Lag BaOmer: The Fires and the Light of the Zohar

Good evening, dear friends. Tonight’s lecture is dedicated first of all to the memory of […], and of my brother, Rabbi Shalom Benizri. And since this is also the hilloula of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes, we associate our lesson with him as well, with a ner lit in his memory. I will explain the meaning of this ner, since it is the central theme of Lag BaOmer. We are interrupting the series we had begun on Mishlei (Proverbs), because Thursday evening is Lag BaOmer, and we are going to commemorate two important events, so to speak. You know that in this chol hamoed (intermediate period) separating Pesach from Shavuot, the task is to prepare the Jewish people to recover what it lost during those 210 years of slavery in Egypt. For no one comes out of an exile unscathed. One survives an exile, but one carries away many kelipot, many husks, many of the failings of the civilizations in whose midst we lived.

That is why, even now that, with the help of Hashem, we find ourselves once again on our own land, we have still not managed to break down the walls of our differences and recover the unity of our essence through our values and our land. And this was precisely the message of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai to the exiles of the future. In what way? I began by saying that in this stretch of time separating us from the revelation of the Torah, there is a period of mourning — a mourning that forbids us all festivity and all music, that forbids us to cut our hair, to shave, to wear a new garment, or to hold weddings.

The truce comes on the thirty-third day of the Omer. Paradoxically, as […] says, it is the day after lev: lev, the heart, has the numerical value of thirty-two. When we have recovered the language of the heart, we can observe the truce in the mourning for the plague that devastated twenty-four thousand disciples of Rabbi Akiva. What did they die of? Of not having maintained respectful relations with one another. They did not respect each other. And why did they not…? You know, at the same time as the truce in this death that ravaged twenty-four thousand in the ranks of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples, there is a historical background: the revolt of Bar Kokhba. Bar Kokhba could not bear Rome’s grip on the Land of Israel.

He held that Israel had a right to independence on its own territory, to conduct its life in accordance with its values and its identity, and he took up arms against Rome. In this he was backed and supported by Rabbi Akiva. And you know that Rabbi Akiva is a monument — a monument of the Torah. It has been said that Rabbi Akiva reached the fifty degrees of knowledge, a level that Moshe Rabbenu, peace be upon him, had not attained: he reached the forty-ninth. We too are accustomed to count only forty-nine days, because the task is to recover the full dimension of man in his middot (character traits), in his way of being, so that he is fit to integrate the teaching of the Torah.

For G-d hastened to tear the Jewish people away from Egypt when only one degree of tum’ah (impurity) remained to it. In Egypt it had sunk down toward the fiftieth degree of timtum — the dulling, the conditioning imposed by Egypt’s very grip upon the people of Israel, meant to eliminate it altogether. He saved it in extremis, and He gave it every latitude, day after day, to rebuild within itself that human dimension capable of receiving the flames of the Torah. Rabbi Akiva, however, did attain that level of fifty degrees of knowledge. Why? Because he was ben gerim, a descendant of converts. And this degree of the ger, the convert — of whom the Torah tells us, “You shall love the ger,” because he brings an element that is missing from the whole, the element of ben adam, that which completes man — this degree Rabbi Akiva possessed. And this is why, when Moshe ascends Mount Sinai into the celestial sphere, he finds G-d placing crowns upon the letters. He says to Him: “What are You doing there?”

He answered him: “Wait — there is someone who will come much later, who will appear much later, and who, through his Oral Law, through his development of the Oral Law, will expound upon every crown of the Torah” — that is, the tag, the simple stroke that crowns a letter of the Torah — “tilei tilim of halakhot, heaps upon heaps of laws, a multitude of rules for living.” So Moshe says to Him: “Then just give it to him; entrust Your Torah to him. Why me?” He says: “No. First, the time is not right; the era is not favorable. And second, you have the Written Law. The Written Law — no one disputes it; there is only the way to read it, only the way to transcribe it.”

The Oral Law opens many doors, because the Oral Law is the Torah measured to each person’s perception. And so there is an evolution in the interpretation of the Oral Law that only Rabbi Akiva could indeed bring forth. Now Rabbi Akiva’s life was somewhat modeled on that of Moshe Rabbenu. For forty years Rabbi Akiva was a man of the street, an am ha’aretz (unlearned man) — by choice. One rabbi says that he remained an am ha’aretz deliberately, because he did not want to be disappointed by the conduct of the students inside the yeshivah. He wanted to reach a certain maturity so as not to have to judge them, and when he felt strong enough, he threw himself into study for forty years. He lived to 120, and when he had passed eighty, he then imparted his teaching to twenty-four thousand disciples who, unfortunately, did not get along with one another.

