I want to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a happy National Crouton Day.
Today is also National Fruit Cocktail Day. One observes National Fruit Cocktail Day by eating a canned fruit cocktail, discussing fruit cocktails with friends, and using “#FruitCocktailDay” when posting on social-media. May is also Motorcycle Awareness Month, National Salad Month, and National Chocolate Custard Month.
These holidays, and nearly fifteen-hundred others are all listed on NationalCalendarDay.com, an “authoritative” list of celebratory days, months to raise awareness for causes, international days, and ways for each day of the year to have its own unique flavor and distinct purpose. Many of the dates on the website’s holiday calendar were submitted by trade groups interested in promoting their product, but some individuals too are extreme in their festive creativity. Adrienne Sioux Koopersmith has invented almost two-thousand “official” holidays and hundreds, possibly thousands of others that she has kept private. Among her more successful and whimsical holidays is National Dealin’ with the Dentist Day (January 16th) and Lost Penny Day, when the pennies stashed in cans and draws get placed back in circulation (celebrated, of course, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday).
I heard about Koopersmith on the radio last week and in response gave a silent curmudgeonly “harumph!” What a silly woman she is inventing holidays on a whim to express some sentiment that has momentary meaning for her. How blessed we are, in the community gathered here, who understand the nature of sacred times that come from God and that are shared by an entire community:
אֵ֚לֶה מועֲד֣י ה׳ מִקראֵ֖י ק֑דש אֲשֶר־תִקרא֥ו אֹתָ֖ם בְמועֲדֽם׃
We have a list of מֲועד֣י ה׳ appointed seasons, declared by God for us to celebrate as a community, Shabbat is first on that list, and the other holidays that give a contour to our religious lives and shape our year are not holidays that were invented to sell products but days that are sanctified by God and listed in the Torah. Observers of contemporary Jewish life have noted that among many modern Jews without a robust form of Jewish observance or a connection to a thick Jewish community, the Jewish lifecycle, bris, bat mitzvah, wedding etc., have replaced the Jewish calendar as a source of Jewish connection and meaning and as a way to give a shape to our religious experiences. How fortunate are we to still have a Jewish calendar!
And yet, as we have discussed on other occasions, there is a human element in the sanctification of time. Indeed, the Torah does say, “These are the festivals of the Lord, the holy occasions.” But then the Torah says, “as you declare them in their season.”
What does it mean, “as you declare them?” Rabbi Mier Levush ben Yehiel Michel, the 19th century Torah commentator known as the “Malbim” explained that there are two ways, in Tanakh that the word “call” – kuf, resh, aleph is used. There are things that have independent existence and then come to acquire a different name. The prefix “lamed” is used to indicate this sort of calling. When God names elements of creation, a lamed is used, “vayikra l’or yom” – God called the light, “day.” God created light and afterwards God gave a name to the light. In contrast, our verse says “asher tirku otam” the holy occasion “as they are proclaimed” with the word “et” instead of a lamed meaning that our declaration of the date determines when the holidays, and their unique sanctities, with occur. The rabbis of old went so far as to say, noting this formulation in the Torah, that even an erroneous declaration of a day as a holiday is efficacious. The holiday is when we say it is.
When the new month was declared by the witnesses testifying before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem that they saw the new moon in the sky the night before, the human role in controlling the calendar was obvious. Now that we have a fixed calendar, our control over time is less obvious, but it still exists. When we accept Shabbat early, as we do in this community during the spring and summer, the sanctity of Shabbat, and the serious prohibitions of Shabbat, begin for us even when the sun is still in the sky.
And, we sometimes add days to the Jewish calendar as well in the spirit of אֲשֶרִ־תק֥ראו אֹתָ֖ם days that we have decided have special meaning and significance.
Tomorrow is… Mother’s Day! Perhaps the most successful invented holiday. It’s lucrative for Hallmark and those who sell flowers…but it also reminds us to think of mothers and no excuse to be nice to your mother can be a bad thing.
But tomorrow is also Lag BaOmer, a holiday with a shockingly fluid meaning in Jewish history that has assumed prominence surprisingly recently.
