Get the Omer Count App:

The Baal Shem Tov, or Besht —  the founder of Chasidism — 
met the soul of the Messiah during an ascent to heaven. 
The Besht asked him, "When will the Master come?" 
The Messiah answered, "When your wellsprings break forth to the outside!" 
(from a letter written by the Besht to his brother-in-law about one of his soul ascents) 

The Omer Widget

לעילוי נשמת אבי עזריאל גודל בן אפרים הלוי וידידיה, For my father, Richard Gary Seidenberg

The widget below will keep count of the Omer between Passover and Shavuot. If you keep it up at other times, it will display a quote from Torah or Kabbalah on your web page. Check it out and put it on your website for the Omer or for the whole year. Also get more Omer resources, including the Omer Counter app for iPhone and Android, here.

The count now changes at 5PM. After midnight the date changes but not the count. If you;ve visited this page in previous years you may need to force reload to see the days for this year displayed (shift+reload button).

There are three text versions: one with a bigger graphic, one smaller, and one text-only. The heading changes to "Tonight is" (or to "eve" for the smaller widget) at 5PM. At 4AM the heading changes to "Today is". Below the widgets, you'll find the code to center the widget (for those who don't know html).

I created this widget during my father's illness and offered it as a prayer for his healing. To our great sadness he died during the Omer of 2007. I dedicate this project to his memory.

 To add the larger widget to your site, homepage, etc, paste this line of code anywhere:

<a href="http://neohasid.org/resources/omer"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://neohasid.org/js/omer_widget.js"></script></a>     
To add the smaller widget to your site, homepage, etc, paste this line of code anywhere:

<a href="http://neohasid.org/resources/omer"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://neohasid.org/js/sm_omer_widget.js"></script></a>
To add the text-only widget to your site, homepage, etc, paste this line of code anywhere:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://neohasid.org/js/omer_widget-nobg.js"></script>

Daniel Bloom from Hazon.org first modded the widget to be text-only.

To add the art widget to your site, homepage, etc, paste this line of code anywhere:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://neohasid.org/js/pauline_fr_omercounter4.js"></script>

This counter uses illustrations by Pauline Frankenberg.

To center the widget on the page or in a column, add these tags before and after → Either add: <div style="text-align:center;"> <script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script> </div>
(you can start that with a <p...> or <h1...> (h2, etc.) tag and end it with </p> or </h1> etc. tag as well)
Or add: <div align="center"> <script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script> </div>
Or add: <center> <script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script> </center>
(this last method is officially "deprecated")


Counting the entire Omer period is one of those mitzvot that is absolutely simple and yet so very hard for people like myself. I think before I made the widget I only managed to count the entire way (all 49 days) three times in my life. (I am sorry to say that my father, z"l, died during the omer in the year that I made the widget, so that wasn't one of the times.) The widget you see above keeps the count of the Omer and will remind you and visitors to your website starting a few days before Pesach. After Shavuot it can display brief traditional teachings related to Jewish "eco-spirituality". Toggle the date and time on your computer to see how it works for different times. See the second widget in place on neohasid's homepage.

more related to the Omer: How to Count, Blessing the Fruit Trees, Lag B'Omer and Rainbow Day), Stolner Counting Nigun, Ana B'Khoach liturgy, The Sefirot and their symbolism, Shavuot, Pauline Frankenberg's Omer Art, Yom Ha'atzma'ut. Please visit our HOMEPAGE and join our list.
Ana Bekhoach
Click to pause

I hope you enjoy this! ~ Reb Duvid

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you so much for making this; I've been wanting something like it for years!

Posted by: Rachel at April 16, 2008 7:17 PM

this is great but i think it's not right? It's fixed! ~ Reb Duvid

Posted by: phyllis at April 21, 2008 3:07 AM

Great idea. Happy omer counting. I'm starting up my omer journal again this year.

Posted by: Shai Gluskin at April 23, 2008 5:37 AM

Thank you, Reb David, for making this beautiful, and useful, link between the old and the new!

Posted by: Dinah at April 30, 2008 4:47 PM

This is a great resource, thank you! I've just added it to my blog.
--aa.

Posted by: alto artist at May 5, 2008 2:18 PM

This song is beautiful!!!
(Efes Bilt'kha )
Is there more?

Posted by: Danika at May 29, 2008 5:31 AM

Thanks for the beautiful graphic with the blessing and the anabekoach versions. Haunting.

Posted by: Lauren Deutsch at April 2, 2010 8:39 AM

Joseph Smith from England asked me April 5, 2013 why the app and the widget originally changed their count at 2AM, and the reason is entirely a legacy from the widget. But because of his question I changed the widget, so that it changes at 5PM and for the larger widgets says "Today" during the day and "Tonight" in the evening. David Cooper has now changed the Omer Counter app so that it changes at precise sunrise/sunset times using GPS. Here's how the original widget came to change count at 2AM, for anyone who might be interested:

I started looking at the original program the app was based on and remembered how it ended up the way it did, with the day switching at 2am. That program was a web widget written in javascript, which means it reads the time zone of the local computer clock to determine the day. Since that doesn't include latitude and longitude it wouldn't be possible to get precise sunset and sunrise times (and the truth is that even if it did have that I wouldn't have known how to do it at the time).

So that means there's going to be some time where it might be confusing. If the app says "tonight is day x" during the daytime, then someone looking at the widget knows to count the previous number for the day. If it were to say "today is day x" during the daytime it would have to switch over precisely at nightfall in order for people using it then to count right. If it said "tonight is day x" without a date, then during the daytime people might be confused about whether it referred to the previous night and daytime or the coming evening. Then during the day for people who missed counting at night might count the wrong number. If it has a date, then the date would switch over at midnight but the count would remain the same until the following evening, another source of confusion.

I decided to specify the day of the week and give the day in terms of "Tuesday eve" or "Saturday eve", which would make clear which part of the night was the reference point, and then people could extrapolate from that. I had it switch days at 2am because I figured that would screw up fewer people, and those up at 3AM on Thursday would hopefully notice that the day count said "Friday eve" (actually "Fri eve" to save space").

I could have had it say "today is day x and tonight is day y" or had it switch a little before morning from "tonight is day x" to "tonight will be day y". I think the latter might be a viable solution. The former is too many words for the format the widget used, which you can see at neohasid.org/omer/omercount/.

posted by: Rabbi David Seidenberg, April 5, 2013

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Design in progress © Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg 2006