Why? Quite simply because each one thought himself a far more important rav than the other and sought to impose his authority on the other; they would not listen to one another. This is something common — all the more so since, at a certain point, it had been taught that one should not keep company with the amei ha’aretz, the common people. Why should one not keep company with the common people? Because one loses one’s substance by frequenting them, and thereby becomes tamei, impure. So imagine: the talmid chacham kept his distance when speaking to the man of the people. This pride is intolerable. This pride destroyed the twenty-four thousand students who took part in the fight alongside Bar Kokhba for liberation from Roman rule — but they did not succeed.

And when the truce in this devastation came, there were no disciples left. Rabbi Akiva turned to five who had remained somewhat faithful to his teaching and who had retained another way of seeing things. The one who shone among them was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — who, while being a student of Rabbi Akiva and having inherited his erudition in the Oral Law (for the whole Torah bears Rabbi Akiva’s imprint; everything is aliba de-Rabbi Akiva, according to Rabbi Akiva’s view) — Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, having inherited this erudition, opened new horizons for the people through the teaching of the Zohar. And on the thirty-third day of the Omer, the day of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s passing — unlike the fasts observed for the death of Aharon, unlike the fasts observed for the death of Moshe — there is a hilloula of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. On the contrary, there is a wedding, a celebration, on the occasion of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s passing.

Why? Because at the moment this master of the Zohar, this master of mystical thought, departs, it is then that his entire teaching spreads and his students are able to disseminate it. It had just been sealed by his passing; there could no longer be any readjustment anywhere. He had finished transmitting; he withdrew. And the Zohar says that on the day he withdrew, a fire surrounded his whole person. So we understand that two symbols mark the celebration of this day. First, archery by young children, to say that Bar Kokhba’s struggle is not over, and that one must learn to shoot the bow, one must learn to fight. David said this when he lamented the death of Shaul and Yehonatan: “to teach the children of Yehudah the bow” — the art of war, the art of archery, the art of combat. And on the other side, the lighting of fires. What do they recall? Here, before dwelling on the fire and the light spread by the teaching of Rabbi Shimon, we should look again at the origin of this fire and the path it has followed through history down to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Now, the first fire in the Torah is that of the Covenant between the Pieces.

It is that covenant in which we had the two civilizations of the North and the South: for the Promised Land was to lie between Egypt — the Egyptian border in the south — and the river Euphrates in the north. Between them, the Land of Israel was promised first of all to the descendants of Avram, and this land promised to the descendants of Avram was promised through a column of fire. It is the first time fire appears: “And behold, a smoking furnace and a torch of fire” — a smoking furnace, a blazing torch lighting its fires. This is the fire that neither the waters of the Nile can flood and extinguish, nor the waters of the Euphrates overwhelm.

These are the waters of all the pogroms we have endured, whether by way of baptism or by way of forced assimilation and forced conversion. This fire, in short, nearly went out once. When it nearly went out, it nearly went out in Egypt. The Holy One, blessed be He, withdrew it from there and set it in the wilderness, until the moment when Moshe recovers it in a burning bush and carries it within himself. And it is this fire that will accompany those freed from the Egyptian yoke through the wilderness and bring them to the foot of Mount Sinai, where they will find this same fire again, but of another nature. So there are two fires: the fire of the promise of the Land of Israel, and the fire of the covenant between the Holy One, blessed be He, and Israel. And these two fires will later find their place in the Sanctuary.

The fire will burn upon the altar and will never go out. And then there is the fire of the menorah. The fire of the mizbeach is the one that atones for Israel — “vechiper admato amo,” He will atone for His land and His people — the land, and the sins of the people. And then the lamps of the menorah. Among the lamps of the menorah there is the ner maaravi, which always burned, which never went out, from which all the others were lit; and that is the fire of the Torah, which was directed toward the Holy of Holies. So: the fire of the Land of Israel, of Bar Kokhba’s fight for the liberation of the land; the fire of the Torah, which was poorly integrated by the disciples of Rabbi Akiva, who each regarded it as his own exclusive property; and the fire of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the Zohar — the fire of transparency, the one that intimately unites all the elements of the people of Israel through love. That is why this fire is present on the anniversary evening of these discoveries, of this unveiling of the fourth dimension of interpretation in the Torah.

For this fire — when the Temple was destroyed, or even before the Temple was destroyed — was first carried by the kohanim — the word of the instructors, of the educators of the people. Then it passed into the mouths of the prophets, of those who admonished the people and invited it to rediscover the root, the root of the word of creation and of revelation. Unfortunately, in both the one and the other, something is lacking. You know, when one reduces the Torah to the demands of chochmah, of pure reason, one does not manage to understand everything. It is a lost cause. There are four levels of interpretation, four currents of thought, like the four rivers that went out, that issued from the Garden of Eden, and they correspond to the four modes of reading the Torah, to the four modes of life through which man passes. There is peshat: the literal meaning, bare reality, the one we cling to. That is peshat. Then there is remez — or rather, first, derash: allegory, where everything is in images. It teaches that we must not attach ourselves to bare reality, to the nefesh — the nefesh behemit, the biological being — but must try to reach the ruach, the spirit, to see what the text means, its tzurah, its form. And then, at a higher level, one must seek remez: that presence of the neshamah which governs everything without showing itself, which is the breath of the Torah and beyond. And now we arrive at sod. What is sod?

