Each of the seven weeks is associated with one of the seven lower sefirot (#4-10), chesed, gevurah, tipheret, netzach, hod, yesod, and malchut. Each day within each of the seven weeks is associated also with one of the same seven sefirot, thus creating 49 permutations. The first day of the omer is thus associated with chesed in chesed, the second day with gevurah in chesed and so-on.
Symbolically, each of these 49 permutations represents an aspect of each person that needs to be purified. Mythically the Jewish people is freed again from Pharoah each year on Passover. The damage from the experience of slavery needs to be healed in order for each person to accept the Torah at Sinai on Shavuot fifty days afer Passover.
This period is a time of partial mourning, during which weddings, parties, and dinners with dancing are not conducted, in memory of a plague which killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva. This custom is also in memory of those Jews murdered during the Crusades, the original pogroms occurring around this time. Some theorists suggest that the period of mourning was borrowed from the Roman superstition that May is an unlucky month, and that the associations with the plague and Crusades are later developments. The Romans had a similar custom of not marrying during the month of May, as that was the time of the Feast of the Lemures. Haircuts, shaving, watching movies, and listening to live music during this time are forbidden by many rabbis. It should be noted, however, that the extent of mourning is based heavily on custom, and therefore Jews will mourn to different degrees regarding certain prohibitions, basing their actions on ancient family custom.
There are other associations and explanations for the period of semi-mourning. One is that the first spring grain harvest is quite vulnerable during this period and a tone of anxiety, naturally felt by middle-eastern farmers at this time of year, needed to be reflected as well in the ritual calendar. Another explanation is that the purification needed to reject the vestages of Pharaoh's law and slavery in order to receive God's law on the holiday of Shavuot is not conducive to celebration.
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