Well … I went to Meron last night. First time in four years.
At first it was frustrating, because our town is one of the main pickup points to Meron, because many take transportation here and then switch to shuttles to Meron. There were a few buses from our town to Meron, but if you could not get tickets, like most people, officially, you couldn’t go. For whatever reason, you couldn’t simply hop on to the shuttles.
Well … that is if you don't act like an Israeli.
When I told a friend (Israeli) that I was planning on going with my older kids via the shuttles, he told me what I had already heard: The area is completely closed down and surrounded by police. You’ll never get in.
HAH! I said! Stop being such an American!
So, my kids and I went, got to the area, walked in as if we knew where we were going, past the barricades and the officers, and straight to the buses. For whatever reason, the area was empty (which made NO sense, given the time), and the bus driver waved us over and said with a smile, “I’ve been waiting for you!” So, we hopped on, and the bus took off!
We made it shortly before sunset, and was able to attend the first (and best) of the bonfire lightings.
The organization that went into it really amazed me, as always, and I was very impressed by the concern for safety (obviously, after what occurred four years ago).
We danced and sang, watched people, and finally returned home at midnight.
I felt bad for the people who we returned with who had to continue on to the center of the country. They wouldn’t be getting home until three to four hours later.
Anyhow …
I heard a very nice talk by Rav Breitowitz from Ohr Somayach.
As we know, there is a tradition that the students of Rebbe Akiva stopped dying on Lag B’Omer. And as we also know, the reason that was given for the plague that killed them was that they did not treat each other with proper kavod (honor).
Of course, many people misinterpret this to mean that they were mean to each other, but such a thing could not be possible. These were students of Rebbe Akiva; they were above such petty things.
Rav Breitowitz notes that the word Kavod (honor) contains the same letters for the word in Hebrew for Kaved “heavy.” In English, in order to show a person is an expert in their field, we would say, “He’s a heavyweight …” or something similar. In Hebrew as well, being “heavy” shows a certain "depth" that a person has.
Sometimes, and I’m speaking about all of you, certainly not me, we look at other people, and we speak to them with a smile, we treat them well, we’re nice to them, we do chesed for them, but, we do so as a higher person looking down at a lower person. We look at them as people who lack a certain depth that we have.
This is where the students of Rebbe Akiva failed, says Rav Breitowitz. They treated each other with respect and treated each other properly. However, each one, on the inside, couldn’t see that the other had as much depth, if not more, than he. And with that attitude, they couldn’t learn from each other. And because of this flaw, they could not be the leaders to transmit Torah from one generation to the next.
Rav Breitowitz also added another good point.
Twenty-four thousand people died in that plague and we have a 33-day mourning period (halachically speaking). Six million people people died in the Holocaust, yet, we have no (Torah or Rabbinic) mandate of mourning for them. Why is this?
First off, we have to understand what mourning is in the Torah. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day of sadness and learning history. But there is no “lesson learned.” We don’t say, “It’s because of this sin and that sin, which brought the Holocaust, and therefore we need to work on fixing it.” Part of the reason is because it was invented by the secular world, which does not acknowledge such a world view. But mainly, because we have no clear answer to what we did wrong.
During this 33-day period, we DO know what went wrong. So the mourning isn’t so much as period of sadness, it’s a period of looking at what went wrong AND working on fixing it up and growing from it.
So, with that, I wish you all an amazing Shabbos!