Leaving the Cave
Lag B'Omer, Emor, and Politics vs. Quietism
And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering—the day after the sabbath—you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week—fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to the LORD. (Leviticus 23:15-16)
Rabbi Yehuda opened and said: How pleasant are the actions of this nation (i.e. the Romans) as they established marketplaces, bridges, and bathhouses. Rabbi Yosei was silent. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai responded and said: Everything that they established, they established only for their own purposes. They established marketplaces to place prostitutes in them; bathhouses to pamper themselves; and bridges to collect taxes from all who pass over them. (Shabbat 33a)
Today is Lag B’Omer, the 33rd day of the 7-week Omer period between Passover and Shavuot. (If you are reading this on Shabbat, it’s the 34th day, the day after Lag B’Omer or Lad B’Omer). Lag B’Omer is neither a Biblical nor rabbinic holiday; but, at least since the 12th century it has become an honorary festival. The non-holiday-holiday celebrates at least two things: a) the abatement of a plague that vanquished 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva who were punished for mistreating one another and b) the yahrzeit of the sage, Shimon bar Yochai, purported author of the Zohar and transmitter of Judaism’s mystical lineage. While the Omer period is considered a time of mourning, Lag B’Omer is a clearing of joy.
This week, in parashat Emor, we read the commandment to count the Omer. If we think of the commandment to observe the Omer period as one large mitzvah spanning 49 days, a kind of conceptual-performance art piece, it is only complete if we retain both the aspect of mourning and the aspect of celebration, together.
The Omer, and particularly, Lag B’Omer, connect the characters of Rabbi Akiva and Shimon bar Yochai, who are archetypes of two different (extreme) ways of responding to the challenges of worldliness, the political and spiritual difficulties typified (in Jewish tradition) by Rome. Rabbi Akiva is hyper-political, supporting the failed Bar Kochba revolt. He dies fighting a losing battle. Shimon bar Yochai runs away, and hides in a cave, when word of his anti-Roman criticism gets out. Thanks to bar Yochai’s flight, he spends 12 years in mystical study, forging what tradition attributes to him as the Zohar, my namesake. The discovery of the pnimiut HaTorah—the inner depths of the Torah, the inward mysteries of oneself, occurs in a monastery, a hideout. Rabbi Akiva is the activist sage; Shimon Bar Yochai is the quietist.
Rabbi Akiva was known to be a halachic master, a legal acrobat. His nickname was “uprooter of mountains,” because his logical and philological acumen combined with creativity allowed him to uncover new readings of text that seemed totally at odds with the plain meaning—and yet were necessary to preserve the relevance of Torah. But Rabbi Akiva was perhaps unsuccessful despite his greatness. No amount of erudition could help him make the right political decision (at least where rightness is judged on the basis of efficacy). His messianic fervor was belied by subsequent historical events. That’s worth considering. Moreover, if thousands of his students couldn’t get along with each other, couldn’t give each other dignity, what was the end of his brilliance? The 24,000 students who died in a plague were killed because they treated each other like enemies. The same righteous anger that animated their passion for legal debate, and for polemic against Rome, turned against itself. Rabbi Akiva enters the Pardes, the mythic orchard of divine knowledge, in peace, and leaves in peace, yet whatever tranquility he might have had—it doesn’t help him make peace in the world. What starts as a principled opposition to Rome becomes an auto-immune disease.
Where Bar Yochai sublimates his antagonism towards Rome (for a time) by going off grid, Rabbi Akiva’s thousands of students sublimate their antagonism towards Rome by directing it at themselves. One clinical definition of depression is anger turned against itself. In the case of Bar Yochai, and many hermit-mystics in general, we might say that the discovery of inwardness is born from the depressive disappointment with the world as it is. The mystic is often a recluse. On the other hand, Rabbi Akiva’s students may be seeking to avoid their sense of futility in fighting Rome by taking out their anger against one another, sublimating their political rage into a rage to win legal debates and discussion. They displace their frustrated agency into textual debate. If they can’t have sovereignty in the world, they can at least be sovereigns at the seminar table.
