Q&A: Is the Description in Jewish Law of the Death of Rabbi Akiva’s Students Logical and Realistic?
Is the Description in Jewish Law of the Death of Rabbi Akiva’s Students Logical and Realistic?
Question
Hello and blessings!
Is the description in Jewish law of the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students logical and realistic?
I would like to ask about the historical basis for the reason behind the custom to mourn during the days of the Counting of the Omer, except for Lag BaOmer (see Orach Chayim, sec. 493, where several different views are discussed at length). According to what the halakhic decisors wrote, the reason for the mourning is that during that period 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva died (Yevamot 62b), and on Lag BaOmer they stopped dying (according to one of the explanations).
A. Seemingly this means that Rabbi Akiva had a “yeshiva” of 24,000 students. But that does not sound logical. Even today it is not technically possible to maintain such a yeshiva, all the more so back then, when the capacities for food supply, housing, and transportation were far less developed than today. So let us say the meaning is “graduates,” that is, that over the years of his teaching he accumulated very many students, and at the time of the disaster they were already scattered all over the country, occupied with various pursuits.
B. How is it possible that 24,000 people died such a death in such a short time? In the Talmud it says they died of “askara.” Let us assume this was a contagious disease (in the Steinsaltz-style companion edition it says this was “death by suffocation due to inflammation of the throat”). Does this mean that the disease struck only them, and wiped them all out? How did it not affect their wives and their children? The simplistic picture is of a disease raging over a very short period and hitting a very specifically defined population in an extremely selective way, like the plague of the firstborn.
C. In the Talmud it says they died until Atzeret. Then the medieval authorities found midrashim unknown to us, saying that they died only until halfway before Atzeret, and the Chida asked (Responsa Tov Ayin, sec. 18) why we should set aside our version because of those midrashim. Fine, so they finally concluded that this means Lag BaOmer. And they also decided that if they stopped dying, that is a reason for rejoicing (and people have already asked what joy there is in that, since in the end not one of them remained).
The historical problem is that according to many views in the commentaries on the Shulchan Arukh, we do not actually follow the position that they stopped dying on Lag BaOmer, but rather that they stopped dying after 32 scattered days. That is, Rabbi Akiva’s students died throughout all the days of the Omer, intermittently: on days when Tachanun is recited they died, and on days when Tachanun is not recited (Sabbaths, Passover days, and the New Moon) they did not die. This is based on the Maharil; see the summary in the Biur Halakhah there. And in order to mark that they stopped dying after 32 days close to the holiday of Shavuot, they chose Lag BaOmer as a day of rejoicing.
This is already a truly astonishing historical puzzle. Regarding the plague of the firstborn it says that the doorposts had to be marked with blood, because once permission is given to the destroyer, it does not distinguish between righteous and wicked. So how here did the destroyer distinguish between a day on which Tachanun is said and one on which it is not said, and kill only on those days?
And even if that is indeed what happened, was there some kind of “population registry” operating throughout the Land of Israel, recording exactly on which day each student died?
Thank you very much.
Answer
Hello.
I do not have reliable historical information (I do not know who does, if anyone), and I also have not thought about it enough to give a dependable answer. I will try to comment briefly.
A. It is possible that he had a large academy, and that it branched out into many subsidiary academies, like Novardok for example. After all, we accept the idea that “all of it is according to Rabbi Akiva,” meaning that the entire Oral Torah is considered his product. Of course, it is possible that the number is typological rather than historical. The point is that very many died.
B. An epidemic can spread very quickly. Certainly if there was something non-natural involved there (a punishment from the Holy One, blessed be He, because they did not treat one another with respect). Who told you it did not affect their wives and children? Maybe it means them and their families. Of course, if we are dealing with a non-natural event, then whoever God wants to strike is the one who will be struck.
C. It is not really important exactly when they died. We mourn them, and that could be done on entirely different days as well. What matters is that we draw the relevant lessons. The details come only to sharpen and deepen the learning from those events, not for the sake of historical precision. Beyond that, people have already noted that there were mourning practices even before the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students. So it is possible that Lag BaOmer and the details were taken from an earlier custom that predated that event, and those details were then overlaid onto the mourning for Rabbi Akiva’s students.
As for the explanations about deaths on scattered days, I too have wondered about them, and I do not take them seriously. These are different mourning customs onto which historical descriptions are imposed in order to anchor them in the stated rationale, namely the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students. Of course, if this was a non-natural event, then there is no difficulty at all. By the way, you would not need a population registry: if people noticed there was a pattern that on special days no one died, they could understand it without tracking each and every death. But as I said, the more plausible explanation in my view is the former one: overlaying history onto earlier mourning customs.
Discussion on Answer
I think that is what is written in Rav Sherira Gaon’s epistle.
