Lag BaOmer Nightmare: Mourning Meron

I started getting messages and calls around eight o’clock last night. “Something happened in Meron!” I couldn’t say “my heart skipped a beat”; “no heartbeat” would be more accurate.

When Shavuot (the festival that celebrates the Revelation at Sinai) comes around in just a couple of weeks, we will read about the unprecedented moment of direct experiential “contact with G-d”—the only such moment in Jewish tradition. What is downplayed, however, was its backlash. Newly freed slaves, they were barely managing to keep it together for all the obvious reasons. Psychologically, one could see how throwing the Sinai Revelation into the mix was a breaking point. This rupture could be understood as a “Pavlovian” moment of transmarginal inhibition, or TMI, in response to overwhelming stimuli, resulting in impaired neurophysiological, psychological, and cognitive functioning.

While the Holiday doesn’t highlight this aspect, the sages of the Talmud didn't downplay it. To the contrary, they called it as they saw it. They named it Death. “Parcha Nishmasam” - they understood what happened as the "fleeing" of all the souls, i.e., the death of all who witnessed the giving of Torah at Sinai.

Yesterday, a part of me died in the moments between hearing of a major “incident” in the city of Meron, where my twin daughters were among hundreds of thousands joining an annual “Pilgrimage” to the northern part of Israel marking the anniversary of the passing of the founder of Kabbalah, and the relief of knowing they were safe and unharmed.

Time froze within that brief interim space of “not knowing.” As I fumbled with WhatsApp, I distinctly remember wondering about the whereabouts of my own body.

My heart was not in a skipping place. Perhaps the term “near-death experience” works better in the ways it can encompass both the victim, and those who are spared but still witness a catastrophic event. For the victim, the term is most commonly used to describe a person who can actually recall what it felt like to no longer be alive after miraculously recovering from a deathly illness. For a bystander, it can be used more literally, the connotation still being a close brush with danger, thus begging the question: how close does one need to be? Were the images of lifeless bodies on stretchers, witnessed by my daughters and their classmates, close enough? What of a parent, currently overseas, whose child perished so senselessly last night, who even from the greatest distance is the closest by far? What of the parent who “doesn’t know”? Might not he, and the one who recovers from a grave illness, and the freed slave whose soul briefly left his body at the foot of the mountain, not share some fragments of understanding over this intersecting experience? Does not the proximity of death itself bring them near to each other?

I will set that aside in favor of what I do know. This year Shavuot showed up two weeks early, on Lag Baomer, disguised as Tisha B'Av.

I still think the sages captured it best. “Parcha Nishmasan.” The concept of the soul leaving the body is nuanced. One's soul needn’t actually leave the body to experience a loss of soulfulness, or to grapple soulfully with loss itself. As we must do in moments like these.

The truth is that I feel a strange chaotic mixture of extreme gratitude, deep sadness for the victims, and helplessness at not being able to be there for my children. If it wasn’t for Covid, I would have booked the first flight to Tel Aviv to be close to them, hold them, and comfort them as I notify them of my final decision to never again let go. Except that I can’t hold them right now, and I know that I will have to let them go, yet again, at least enough to have it look that way.

Until then, this is my hug.

I cannot stop thinking about all the funerals that are hurriedly happening before Shabbat, a Jewish means of ensuring that the souls of the departed don’t remain in the spiritually unbearable state of “limbo.” I can’t stop thinking of all the families who will absorb that very limbo, doomed to wait forever for someone who will never return.

Lag Baomer, as I knew it, won’t ever return either. A holiday that marked the end of a plague that had claimed the lives of thousands of the students of Rabbi Akiva will forever be marred by the twisted irony of this still unfolding tragedy.

However, in endeavoring to speak to you before Shabbos as a Chosid with an O, I want to try and conclude on a more positive note.

Notwithstanding the tragic resurgence of Covid in India and the mounting death tolls, there has been a clear and dramatic improvement in many other countries, the United States and Israel among them. While we are not yet “out of the woods,” the effectiveness of the vaccines has shifted the momentum dramatically.

And yes, please do “take a moment” to “stop” and “think about it.” Covid IS a plague. However, I will forever associate this year's Lag Baomer as a defining moment, a turning point of sorts that will hopefully be the beginning of the end of this deadly plague.

Please join me in praying for the health of close to two hundred wounded, some critically. I know you will join me as well in extending these prayers of consolation for those mourning the sudden and tragic death of their loved ones.

“Hamakon Yenachem Etchem Betoch Shaar Avaylay Tzion Ve Yerushalayim/May you be comforted amongst the Mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Meanwhile, take the first chance you have to hug your children and let them know how much you love them.