When Shimon Bar Yochai leaves the cave, he is angered by what he sees; he’s sentenced to return to the cave, because his eyes burn up all they encounter. His mystical knowledge doesn’t seem to make him better equipped at coping with everydayness. At best, mystical understanding is neutral, showing that even after 12 years the firebrand hasn’t changed his personality. At worst, it’s negative: heightened focus on interiority and transcendence are in conflict with the world, and exacerbate bar Yochai’s conflict with Rome. Like Rabbi Akiva’s students, bar Yochai’s anger is indiscriminate, directed at Jew and non-Jew alike. What saves him, in the end, is the realization that worldly endeavors can have transcendent ends—he sees a man gathering myrtle to honor Shabbat. If not for Shabbat, some end outside himself, bar Yochai would disdain the myrtle gatherer. Bar Yochai’s conversion from anti-worldly mystic to engaged mystic turns on his experience of Shabbat as something that is both worldly and other-worldly. Shabbat is a bridge.
According to Kabbalistic tradition, the 33rd day of the Omer corresponds to the divine attribute of Hod she’b’Hod—humility within humility, splendor within splendor, singularity within singularity. What connects the attribute of Hod to Rabbi Akiva, Shimon Bar Yochai, and this week’s Torah reading, Emor? The first link is that Hod is also the divine attribute associated with Aaron, the high priest. Why? As I suggested last week, the holy of holies is a non-place, a place that doesn’t exist, and yet which we can enter nonetheless. It is like the imaginary number, a flickering between the real and the unreal. Hod’s beauty and humility are connected to the fact that it is unrepeatable and unrepresentable, an unknowable by scientific method and rational discourse. Netzach, Hod’s foil, is all about endurance, sustainability, reproducibility. Hod is about the moment that never comes again. Netzach is constancy; Hod is fleetingness. The priest is associated with Hod, because the priest discovers God in singularity; the holy is none other than the moment which is already gone, the apparition of God that is already a memory. Priests serve the people in the moment; their concern isn’t anything else, not transmission, not sustainability, not the world outside their bubble, their enclave. The first cave is the Sanctuary.
When Shimon bar Yochai and his son flee to a cave to learn Torah, they bury themselves up to their necks in sand—they approximate death (like the High Priest on Yom Kippur). Their lack of corporeality corresponds to that of the priests for whom purity largely means an overcoming of the body. To return to the world and come to respect it, the mystic and the priest must become embodied, must learn from the myrtle gatherer.
The occupational hazard of priests is that they are people-pleasers. The occupational hazard of prophets is that they are God-pleasers (and thus, people-condemners). Priests are largely forbidden to mourn, to express emotion. Prophets are filled with emotion, often to a breaking point. If priests are too stoic, prophets are ticking bombs. Think of bar Yochai’s flight into the cave as the priestly solution to the unruliness of emotion and the body. Think of Rabbi Akiva’s fight against Rome, culminating in his ultimate martyrdom, as an enthusiasm that might have been more effectively contained, and an overestimation of the body’s capacities. Think of Rabbi Akiva’s masses of students as mini-prophets all self-destroying as each thinks he is right. Their unwillingness to compromise, listen, or give honor to their own classmates reflects the passion of a prophet who has no time to hear the other side, because his body is in excruciating pain.
But the perennial challenge is to find the balance between Moses and Aaron, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, leader and mystic, law giver and drop-out, prose and poetry. The Omer period is a time of waiting and preparation for the giving of the Torah; in the middle of it, we invoke the memory of Shimon bar Yochai, who had to wait a total of thirteen years before re-entering society. The juxtaposition is pointed: while we wait to receive Revelation, for Bar Yochai, Revelation is the easy part; the hard part is finding a way to make peace with the world, to express his learning from the cave in ways that are life affirming.
From the combination of Rabbi Akiva and Shimon Bar Yochai, flawed heroes, we learn that a person can be wise and politically mistaken, wise and ethically challenged, wise and psychologically limited. The ability to read Torah creatively and to discover the supernal mysteries is a great but insufficient aspiration. Or as Hannah Arendt put it, politics concerns those questions for which answers don’t exist. Even the cave, even the pardes, won’t supply us with answers to those questions for which there aren’t any.
Neither fight or flight, neither righteous anger nor stoic equanimity, can save us from the Rome without and the Rome within. Vayikra (Leviticus) doesn’t tell us to solve the human condition, but to try our best, fail, repent, learn, and try again. To leave the cave, we must take it with us.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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Beautiful, thank you.
Beautiful, thank you.