Lag B'Omer: Holiday of Synthesis

Finding the Happy Medium Between Hyper-Politicization and Quietism

Today is Lag B'Omer, a folkloric Jewish holiday that celebrates two things: 1) the life of Shimon Bar Yochai, purported author of my namesake, the Zohar 2) the abatement of a plague that killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva. How do these two relate to one another?

Rabbi Akiva and Shimon Bar Yochai both opposed Rome. Rabbi Akiva opposed Rome by backing the failed Bar Kochba revolt. Shimon Bar Yochai opposed it by speaking out, but then running away and hiding in a cave for 13 years.

Rabbi Akiva ends up dying a martyr's death at hands of Romans. He was not only politically active, but arguably politically incorrect; his battle failed. Bar Yochai's quietism didn't succeed in fending off Rome, either, but there's a happy medium between the two.

The students of Rabbi Akiva fought with one another. Many historians describe the death of empires and civilizations as the result of internal division. The reason Rome succeeded, as it were, is because the students of Rabbi Akiva didn't treat one another with respect.

Is it a coincidence? No. People who are very politically active tend to be quite polarized and polarizing. The same tendency that leads Akiva to fight Rome leads his students to fight with each Other.

Just as one who holds a hammer sees only nails, one who holds a friend-enemy distinction sees enemies everywhere.

Bar Yochai is also oppositional, but he sublimates it, by leaving the city. This is also not healthy. Is Rome really all bad? Every city is mixed. Most things are good and bad.

The celebration of Bar Yochai's life is connected to the abatement of the plague that killed Akiva's students. Bar Yochai sees a man bringing myrtle to honor the Sabbath and decides materialism isn't all bad. You can use the material world to open up the spiritual realm.

Bar Yochai stops thinking in terms of binaries and either/or. Had R. Akiva's students thought more dialectically, they might have respected one another more, and then the Temple would not have been destroyed.

Rome is a stand-in for scale. When things scale, there's more impact, for better and for worse (bar Yochai initially objects to bridges, aqueducts, and marketplaces). But you can't simply be against scale without becoming a "cave-dweller," clearly not a sustainable option.

The cave to which Bar Yochai returns is both the womb and the tomb. That's not a good place to live; it's ok for a shivasana. But 13 years??

Just as it's wrong to draw a sword all the time, it's wrong to retreat from the arena. So the question is how to be worldly without being captured by worldliness.

If religion has nothing to do with politics, it's like a cave. If religion is subordinate to politics, we often end up supporting bar Kochbas, making false messiahs of political impresarios.

Rabbi Akiva and Shimon Bar Yochai are both close, attentive, creative readers of Torah, finding a kind of “omnisignificance” in it. But both can go astray in opposite ways.

The one sees every word as a sign telling us to ACT NOW in some hyper specific way. The other sees every word as telling us to find patterns that make a cave of the text, shut off from the realm of action or moral clarity.

Akiva's students hate each other because they don't agree. Bar Yochai’s companion in the cave is his own son; there's love there, but on the flip side, maybe no viewpoint diversity. The chevruta-relationship between them is more top-down than a relationship of striving equals.

Last point: Akiva is a convert or a late bloomer, who begins learning at 40. He represents the notion that you can engineer a different life for yourself through striving. That same ambition and willfulness arguably leads him astray in his political choice of Bar Kochba.

It also leads his students to become so willful as to be obstinate.

Meanwhile, Bar Yochai, who leaves the city, is associated with the natural world rather than with civilization. This, too, has its limits, because it leads to a lack of willfulness. Not coincidentally, the holiday to which he is attracted is Sabbath, which is a day of rest.

The turning point from mourning to joy which Lag B’Omer celebrates is the turning point from hatred of the world to love of the world, from hatred of one's opponents to love of “argument for the sake of heaven.”

The synthesis that prepares for Revelation is that between the one-sidedness of hyper-politicization and the one-sidedness of “beautiful-soul-ism.” The Torah must direct us to act, but it must do so while preserving the dignity of our ideological opponents.

P.S.—Happy to share my podcast conversation with Matt Levine, author of Money Stuff. And also, Caleb Ontiveros interviews me on Stoicism, Heraclitus, Judaism, and more, for the Stoa.

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