The Counting
It sounds like a riddle. In what way does the sacrifice of a sheaf of grain connect to the deepest questions of theodicy-why do the innocent suffer? The answer, oddly, is found in the period in the Jewish calendar known as the Omer, the seven-week timeframe between Pesach and Shavuot. when that offering had once been made daily in the Temple in Jerusalem. Almost two thousand years ago, in the span between the two holidays, the Talmud reports that 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva suddenly died.
As the planet enters its second year of pandemic, the story of Rabbi Akiva’s students cannot help but conjure up images of spreading devastation and agonizing helplessness. But medical reasons for the widespread deaths were seemingly shunned by the ancient rabbis, as were potential political explanations (for instance, that the students were incidental victims of Roman oppression).
Instead, the Talmud offers a stark rebuke in accounting for the tragedy: “Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of students…and they all died in one period of time, because they did not treat each other with respect.” The pattern of linking calamity to moral failings can be found elsewhere in Talmudic texts, including a well-known assertion that the destruction of the Temple during the Ronan period was because of sinat chinam, “the groundless hatred of one Jew for another.” Could ancient Jews have been so toxic in their behaviours that they could trigger mass death and destruction? Is this historical fact or religious myth making?
Rabbi Akiva is believed to have backed an unsuccessful uprising led by the Jewish military leader Bar Kochba against Rome around 132-35 C.E. If many of Akiva’s students joined him in the revolt and were killed, then perhaps the story of the deaths of the 24,000 is just a thinly veiled way of alluding to their demise in battle. But the Talmud’s framing of the narrative may have its own inner rationale. Rather than resorting to the usual justifications--that they were done in by pestilence or Roman brutality--the rabbis revert to a deeper map of existence, the one that says we are all prone at any minute to oblivion, and that in fact we live and die by the love, compassion and respect that we offer to others.
Likely the rabbis were fully aware of the consequences of disease or war, but chose to turn that which was out of their control—be it military subjugation or the mysteries of contagion-and recall for their readers the only thing over which we have any agency: how to behave in the short time allotted to us. So, despite the harshness of the rabbinic rhetoric and the problematic implication of cause and effect in their summary, we can discern between the lines a path for inner renewal.
For it turns out, as the modern French thinker Albert Camus wrote in his 1947 novel The Plague, that in the end the real disease is internal: “Everyone has it inside himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, can ever be immune.” For Camus, affliction constitutes the inherent condition of living. Both Covid-19 and the Omer plague remind us that fragility is not a flaw in the system we call life; it is the very underpinning of that system.
At any time, when you least expect it, what we construe as the solidity of our world – our jobs; our most sacred relationships; our sense of self; not to mention our bodies, our immunity – all of this can be compromised in an instant. As the philosopher Alain de Botton notes, “the actual historical incidents we call plagues are merely concentrations of a universal precondition, dramatic instances of a perpetual rule: that we are vulnerable…to a bacillus, an accident or the actions of our fellow humans. We assume that we have been granted immortality…[but] for Camus, being alive always was and will always remain an emergency, as one might put it, truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition’.”
On Thursday night April 29, the holiday of Lag Ba’omer comes to remind us of both our precariousness and our possibility. A medieval tradition cites this 33rd day of the Omer period as the one when Rabbi Akiva’s students ceased to die. Everything bad passes, but it is not in the nature of things for our material existence to last forever. What can be permanent, however, is our legacies, the principles that we stood for and the values we bequeathed to others. So, on Lag Ba’omer, we celebrate fragility; we honour the fleeting nature of our time; we remember the passing of those we love.
The mitzvah of Sefirat Haomer, the forty-nine day tallying of the Omer, is there to create a sense of anticipation from Passover, our time of liberation, to Shavuot, the time when we received the Torah and began to forge out a singular moral path which changed the entire world. Not just these seven weeks, but life itself is a counting, as we add up what matters and try to discern the wheat from the chaff. It is Rabbi Akiva, after all, who taught that “love your neighbour” is the central mitzvah of the Torah. In a time where we have all felt visceral insecurity in the mundane acts of touching, talking, breathing, Lag Ba’omer reaffirms that there is joy beyond mourning and redemption that rises from loss. To live Jewishly means to understand the delicate balance of all things, to pray for the restoration of peace and healing in a fractured world, and to add up our days and try our utmost to make each one count.