Q&A: Lag BaOmer, a holy custom or a pagan ritual?
Lag BaOmer, a holy custom or a pagan ritual?
Question
I would be glad to know the Rabbi’s opinion about Lag BaOmer: what is special about this day, what is the custom of lighting bonfires, and whether in your view it came from paganism, and whether the secrets of the Torah were really revealed on it and it is indeed the “festival of the giving of the Oral Torah.”
Answer
This is a popular folk holiday and has no special significance. One can of course load onto it whatever one wants. You can use the opportunity to engage in mysticism and its meaning—why not?
The bonfires are a folk custom, and there is no point in looking for meanings in it. There aren’t any. What is done in Meron is nothing but a power struggle between Hasidic groups who use this custom and pile onto it mountains of nonsense and imaginary holiness just to glorify their rabbi and rebbe. Nothing beyond that.
Discussion on Answer
What exactly is the problem with pagan rituals from third-world countries?
There is some axiom in the “enlightened” world that any social custom accepted only in primitive societies and not in enlightened, advanced Western society is repulsive and stupid. That is nothing more than cultural condescension that thinks only what we do is good and beautiful. There should be no significance to the question of in which societies the custom is practiced: if there is an essential problem with it, then it is no good, and if not—whoever wants may adopt it without concern.
Are you serious? The prohibitions against sorcery, idolatry, consulting ghosts, divination. And that’s without even mentioning the positions of rationalists like Maimonides, for whom the World to Come is acquired only through acquiring wisdom.
And even according to the Haredi outlook, there is neglect of Torah study here.
Lately there’s been a fashion of attacking everything Western, rational, and “enlightened.” Beyond the fact that it’s obvious the writer wouldn’t go live in a third-world country. To reach such absurd extremes and justify paganism—which there is just a whitewashed name for idolatry, originating in the customs of primitive farmer idol-worshipers. Soon the even more bizarre part, which resembles more the progressive side they hate, will start worshiping the Baals and Asherahs just to poke a finger in the eye of the West and of progress.
As in every area, norms from general society find their way into religious society with a slight delay (see, for example, sandals, mustaches, and duffel coats).
So after the identity politics of the postmodernist left became the central axis of our faith-based coalition, they keep going and adopt the full postmodernist narrative—rejecting modernity with its rationality and science, and accepting pagan ceremonies as equal in value to scientific inquiry and investigation.
It’s not exactly like that. The celebrations in Meron are ultimately what is nowadays called in the yeshiva world (and as a pretty fresh graduate of it, I know)—“holy stonedness,” a time to leave the yeshiva and dance even without any connection to this or that rebbe. Personally, I’m pretty repelled by things like that, and especially dancing around bonfires which always, strangely, remind me of pagan rituals from third-world countries. In any case, whenever I would voice my opinion, it wouldn’t be warmly received (even though I studied in one of the best Lithuanian yeshivas in the yeshiva world), and still phrases like “the giving of the Oral Torah” and the like were on everyone’s lips. I wasn’t always able to respond without coming off as a heretic.