By David Bryfman

“You shall count from the eve of the second day of Pesach, when an omer of grain is to be brought as an offering, seven complete weeks. The day after the seventh week of your counting will make fifty days, and you shall present a new meal offering to God.”
Leviticus 23:15-16

The word omer literally means “sheaf” and refers to the sheaves of barley that Jews would bring to the Temple as a means of thanking God for the harvest. It is the custom for many Jews to count the forty-nine day period between the second night of Passover (Pesach), the initial liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, to Shavuot, which marks the culmination of the process of liberation, when the Jews became an autonomous community with their own laws and standards.

This year we will mark our own Omer, by counting 49 days with a series of blog posts, to be known as “Blog B’Omer,” that will provide many different insights into the minds of people passionately engaged and committed to Jewish education. The only charge that we gave our authors was to bring themselves and their passion to their blogs. In doing so we hope that we can all be a bit more liberated from that which is holding us back, and inspired to do even greater work in bringing the beauty of Jewish wisdom, to the Jewish people.

You can check out the “Blog B’Omer” starting on Sunday evening April 24th, and sign up for a daily blog for the duration of the omer.

David Bryfman is chief innovation officer at The Jewish Education Project.