Take a bizarre plague no one had ever heard of until hundreds of years after it allegedly happened, a yartzeit that no one knew or celebrated until about 1,350 years after the person's death actually took place, and a notorious rabbinic forgery. Combine them and you get Lag Ba’Omer, where giant bonfires celebrate the book Bar Yochai did not write as hundreds of thousands of Jews pray at a grave Bar Yochai almost certainly does not occupy.
‘Ancient’ Holiday Of Lag BaOmer Is A Medieval Fabrication
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
As hundreds of thousands Jews, primarily haredim, build bonfires and rush to Meron to celebrate the holiday of Lag BaOmer, it behooves us to explore the actual origin of the holiday.
The holiday is supposed to celebrate both the cessation of a plague (or other calamity) that supposedly killed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students almost 1900 years ago and the yartzeit (anniversary of the passing) of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the purported author of the Zohar, the “bible” of all Jewish mystical texts.
The problem with this holiday, however, are many.
Lag Ba’Omer – the 33rd day (the Hebrew letters lamed-gimmel, together adding up to 33 in Hebrew, is pronounced “lag”) of the Omer counting – didn’t become the day marking the end of the purported plague that killed Rabbi Akiva’s students until sometime in the late Geonic era at the earliest, about 850 years after the mysterious plague allegedly took place.
Worse yet, there is no actual contemporaneous record of this purported plague – even though the death of 24,000 people due to a mysterious illness certainly would have been noticed and recorded, not only by Jews in Israel but by their Roman occupiers and the non-Jewish people that lived among them and surrounding them. The first mention of it comes from the Babylonia Talmud Tractate Yevamot 62b, which was codified (so to speak) about 800 CE to 900 CE – approximately 750 years after the plague supposedly happened.
And then we turn to Bar Yochai, whose yartzeit is on Lag Ba’Omer – maybe – and who is buried in Meron where his ‘tomb’ currently stands – maybe.
In about 1570, Rabbi Isaac Luria – the Ari – arrived in Sefat in the north of Israel not far from Meron and taught a new system of Kabbalah. Luria – who by today’s definition was arguably mentally ill – also claimed to be able to divine the locations of the graves of famous Jewish personalities from antiquity. One of those famous personalities was Bar Yochai, whose grave Luria “found” through divination in Meron. Luria also insisted that Lag Ba’Omer was Bar Yochai’s yartzeit – even though there was no evidence to support either claim.
Worse yet, the Zohar, the mystical book Bar Yochai supposedly authored, was really written by a medieval Spanish rabbi, Moshe de Leon, in the 13th century CE – about 1,000 years after Bar Yochai died.
So we have a bizarre plague no one had ever heard of until hundreds of years after it allegedly happened, a yartzeit that no one knew or celebrated until about 1,350 years after the person's death actually took place, and a notorious rabbinic forgery. Combine them and you get Lag Ba’Omer, where giant bonfires celebrate the book Bar Yochai did not write as hundreds of thousands of Jews pray at a grave Bar Yochai almost certainly does not occupy.
In fact, the first celebrations we have record of marking Lag Ba’Omer in some form took place 15th century CE in Germany, about 1,200 years after Bar Yochai died and about 1,300 years after the plague that almost certainly wasn’t supposedly ended. And we don’t have any idea what those celebrations consisted of or looked like.
Many (if not most) academic scholars think the mysterious ‘plague’ was really the Bar Kokhba revolt, which took place from 132 CE through 136 CE.
Rabbi Akiva was one of the only major rabbis to back Bar Kokhba and his revolt against Rome. He saw in Bar Kokhba messianic portent and sent his students to fight with with him. At first, Bar Kokhba was successful. He took Jerusalem, minted his own coinage and probably ruled there for a brief time as both king and as the potential messiah.
But Rome eventually turned the tide (in part with the help of spies who may have been followers of other rabbis) and destroyed Bar Kokhba along with his army, tens of thousands (if not more) of other Jews, and much of Jerusalem and the surrounding area, as well.
Jewish life and most of the surviving rabbis then relocated to the Galilee in the north of Israel. The Mishna was written there, most of the sages cited in the Mishna – including Bar Yochai – lived there, and that is why Bar Yochai could have been buried in Meron – which is in the Galilee – although there is no actual evidence to show that he is.
So why celebrate Lag Ba’Omer, which is not an ancient holiday and likely celebrates fictional events?
The short answer is that the hasidic movement, which began in the 1700s CE, based their teachings on Bar Yochai’s purported book, the Zohar and on the teachings of Luria which he claimed to derive from it. The same is true for Sefardic kabbalists who based their authority on ‘Bar Yochai’s’ book and Luria’s interpretations of it.
Luria “discovered” Bar Yochai’s grave. Luria divined the date of Bar Yochai’s yartzeit. And Luria made a questionable and obscure minor holiday celebrated by almost no one into an important event for him and his handful of followers.
And because the celebration of Lag Ba’Omer offers a one-day respite (or for some, an end) to the yearly 43-day mourning period for the 24,000 dead students of Rabbi Akiva made up of all of the days of the Omer counting that do not fall on Passover or Shavuot, and because the day was a 24-hour party filled with singing, dancing, bonfires, cookouts, and special children’s games, the holiday as reinvented by Luria out of whole cloth eventually became a Jewish national holiday accepted by all Jews as authentic and ancient – even though it likely is neither.