Mystical Consumption

Post-Passover: Refilling the Space with Conscious Love and eating like a mystic.

We’re in this powerful, quiet space now, post-Passover. The Seders are behind us. The receiving and revelation of the Torah at Sinai is just ahead. In between, there’s a subtle shift in the air, a clearing, a certain renewal of life energy. It’s like the soul exhales softly.

If the experience of Passover was a kind of birth, what follows is what happens after the baby arrives. What now? What do we do with this new, raw, exposed self? We ate matzah, which symbolizes egolessness, simplicity, the essential self without puff or pretense. Now that we’ve cleared out all the chametz, all the leavened layers of ego and distraction, we are left with this beautiful, wide-open space.

And the question becomes: what do we fill it with?

That’s what the journey of Sefirat HaOmer, the Counting of the Omer, is really about.

When the Jewish people left Egypt, they were free, but they were also raw. They were at a clean slate. That phrase has so much energy in it. A clean slate doesn’t just mean you’re done with something, it means you haven’t yet begun something new. You’re standing in the liminal, between what was and what could be.

Imagine this in real life: you’ve just left a toxic relationship or a job that drained your spirit. Maybe it ended painfully, or maybe it was liberating, either way, you're not immediately running into the next thing. You’re just… here. U. Unwritten. Unformed. Unattached.

And in that space, the deepest work begins, not of looking for the next partner or job, but of asking: Why do I want to be in a relationship at all? Why do I want to work at all? What do I value in connection? In contribution? In love? In reciprocity?

It’s not just about getting better things. It’s about remembering why we want things in the first place.

The Omer is a sacred container for rebuilding our inner world. Each day, each week, we’re invited to reintroduce the building blocks of our emotional and spiritual life, but this time, with intention. Not the default settings of a society that has conditioned us into patterns of self-protection or performance. But the soul’s settings, vulnerable, clear, and refined.

Each week corresponds to a specific emotion, and the Kabbalists teach us that these emotions form the architecture of our spiritual self:

• Week One – Chesed: Love. Not lust. Not fantasy. But expansive, kind, generous love. The kind that lets us soften and widen toward the world. As a slave, love is hijacked, either shut down or distorted. Now, in freedom, we can rebuild love as a virtue, not a craving.
  
  

• Week Two – Gevurah: Boundaries and Power. This isn’t about dominance. This is the holy kind of power, the one that creates structure, that draws lines with dignity, that honors the sacredness of time, space, and self. Gevurah teaches us to say “no” as a way of saying “yes” to our higher purpose.
  
  

And so on through Tiferet (compassion), Netzach (endurance), Hod (humility), Yesod (connection), and Malchut (presence and sovereignty).

Week by week, we don’t just become free people, we become whole people.

This same invitation shows up in this week’s Torah portion, Shemini, which introduces us to the laws of kashrut, what is kosher and what is not.

I’ve seen so many people wrestle with this over the years. In our modern world, kosher has become more about labels than consciousness. A little symbol stamped on plastic makes something technically kosher, but does that mean it’s aligned? Is it nourishing? Is it sacred?

Kosher, in its essence, is not just a diet. It’s a spiritual wellness practice. A sensitivity practice. It’s about bringing awareness to the most primal act we perform daily: putting something into our mouth and making it part of our body.

To keep kosher is to live in a state of inquiry: Where did this come from? How was it made? What energy was it created with?

Big Kosher Idea: Conscious Consumption