Sod — Yaakov says: “Besodam al tavo nafshi,” into their secret let my soul not enter. But in reality there is a parallelism here between sod and kahal: “bik’halam al techad kevodi,” in their assembly let my honor not be joined. Here, kahal is parallel to sod. This explains what sod is: it is the whole, the sum. To slice up the teaching, to try to cut it, to separate it — then it remains your Torah. […] Each one then states his own Torah as he conceives it, as he understands it. But beware: that is not the Torat Hashem that we sing — “Torat Hashem temimah,” the Torah of Hashem is perfect. The Torah of the Eternal is not a personal Torah; it is not as you interpret it according to your own lights and your own levels of interpretation. No: Torat Hashem is the one that stands beyond, and that is able to gather all the currents together and to unite them.

And yes, when there is perfect union, there is then no longer any distinction between profane and sacred, pure and impure, good and evil. There were two trees in the Garden of Eden. The Etz HaDaat, the Tree of Knowledge, still distinguished between good and evil. In the Etz HaChayim there is no good and evil. Even evil takes part in the fulfillment of man in his totality, because when it is properly handled, when it submits to a higher will in order to grasp it, then it can be good. Sometimes there are unfortunate events that we lament, and it turns out afterward that, on the contrary, they served to carry us to another level of intelligence, of understanding, and that they were an element of good and not of evil.

Except that we, today, when we lose a loved one, cannot yet say “Baruch hatov vehametiv,” blessed is He who is good and bestows good; we say “Baruch Dayan ha’emet,” because we are not yet able to understand that in the passing of a loved one we will begin to live — not through those points we lamented, “negative” ones, in quotation marks — but, on the contrary, we will kindle a light, a fire, an illumination. That is why, as soon as the soul departs from a loved one, a flame is placed at his head. That is what remains, because every being in life carries this flame. The whole question is whether we will, on the contrary, give it more substance so that it endures — and then it is a ner tamid, it becomes a perpetual light — or whether it remains a flickering light that the slightest wind, unfortunately, threatens to put out and to let sink into oblivion.

Well, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, through his teaching, conveyed something to all of Israel. At the very moment when this Torah of Rabbi Akiva, great as it was, could devastate twenty-four thousand students — because each one confined himself to his own exclusive teaching and perception and could not integrate the other, the other talmid chacham, his fellow student, and all the more so the man of the street — Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai comes to illuminate us with a new light, the one that teaches that we can, berachamim, with mercy, with love, spare the world from judgment; and judgment is always the origin of many harms. If we only knew how to open the horizons of the Torah a little, under the auspices of mercy and love, then we would rediscover this Shir HaShirim that Rabbi Akiva himself declared kodesh kodashim. He says that it is the whole Torah: all is kodesh, holy, but the Song of Songs, the hymn to love, the song of love — it is kodesh kodashim, the holy of holies.

How does it end? “Many waters cannot quench love, nor can rivers sweep it away; if a man were to give all the wealth of his house for love…” Many waters — because whoever still separates between the upper waters and the lower waters, there is a hint of idolatry in that, a hint of separation. Havdalah, separation, can only be formal. But in reality, if we say that in the future these differences will disappear, it is because we will reach that thought which integrates even the husk and gives it a purpose — a purpose toward the good. Why? Because […] as they are conceived, it is “ruach chochmah uvinah,” the spirit of wisdom and understanding. That is very good — but without the vision of the Eternal, without the fear of the Eternal, a very strong awe — not fear, a reverential awe — it serves no purpose. This intelligence serves no purpose; on the contrary, it can have harmful effects in its practice. And we know this, because in the world created by the Holy One, blessed be He — “zeh le’umat zeh,” one opposite the other — there is always a tzad nigleh and a tzad nistar: a revealed side and a hidden side. There is a good aspect and an aspect that at first sight seems bad to us. There is an aspect that seems sweet to us and that we are happy to take in, and another that makes our life bitter. But all this is so when we confine ourselves to a formal Torah, because we are not yet capable of integrating this love.

We have not yet reached it. There is an age for it, and love develops little by little. It is gradually that love loses its physical appeal, its carnal appeal, and truly becomes a love born of a will to know, of perfect communication — and it is shalhevetyah, a flame of the Eternal. A flame of the Eternal: you see, we understand why. What we celebrate on the thirty-third of the Omer is a different fire dance — certainly not that of Manuel de Falla, a disenchanted love that must be won back through sorcery. That is not the fire dance we celebrate on the night of the Omer. It is rather this fire of love, this dance around a fire of love that unites humanity and assures the exiled people of a return to its fold — on the one hand, since fire, as we said, is bound to the promise of the land and to the Torah — and of a rediscovery of the original teaching of the Torah.