Lag BaOmer is not mentioned in the Torah and it is not mentioned in the Talmud. The first mention of Lag BaOmer is found among Medieval works of halakhah and minhag from Provence. They discuss the day as a break or end of the period of mourning between Pesach and Shavuot. The Talmud itself says that many thousands of students of Rabbi Akiva died between Pesach and Shavuot. And one thousand years after Rabbi Akiva, scholars in Provence wrote about a tradition that the students ceased to die on Lag BaOmer, the 33rd day of Sefirat HaOmer. It was not a day of celebration. It was an end or a pause to a period of quasi-mourning.
Centuries ago, this rationale was questioned. Why celebrate because the students of Rabbi Akiva ceased to die. They ceased to die because they were already dead. According to the Talmudic tradition that records the deaths of Rabbi Akiva’s students between Pesach and Shavuot, they stopped dying because they were already dead, every single one of them. That is not a reason to celebrate.
Centuries after the first recorded mention of Lag BaOmer we find references to the day as the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, one of the great tanna’im, scholars of the Mishnah, and the individual credited as the author of the Zohar, a foundational text of the Jewish mystical tradition. That element of Lag BaOmer, a celebration of the life of Rabbi Shimon and of the Jewish mystical tradition has become central to the day.
In 1925, a young yeshiva student named Dov Mayani wrote a letter to a friend from the Hevron Yeshiva, which was still located in Hevron in 1925 – it has existed and thrived in Jerusalem since it relocated there following the 1929 massacres in Hevron. In this letter, Mayani, who had been raised in Lithuania, shares how Lag BaOmer in the Land of Israel differed from how it was celebrated in Lithuania.
This letter was translated into English and published online earlier this week and it is a fascinating glimpse into the forms of Judaism that were practiced nearly a century ago, and the ways in which a Litvak, a member of an elite yeshiva community, experienced and described the form of Judaism practiced by the mystically inclined Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael.
“Today is Lag BaOmer. Today is the day that the entire yeshiva was desperately waiting for, since they are now able to remove the mask of hair which was covering their faces. You should know that here there are more stringent customs. Starting from Pesach, no man may raise a hand to touch his beard. It grow and increased until it mature; the hair sprouts and there is no respite from it. Picture for yourself that even my bear got big and wide.”
“On the day of Lag Ba’omer they gather from the entire land mostly from the Hasidim, Sefardim, and the Bucharians, at the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Meron, near Tzefat and they make a big fire and they light candles and oil…They throw all kinds of clothes into the fire, expensive items, and notes with request on them. This custom, although opposed by many of the Gedolim, still remained strong and the masses believe in it and its power. It used to be a yom too of Hasidim and Anshe Ma’aseh, but now it has the character described above and it is certainly not appropriate to be excited about it.”
In 1925, the customs of Lag BaOmer were unfamiliar to a Lithuanian yeshiva student visiting Israel for the first time. In recent years, the festivities at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Smaller bonfires across Israel excite children, terrify their parents, and endanger asthmatics. What to make of all this?
Adrienne Kooperman is not wrong to link days of the year with sentiments and ideas that are worthy of being spread. It is important to deal with the dentist and take care of your teeth. Why not a day on the calendar to remind ourselves to do so? And she is correct that the calendar is not a closed book. New dates can be added and new meanings can be given to old dates.
She is wrong in thinking anything of this sort can have any impact whatsoever without a community that celebrates and observes the holidays with you. Celebrating holidays, observing traditions within a community does not stifle creativity, on the contrary it creates a substrate in which creativity and discovery can blossom.
Lag BaOmer is a perfect example of a day that emerges from obscurity centuries after the close of the Talmud and becomes the occasion for what may be the largest annual collective religious ceremony in Israel. And the twentieth century Jewish holidays, Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikkaron, Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, and Yom Yerushalayim, because of their newness, and because their observance is perpetrated through a community of human beings with evolving needs and shifting perspectives, will also evolve in their meaning and expression. The way in which new meanings are discovered for old practices, and new practices evolve to fill in the counters of our lives of Torah and mitzvot is a source of vitality and sign of the dynamism and energy inherent in traditional Jewish life.
So Happy Lag BaOmer, Happy National Crouton Appreciation Day, don’t forget to call your mother tomorrow, and Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 