To Rabbi Michi, I would be glad for a link or clarification about mourning customs during the Omer before Rabbi Akiva’s time. I have never heard of that. As far as I know, before the time of the Talmud, or until as late as the ninth century, there is no known mourning custom at all for the days of the Omer.
In general, it is very hard to sit and study the entire Shulchan Arukh and its commentaries, along with the summaries in the various editions (Metivta, for example), when they all take the historical description with complete seriousness. They explain all the various disputes: this one holds they died on Sunday and not on Monday, that one holds the opposite, and therefore according to his view you count this way, and according to the other view differently. It is a little frustrating to invest and work hard if you doubt the historical reliability. What do you recommend?
To M:
Of course I have heard that explanation, but it really does not fit what is said in the Talmud and in Jewish law, and that was my question.
It also does not fit because in the Talmud the cause is “askara” and not a revolt. Also, mourning during the “Counting of the Omer” fits a miraculous death of students who did not treat one another with respect. If it was about the failure of a revolt, they would have established a fast in the style of Tisha B’Av for yet another destruction. In fact, the Bar Kokhba revolt is what mainly brought the devastation. The first revolt brought the destruction of the Temple, but the second brought much greater slaughter and exile.
By the way, what comes out according to this explanation is a bit amusing, according to the theory that the joy of Lag BaOmer is because of the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt, as is accepted among various historians. If so, then throughout the Omer one mourns the deaths of the soldiers, and on Lag BaOmer one rejoices over the outbreak of the revolt that failed. That is like a long Memorial Day ending with a short Independence Day for a state that in the end was never established?
I did not understand what you meant by “to tone down the stories of the revolt, as was common in the Middle Ages.”
To Avi:
See the Wikipedia entry “Counting of the Omer” and the sources cited there in the notes for this interpretation.
There it says that there are two versions of Rav Sherira Gaon’s epistle, and in the version considered less reliable it appears that they died “under decrees of persecution.”
Based on those words, later scholars developed the theory that Rabbi Akiva’s students died in the Bar Kokhba revolt.
Aharon,
Yes, it is brought in the name of the Ari, and the Shelah also cites it.
I did a quick search and saw a reference to this: Benayahu, Meir, The Ascent to Meron, in: Schiller, Eli (ed.), Ze’ev Vilnai Book, Ariel, 1987, vol. 2, pp. 326–330
And I do not have it on hand.
As I recall, I also read that researchers discovered this was an earlier custom that was overlaid onto the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students.
See also Eduyot 2:10, and Shibolei HaLeket sec. 235, which relied on it.
By the way, something similar is also said about lighting candles on Hanukkah.
Rabbi Michi, I got to some of the sources.
I think there are 3 questions here:
1. What is the reason for the mourning during the days of the Omer? About this you wrote that there were reasons that preceded the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students, and you attached that to a Mishnah in Eduyot. That is true, and I came across several reasons.
2. A theological question: did the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students cause these days to become days of judgment, or the reverse? (This is like the claim that Tisha B’Av is an accursed day, and therefore several calamities occurred on it.) This is what the reference you gave from the books of Meir Benayahu and Ze’ev Vilnai belongs to (from the Wikipedia entry on the Omer days?).
3. Were the mourning customs actually observed in an earlier historical period? That is, do we know that a thousand years ago people did not cut their hair and did not marry on these days? That was my question, and it seems to me that you did not cite a source for it.
Could you explain what exactly you were trying to prove, and give me a link to the claim itself and not only to the source?
I do not remember where I took the source from (I skimmed several sources).
Regarding the antiquity of the mourning customs, quite a bit has been written about that. See for example the article by Simcha Emanuel in Netuim and more:
Click to access netuim20_emanuel.pdf
I did not understand the last question.
Now someone here mentioned a tradition from Ethiopian Jews (apparently from before the destruction of the First Temple):
התייחסות לסרטוני הערוץ המיסיונרי iGod – תושב”ע ו”מזימות הרבנים”: הטיעונים – המשך שלישי
I do not understand—what does that have to do with this??? That tradition speaks about mourning during the Nine Days, not during the days of the Counting of the Omer.
There is also no reason at all to think that the traditions of Ethiopian Jews predated the destruction of the First Temple.
Even if we were to say that the community had existed there since the First Temple period (and there really is no significant support for that),
the Ethiopian community did not remain frozen in place, and many customs developed over the generations. (And the separation was not total either. The Torah they had was a translation of the Greek translation, which is certainly later.)
Obviously, but even the Nine Days are seemingly a later custom.
M.R., I really am not expert in this. Maybe you are right. I brought it up here only because someone mentioned it and it connected in my mind to this question.
They probably actually died in the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the interpretation that askara is an epidemic was meant to tone down the stories of the revolt, as was common in the Middle Ages, or else it was based on a mistake. Once you understand that, everything becomes reasonable and makes sense.