I can almost close my eyes and picture myself, 18 again, 1 a.m., squished among thousands at Mount Meron on Lag b’Omer. It was electrifying.
I understand the draw.
You get this sense of a tangible spiritual sphere. You join with so many fellow Jews as the drive up the mountain intensifies with each new bonfire lighting up the night that you pass by.
Singing in unison — it is exhilarating and faith affirming. You almost feel like you can touch something sacred with your bare hands.
Clinging to the light, to the idea, of feeling close to a tzaddik, to someone who was so intense a creature and wrought miracles, as set down in the Talmudic tales you learn about.
Judaism is an unmediated faith. There is no go-between necessary to connect with G-d. But to pour your prayers forth in proximity to someone who lived and reached his great potential — and beyond — it’s inspiring. It propels you to pray and to reach deeper inside your own self and peel away and reach the deepest potential of your highest self.
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — known by his acronym of Rashbi — was a powerful second-century tanna scholar and mystic. He was an extremist, intense persona who was “on fire,” so to speak. This intensity of his persona has been transmitted through the ages, and in recent centuries culminated in the ever expanding pilgrimage festival to Meron on Lag b’Omer, the date of his departure from this earth.
Even at 18, after I left Meron, I felt a sense of relief to have gotten out of there in one piece. The crowd was overwhelming.
I’ve returned to Rashbi on Meron many times, but never again on Lag b’Omer. In fact, the night before I left Israel, when I was very sad to be moving and what felt at the time like an imposed personal exile, my way of bidding adieu to the land and saying my farewell was to travel to the Galilee to the sacred burial spots of tzakiddim and say my goodbyes.
It was night time, as we drove from one grave to the next, including to Rashbi’s, to pray and take leave — sealing it with a daybreak morning prayer at the Kotel upon my return to Jerusalem.
Rashbi and Meron were places close to my heart. The inspiration and fervor of being uplifted from praying there on Lag b’Omer cannot be explained to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
As beautifully moving as the pilgrimage to the Kotel on Shavuot and Hoshanah Rabbah is, the added layer of the intensity of bonfires and informal prayer expressed in song on Meron on Lag b’Omer is different.
It also always comes after 33 days of restraint from music altogether; so again, the intensity is heightened.
I mourn this heartrending tragedy at Meron together with my fellow Jews. It’s such a heartbreaking tragedy, especially for the feeling that Meron on Lag b’Omer as we have come to know it could have been executed differently, preventing just such a tragedy.
Like many, I’ve watched, weeping, clip after agonizing clip of footage of the 45 sacred souls who tragically lost their lives, as well as the inspiration of the survivors. I’ve read article after article. It seems that the angels within this heartbreaking tragedy are endless.
The Arab villages that surround Mount Meron — Gush Chalav, Pasuta and Sassa — how they opened their homes and villages in incredible hospitality and support to so many fleeing the scene with no where to go because the roads had been temporarily closed to make way for the emergency vehicles. “Achim anachnu be-simcha uve-tzarah, we are brothers in joy and in anguish,” they said. The thousands of Israelis, Jews and non-Jews, secular and religious, who lined up to donate blood. The extraordinary first responders, diverse yet united teams of Jews, Arabs and Druze who make up the Israeli police force, Magen David Adom and Hatzalah.
Forty-five lights in this world were cruelly extinguished. This was a tragic crush, not a stampede. There is still so much to learn and read, to try to understand what transpired. Emerging from Mount Meron’s paths now littered in pain, are stories and some personas for the ages, no less legendary than Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai himself.
Yoel Schlesinger of Meron’s organization “Hachnasat Orchim,” “Hospitality,” who happened to have been located in an area with a bird’s eye view of the crowd below and understood the tragedy that was unfolding before the crowd did, heroically saved children’s lives.
And Rav Avigdor Hayut. The heart cries for this man, who has distinguished himself for the luminescent person that he is and who we have come to know in his deepest moments of pain. Last Sunday night I happened to have clicked on a clip that showed a relatively young but broken, bent man in a wheelchair, a father, sobbing, wracking primal sobs of complete defeat and crushing pain, as he sobbed that he could not save his son, nor his son’s friend, who was his beloved student. Alongside him, a sweet, bewildered man who looked to be his contemporary, sat caressing him, over an over, as though comforting a child. But, it turns out, that he was none other than the other father. It was his son who was the friend and student of this broken man on whose watch these two boys were lost.
I sat weeping, thinking this is too much to bear. I myself wanted to reach through the screen and hug this shattered man.
His life is over, I thought to myself. This is just too painful. A good kind innocent man, all he wants to do is go to Meron on Lag b’Omer and share the inspiring experience with his own son and student — now has to bear this burden of their lost lives. And the fellow saintly father!! How is he sitting there comforting the man under whose watch his own child died, for whom he now sits shiva?
It was just too much. Yet at the same time, after this intimate moment of profound pain was exposed, I felt I had glimpsed greatness.
The next night — in the intervening hours I had clicked on a few other clips that shared equally heartbreaking stories — I see a man, composed, eloquent, wise, inspiring, sitting and comforting a teen boy coming apart, sobbing, at the thought of two boys dying whom in the moments of panic he had actually valiantly tried to save, yet unbeknownst to him, he had actually directed them in the direction of the crush. His decision, as fate would have it, sealed their fate.
I watched this man speak. His faith. His composure. His authentic, iron strength in the face of such deep tragedy. He, the breaved father, was comforting this broken teen, bolstering him, and telling him he feels no anger toward him and hopes one day they can dance together at this young man’s wedding. I was mesmerized. Something tugged at me . . . he looked familiar. I increased the screen size and quickly looked through old clips to compare it to the one from the previous night. Lo! It was the same man. I searched to learn of his name, and that’s how I encountered the sacred Rav Avigdor Hayut, who by that point was all over the news.
I am still processing the enormity of this national Israeli tragedy and the sadness and response of its aftermath.
On many levels, it demands much reckoning and soul-searching. Almost like when Rashbi, who after 12 years sequestered in a cave, upon his departure and re-entry into the normative world could not integrate properly. His fiery energy was destructive, whereupon he was instructed to return to the cave once more so as to tame his fiery powers so they could be harnessed for good. Upon his second exit from the cave one year later, in the twilight of the dwindling week at the onset of the Sabbath, he demonstrated he could.
Lag b’Omer, a day symbolic of such intense illumination and fiery light, was painfully diminished by the extinguishing the light of 45 pure souls.
It now feels like a charge to each and every one of us to imbue this world with increased light of care, respect and understanding for one another.
While each of the lost victims is tragically irreplaceable, it is up to each of us to burn what would have been their light in this world, ever brighter.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
