Responding With All Your Might: A (Post-) Lag Ba'Omer Thought

Lag Ba'Omer*, the 33rd day of the counting of the omer (the 49-day period from Pesah to Shavuot), marks a joyous occasion in the midst of an anguished period of Jewish history. The Talmud (Bavli Yevamot 62b) tells us that this period was marked by a plague in the 2nd century CE which took the lives of 24,000 students of the great sage Rabbi Akiva. Only a handful survived, among them Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai, considered by some to be the father of Jewish mysticism. As such, Lag Ba'Omer has become in recent years a celebration of Shim'on bar Yohai: tens of thousands of Haredim march from Tzefat, in northern Israel, to Mount Meron, where bar Yohai is traditionally thought to be buried, and light bonfires to honor his legacy.

I was once at the grave of Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai, not on Lag Ba'Omer, and experienced there the most peculiar behavior that I have ever witnessed in the context of tefillah / Jewish prayer. It was an otherwise ordinary afternoon, and there was a standard pick-up minhah (brief afternoon service) going on nearby, attended by a handful of guys who seemed to be from the same Haredi sect.

They arrived at the end, and one of them began saying the Mourner's Kaddish, the prayer recited by those who have recently suffered a loss or are recalling the annual observance of a relative's passing. They came to the congregational response, usually similarly intoned in a spoken-word form - no music, marking the mourner's sadness. And then something truly wacky happened: all of the assembled began to SHOUT WITH ALL THEIR MIGHT, "Amen! Yehei shemei rabba mevarakh le'alam ul'alemei alemaya!" "May God's great name be praised throughout all time!"

I think I jumped. I had never heard anything like that.

A few years later, as I was studying liturgy seriously at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I encountered a real gem of Talmudic wisdom, and experienced a brief moment of revelation (Bavli Shabbat 119b):

אמר רבי יהושע בן לוי: כל העונה אמן יהא שמיה רבא מברך בכל כחו ־ קורעין לו גזר דינו

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi taught: One who says, "Amen! Yehei shemei rabba mevarakh..." with all his strength, any [negative Divine] decree against him is torn up.

In other words, if you scream this line when responding to a mourner, you get a whole lot of Heavenly credit, and a guaranteed place in the world to come. I realized, in retrospect, that this is exactly what was going on during that otherwise ordinary minhah: they were taking this piece of wisdom literally.

I do not necessarily recommend shouting in synagogue. Depending on the congregation, the reactions by others might vary from discomfort to shock to bodily removing you from the building. But we might want to think, not only as we respond to those in mourning but throughout our tefillah, about Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai, about the bonfires of the soul, and about pouring all our might into forming those words of prayer.

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

* "Lag", ל''ג, is not a word but a number: the Hebrew letter lamed has a numerical value of 30 and the gimmel a value of 3.

Thursday Kavvanah, 5/19/11 - Lad Ba-omer? No, thanks.

The chief rabbis of Israel and other influential rabbis have issued a statement that Lag Ba-omer, the 33rd day of the counting of the omer (which is the period of 7 weeks from the second day of Pesah until Shavuot) should be observed this year not on the 33rd day, but on the 34th day.*

Lag Ba-omer is the day when the plague that killed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students during the omer period ended, and is thus a minor day of celebration. The rabbis' reasoning in moving it back by a day is that in Israel, many celebrate by building bonfires on the evening of Lag Ba-omer, and since this year this would be Saturday night, there would be mass desecration of the Shabbat in preparing bonfires. (To be fair, I am not aware that there has been a precedent for "moving" Lag Ba-omer; it fell on Sunday last year as well.)

The idea of relocating the celebration is mostly academic; what is more interesting to me is the fact that Judaism is not a centralized religion. We have no pope, nobody who can command something that all will follow. No matter which influential rabbis issue decrees, there will be some who reject their opinions. For sure, on Saturday night in Israel there will be bonfires, by secular Israelis who don't care what the rabbinate says, and Haredi groups for whom the merely Orthodox rabbinate is inconsequential.

But this is one of the major strengths of Judaism: our decentralization made us portable and democratic. There's no hierarchical bureaucracy in Judaism since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 70 CE. And that simple fact has made it possible for us as a people to survive 2,000 years more than we might have, through exile and dispersion.

I'll be marking Lag Ba-omer on Sunday, like most of the Jewish world.


*The word "lag" is an abbreviation for 33 - the Hebrew letter "lamed" has a numerical value of 30, and "gimmel" has a value of 3. Hence, lamed + gimmel = "lag" = 33. The vowel has no value. 34 would be lamed + dalet, and therefore is pronounced "lad."