Today marks the sixth day of the omer. Yesod b’chesed. Bonding of lovingkindness. Yesod is yet another tricky word to define. While it usually gets translated as bonding, it  also means foundation. Now Rabbi Zlotowitz used to tell a funny story about one of his professors who was German. He would start his class by saying, “Boychicks, today we are going to study the basement of Judaism.” He had confused the words in English for foundation and basement. We can chuckle, but if the basement is firm, the foundation secure, than love can grow and blossom. If the foundation is not solid, the building blocks not strong than love can wither. You need both, love and the bonding that goes with it to make it eternal.

Today, because it was a nice sunny day, one of our congregants built the frames necessary for our community garden. Without the framework we cannot plant in the raised beds. How many people do you think we can feed from our 8×8 plot? How much work, time, seeds, water and faith will this project take? But the building blocks and the foundation are now in place.

How do we do this in our own lives? What are the building blocks or the foundation of love? How do we bond? How do we get there? How do we make our relationships rock solid?
This week on Shabbat we read Song of Songs as the extra megilah of Passover. It has been my Bat Mitzvah “haftarah”. This week we sang a lot of it. Beautiful love poetry, an allegory if you will between G-d and the people of Israel. While it talks about young love and courtship,  it also talks about the foundation of love. Like the Torah portion for Passover it talks about hiding in the cleft or crevice or cranny of the rock. That’s where love sometimes hides. Sometimes it is where we find G-d. We need the Rock to be solid, so that when we can’t see G-d or feel G-d we still know G-d’s there. We need our relationships to be bound so that even when we are not feeling love we know that it is there. Then we will move into knowing, deeply deeply knowing that we are loved.