A Look Into The Origins of Lag B’omer

by Daniel E. Levenson, ALM

April 28, 2010

Although many Jews may think of the late spring as a time when not much is happening in the Jewish year, we are in fact about to celebrate Lag B’omer, a holiday with who roots are a bit obscure, but one which is still freighted with meaning.

Last year I experienced Lag B’omer in Jerusalem, and what an experience it was. In the late afternoon and early evening I watched with a mixture of amusement and mild alarm as people gathered wood from all kinds of places (some legal, others perhaps not so much) and piled it up in various open areas – parks, vacant lots, abandoned railroad tracks. Even in the courtyards of apartment complexes, people of all ages, including whole families, seemed to be intensely focused on gathering wood and making enormous piles. As the evening progressed the air began to fill with smoke from the collective bonfires, lending the entire city a thick and hazy feel, unpleasant to breathe, stinging the eyes.  I have to admit, that of all of the holidays I have observed in Israel, Lag B’omer was not my favorite.

But despite my rather unpleasant sensory experience in Jerusalem last spring, Lag B’omer is a holiday that I find quite intriguing. In the most basic terms, Lag B’omer is the thirty-third day of the Omer, a special period of time between Pesach and Shavuot, and while it is a minor holiday to be sure,  it is also one which seems to straddle the bounds of both concrete history and medieval mystical tradition. A variety of interesting customs have arisen around the holiday, some, such as the temporary lifting of customs normally associated with mourning which are otherwise associated with the period of the Omer, appear to be historically linked, while others, such as visiting the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the Galilee and engaging in celebratory feasting and dancing, highlight mystical connections to the holiday.

Author Isaac Klein notes in his book A Guide To Jewish Religious Practice, “According to tradition, the calamities of the Hadrianic persecution were interrupted on the eighteenth of Iyar, and as a result it was declared a semiholiday.”  Rabbi Irving Greenberg echoes this idea in his book The Jewish Way, where he also highlights the connection between the celebration of Lag B’omer and historical events, writing “The Talmud speaks of a plague that decimated the students of Rabbi Akiva during this period. It is entirely possible that the plague was, in fact, a Roman purge of Akiva’s students for the crime of being involved in the Bar Kochba revolt.” So from an historical perspective, Lag B’omer appears to commemorate a brief respite in an otherwise bloody and protracted conflict between Rome and the Jews.

But the holiday also has echoes of the mystical as well. Klein later adds in his commentary on Lag B’omer that, “In Israel the day is also observed as  … the Yarhrzeit  of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the alleged author of the Zohar.”  This connection to bar Yochai has special signifigance for certain Jewish groups who make an annual pilgrimage to his grave site on Lag B’omer where young boys are given their first haircut at 3 years of age.

I do not consider myself a mystic, per se, although I do have a certain fondness for the writings of Gershom Scholem, and I am inclined to agree with his assessment that mystical ideas and thinkers have had more influence on “mainstream” Judaism than rabbinical tradition is perhaps comfortable acknowledging. There is something magical for me, though, about this time of year, and especially about Lag B’omer and Shavuot. As a student of Jewish history, I like that we have retained traditions relating not only to our distant biblical past, but those that connect us to important events in the more recent (and I use the term “recent” relatively here) past, such as the events of the bar Kochbah revolt. I also find the idea of creating a huge bonfire to be at once somewhat environmentally irresponsible and appealing on a primitive level.  It is for these reasons, I suppose, that I will be celebrating Lag B’Omer, because it connects me on some level to the past, to the mystical and of course to other Jews around the world.