One of the hardest challenges I have comes after I finish something. Once in a while I want to sit back and admire my work and just enjoy it. Often, if there is some appreciation out there, I admittedly want to enjoy some praise. The better I did, the more I feel like sitting still–perhaps I don’t want to risk this recent success with a future failure. I am one of the people who looks at everything I did right as some sort of fluke, a lucky mistake, and am terrified that next time I’ll fall flat on my face, so it can be hard to motivate myself to take the gamble.

But, eventually, the next project calls. I have an insight or an image (I did work as a photographer for 45 years, and there would be days and weeks of relentless assault of new visions of beauty, sometimes almost silent in simplicity, other times raging in complexity, which I just had to share) that demands to be shown. Or I’ll hear a tonality or a lilting chord I can’t keep to myself.

Next thing I know, the process of the old falls into the past and, if I’m lucky, I am more of less engaged with the next. In many ways I have it easy because I’m not searching for a new theme or subject. Since as long as I can remember, I believe this might have been my first photo exhibition with Hal Gould z”l at his Denver gallery (Colorado Photographics Art Center, 1977 or 78), in between periods of being religious, I have always attempted to show M’lo Kol HaAretz Kvodo”, He (i.e. God) fills the entirety of Creation with His Existence, that All is, if only we can see the projection back to the Source, God.

Granting myself some degree of success, immediately after illustrating that God underlies and sustains and, ultimately, is All, I go right back and try to do it again, this time with an even stronger or more subtle or compelling example. Finishing one task I turn to the next, only to find it’s not really something new.

Parshat Sh’mini (Eighth), which always falls soon after the seven mandated days of Pesach, talks about the day after the week the newly built Mishkan (Holy Dwelling) and the newly-annointed Kohnim (Priests) have been consecrated. Through a variety of verses and references to the Zohar and Sefer Yetzira (a fundamental text of Kaballah, attributed to Avraham and likely passed down orally until it was written by Rabbi Akiva in early talmudic times, and later re-revealed by our great mystics), the great Chernobyl Maggid, Menachem Nachum Twerski, one of the earliest chassidic masters, points out that in that previous week of dedication, each days followed the sephirotic order, with the first expressing the essence and influence of Chesed, Love and pure energy, the second Gevura, Strength, form and structure, the third day Tiferet, Beauty and balance, etc.

This, of course, follows the practice of counting the Omer, the days between Pesach and Shavuot, building from initial Redemption to Enlightment/Empowerment (Receiving the Torah), a seven-week period with each week assigned one of these Sefirot and each individual day representing the slow, deliberate journey, step-by-step and mirroring the Seven Days of Dedication (which, themselves, represent the Seven Days of Creation, as we enter a fractal universe of echos and reverberation, itself the Harmony of Divine Music).

The Chernobler asks what follows that week of dedication (Y’mei HaMiluim, literally the days of filling the hands of the Kohanim (Priests) so they are enabled to fulfill their tasks) and answers, simply, another week of seven days.

What’s next is our next opportunity to improve our most recent attempt at partnering with The Creator to Perfect The Creation. The next of an endless opportunity to grow, to do better and better, to love more deeply and strongly, to become more and more fully human.

Shabbat Shalom