Rabbi Rael Blumenthal

At its core, the celebration of Lag Ba’omer is a celebration of the hidden, mystical dimension of Torah. But in doing so, there is already a paradox.

Rebbe Nachman writes (שיחות הר”ן א):

The holy Zohar states that ... the vision of God which each man perceives through the gates he makes in his own heart (Zohar I, 103b). The heart is hidden and the gates do not open to another.

And herein lies our problem: Celebration is, by its nature, an externalizing activity, and our practices on Lag Ba’omer are loud and public. But the secrets of the Torah are fundamentally impossible to express outwardly; so why are we doing any of this?

To that end, the Aruch HaShulchan writes that despite the multitudes of explanations about the day, perhaps the real simcha of Lag Ba’omer is that it was the day the Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai left his cave for the second time. It’s the day that he somehow re-entered the world without burning it down, as the Gemara tells us:

They emerged from the cave, and saw people who were plowing and sowing. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said: These people abandon eternal life of Torah study and engage in temporal life for their own sustenance. The Gemara relates that every place that Rabbi Shimon and his son Rabbi Elazar directed their eyes was immediately burned. A Divine Voice emerged and said to them: Did you emerge from the cave in order to destroy My world? Return to your cave. They again went and sat there for twelve months. A Divine Voice emerged and said to them: Emerge from your cave. They emerged. Everywhere that Rabbi Elazar would strike, Rabbi Shimon would heal.

Somehow, after those additional twelve months, Rabbi Shimon could carry the mystical weight of Torah into the world without judgment or destruction.

But when we speak about this story, we might fail to realize that the story doesn’t begin with Rabbi Shimon fleeing to a cave to avoid persecution. It starts with a seemingly political debate:

The Gemara relates an incident that took place when Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon were sitting, and Yehuda-ben-Gerim, sat beside them. Rabbi Yehuda opened and said: How pleasant are the actions of this nation, the Romans, as they established marketplaces, established bridges, and established bathhouses. Rabbi Yosi was silent. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai responded and said: Everything that they established, they established only for their own purposes. They established marketplaces, to place prostitutes in them; bathhouses, to pamper themselves; and bridges, to collect taxes from all who pass over them. Yehuda-ben-Gerim, went and related their statements to his household, and those statements continued to spread until they were heard by the monarchy. They ruled and said: Yehuda, who elevated the Roman regime, shall be elevated and appointed as head of the Sages, the head of the speakers in every place. Yosi, who remained silent, shall be exiled from his home in Judea as punishment, and sent to the city of Tzippori in the Galilee. And Shimon, who denounced the government, shall be killed.

The Maharsha here notes that it’s obvious that all the sages agree to Rabbi Shimon’s point. Indeed, the Talmud in Avoda Zara tells that in the future, Hashem will tell the nations of the world that He knows that all of their advancements were made for personal gain. Rabbi Shimon, however, is the only one willing to say it.

All this is to say, that Rabbi Shimon’s flight to the cave and his plumbing the depths of the secrets of the Torah are framed as an act of political rebellion. Simply put, he is unwilling to drink the kool-aid of Roman rule.

In the world of Rabbi Shimon, the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash and the rise of a foreign culture is anathema to the intent of existence. It’s immoral to see any value in such perversion of purpose, and there cannot be beauty in it.

But, tragically, that is the reality of the world – since the days of Rabbi Shimon and even today. We, the Jewish people, are not the princes of the universe that Hashem intended us to be. We are yet groveling at the feet of some president, political party, or social media algorithm. We still have not retaken our rightful place as the Light-Unto-The-Nations.

To all of this, Rabbi Shimon leads his silent rebellion.

Deep in that cave, he discovered and explained how the even in his circumstance, even in ours, we are still children of Hashem. Even in the failure, in the pain, and in the misery, our world is real, while theirs is fiction.

But to celebrate Lag Ba’Omer is to know that it’s possible to live a life of Geulah even while we’re in exile. It’s to feel the hand of Hashem guiding us through our personal issues as much as He directs History.

The Light of Rabbi Shimon is the perspective that I can walk in this world, while my head and heart are already in the Beis HaMikdash. It’s eyes that can burn the world by seeing its falsehood, but choose to repair it instead.

Lag Ba’Omer is thus the simcha of the few who get “it”. Those who know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be, and who have committed their lives to seeing the world as it could be.

It’s lighting the fire in the darkness, with friends and family and declaring that there’s only a few days left until we can reclaim the Torah, and once again take our place in history as the people Hashem has created us to become.