example, on the 23rd night, one says:

Blessed art thou, Lord, or God, king of the universe, who sanctified us with his commandments, and commanded us to count the omer. Today is the 23rd day, which is three weeks and two days of the omer.

If you forget to count in the evening, you can still count (without a blessing) the next day. That done, you continue to count each evening with a blessing. But if you forget to count in the evening, and don;t make it up during the subsequent day, then you no longer use a blessing when counting (in that year).

After the 49th day of the omer comes the holiday of Shavu'ot, also known as the Festival of Weeks. Shavu'ot commemorates God giving the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai.

It has been a longtime goal of mine to, one year, count the omer all 49 nights, so that on the 49th I am still counting with a blessing. And, year after year, I have fallen well short. Many years I didn't even remember on the first night -- which is particularly embarrasing since the counting of the first night is incorporated into the second Passover seder.

But this year I was determined. And this Saturday night, the 49th night of the omer, I finally did it.

One can argue that it couldn't have meant that much to me if I never managed it before, and if many years I blow it on the first night. I choose to ignore such arguments because I have no good response. But every year for decades I have had a "Dagnabbit!" moment when I realize I've blown it for another year.

So what made this year different? Techmology! I realized that, since I have a smartphone with me all the time, I could use it to help me. So for seven weeks I had a nightly alarm to remind me to count. Of course even with that I could have missed. There were a couple times that the alarm went off that I couldn't stop to count. My backup notification was a WhatsApp conversation with some friends from work. There are four of us in the conversation, and the other three are all practicing Orthodox. They were only too happy to add nightly (or near-nightly) reminders. They even made it a game, substituting baseball players whose uniform numbers matched the day. "Don't forget, tonight will be Tom Seaver of the Omer!" Between the alarms, and the moral support, I managed to get through the process. I suppose there's a life lesson. Wanting to do something isn't as important as taking concrete steps to do it.

There is, of course, an epilogue. In this seven weeks of counting, I was thinking of the whole thing as kind of an exercise in OCD. The daily counting has a certain something to it that appeals to my more obsessive nature.** I didn't even think of there being a spiritual, self-reflective element to the process until a Facebook friend (who isn't Jewish) noted it.*** Even then I put thoughts of that aside until tonight. In writing this post I decided to look for a Youtube video that would explain the whole thing.

So, while I went through the motions, I completely missed the (arguably more) important element of self-reflection. I suppose there's always next year...

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*According to the Hebrew calendar, a day starts at sundown. So when the second night of Passover is on a Sunday night (as it was this year), the first day of the omer runs from Sunday evening until Monday evening.

**Remember -- I used to sort pennies by year and mintmark before rolling them.

***Which reminds me of the time my Irish Catholic boss (unintentionally) shamed me into taking off work for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.