By Marco Del Monte
On the day of Lag BaOmer, the soul of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi) ascended to heaven; according to some, it was on that very day that the twenty-four thousand students of Rabbi Akiva stopped dying. A strange coincidence: the end of the death (of the students) and the beginning of a new era, of a new life, are marked by another death (that of Rabbi Shimon).
It is customary to hold great celebrations on this day, as according to some opinions, the semi-mourning customs adopted during these 33 days come to an end. We might ask ourselves with a purely rational mind: a Tzaddik like Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai dies and we celebrate? A Tzaddik dies and we stop following the rules of mourning? And how can all of this be linked to the parashah of Emor, which is contiguous to the holiday?
Let us try to analyse what is written in a part of the Zohar called Idra Zuta, the part that describes the ascent to heaven of Rabbi Shimon, the part that should be read precisely today. It is recounted that at the moment of Rashbi's death, a light surrounded the bed, and no one could approach. It was like the altar: there was too much light, the silence was deafening. But at the moment when his neshamah ascended, it did not leave darkness, but a flame that has been burning for millennia. Rabbi Shimon left in this world the great light of the "Book of the Zohar", of the "Book of Splendour". But there is another mystery of Lag BaOmer, in fact, precisely on this day, after the death of the 24,000 disciples of Rabbi Akiva, when the Torah seemed to be dying out,
he transmitted the semikhah to 5 new talmidim, from whom everything was reborn. Who these 5 were: Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua. Once again the same dynamic: when it seems that the flame is dying out, the fire continues to burn, when it seems that the oil of the people of Israel has run out, behold, a new flask of miraculous, enduring oil always appears. We read in the Parashah the topic of the Ner Tamid, of the eternal light, and we find these words: "לְהַעֲלֹת נֵר תָּמִיד" To cause a continuous light to rise (Leviticus 24:2), the term "to kindle" is not used, but to cause it to rise, because the Ner, the fire, is always burning, one only has to make it rise. And so it is written ” נִשְׁמַת אָדָם נֵר ה' The flame-Ner of G-d is the soul of man” (Proverbs 20:27). Every neshamah is a candle, every life is a light. The soul of the Jewish people is a Ner Tamid, it cannot be extinguished but only made to rise, even on a day when hopes seem now lost, metaphorically represented by the death of Rabbi Shimon or the students of Rabbi Akiva, or any personal "Dark" period, the Jewish people fuels and makes the fire rise, being reborn even stronger like the phoenix, whose story is recounted in Talmud Sanhedrin 118b, where Noah himself blesses it with immortality, and it is thus that Job in his book, full of apparent destruction, tells us: "I shall die in my nest and multiply my days like the phoenix" (Job 29:18). Our Ner, our fire, our soul, that of the people of Israel will never be extinguished and even those who think they can destroy us should know that, like the phoenix, we are reborn every time even stronger, this is what this day reveals to us, the letters “ לגLag” (BaOmer ) meaning the 33rd day, can be read as “Galגל ”, that is, the "revelation", namely the revelation of the Ner Tamid of the Eternal Flame that will never be extinguished, this is what is celebrated... Life, The Torah!
L'chaim!
Shabbat Shalom
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.