The fire of the covenant at Mount Sinai: in this fire of the covenant at Mount Sinai, a heavenly fire descends. But how does Moshe respond? “UMoshe alah” — and Moshe went up. Moshe is not content to receive this fire; he carries it within him, and with this fire he sets out to rise, to ascend toward the Eternal. And that is the fourth dimension — the Zohar, the interpretation of the Torah that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai develops. And if you ask yourselves why only at that time — why only around the year 180 of the Common Era — for Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai passed away around then, on the thirty-third day of the Omer, the eighteenth of Iyar, and rejoined the celestial sphere…

It is quite simply that in the Torah of the Zohar there is a will toward hitchadshut, toward perpetual renewal. Perpetual renewal: halakhah is dry; it does not change, it does not evolve. It is the product of reason; it was fixed together with the thought of the Torah. But the other perspective, the vision of the Torah, is the one that allows its data to be renewed — just as the Holy One, blessed be He, renews His creation every day. So we are indeed obliged to devote ourselves to this renewal of teaching through the mysteries that have not yet been decoded — mysteries that have not been decoded by the paths of reason. For, let us say it, the prophets failed: by dint of reproaches the people lost its confidence, and if it listened for two days, three days, four days, afterward it went back to its bad practices. And the same is true of the chachamim, the sages.

Now, it has nonetheless been said, “chacham adif minavi.” Chacham adif minavi means that the sage, the man of learning, is preferable to the navi, to the prophet. But beware: the prophet receives the divine message from its source, whereas the chacham is rather developing it through his own thought. Yes, the chacham said what I was saying — only it is limited. It is limited, because in addressing itself to reason it can indeed shape modes of functioning of thought, categories of thought, there is no doubt about it; but it lacks that element of prophecy. It lacks that element of prophecy.

So what is needed is to try to blend together rational thought and that prophetic thought which ceased with the destruction of the First Temple, and to try to give it body again, because only in this way can the Torah be perceived, lived, and discovered day after day. Just as one discovers the secrets of an intimate relationship between two beings. What draws two beings together? What draws two beings together in general? Either ideas, or temperament — but none of this is love, because ultimately these are reciprocal exchanges that take place through the mind. But there is something beyond. A beyond such that “ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha, ani Hashem”: if you must love your fellow as yourself, think of the way you must love the Eternal.

And the love of the Eternal is a love to be discovered anew each time. Is this not what Rabbi Akiva was saying? You know that four entered the Pardes, the orchard — that is, the secret of the interpretation of the Torah: Ben Zoma, Ben Azzai, then Elisha ben Avuyah, and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them: “Beware: when you reach the avnei shayish, the stones of marble, do not say ‘Water, water'” — do not speak of flowing waters. […] And it is said that the four entered this orchard of knowledge: the first died; the second came out wounded, harmed in his mind; afterward, the master of Rabbi Meir became Acher, “another.”

A way of saying […] only Rabbi Akiva, who said that beyond rational knowledge there is emunah, faith. Put your trust in the other; do not say “water, water.” This faith does fluctuate: sometimes it is strong, sometimes it is shifting. So do not let your faith waver. You must give it the solidity of avnei shayish, a marble stone, so that in the end you may enter the orchard of knowledge in peace and come out in peace. That, in summary, is Lag BaOmer. If you have questions, I will gladly take them. — A question: Is there not a kind of paradox between the personality of Rabbi Akiva and the personality of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai? For from what we can understand, Rabbi Akiva was the opposite of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was in the end very extreme, and yet he succeeded in safeguarding the Torah, whereas Rabbi Akiva, who was rather lenient, saw all his twenty-four thousand students decimated.

— That would require a second study. I’ll tell you: I was torn between speaking about Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai himself and speaking about his various teachings. If the course continues, perhaps next year, on the occasion of Lag BaOmer, we will take the teachings of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and analyze them closely. For there is no doubt that the Torah of Rabbi Akiva is what gives us access to the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. We cannot… Why? Access to the teaching of the Zohar is not given before the age of forty — quite simply because, it is said, a certain maturity is needed, a maturity acquired through the study of the Torah, in order to have access to the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.

And in sum, Rabbi Akiva — is it not he who summed up the whole Torah? “Ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha,” you shall love your fellow as yourself; “ani Hashem,” I am Hashem — that is already a great principle in the Torah. So: “You shall love your fellow as yourself; I am Hashem.” I point out in passing: when it says “ve’ahavta et Hashem Elokecha,” you shall love Hashem your G-d; and “ve’ahavtem et hager,” you shall love the stranger — then, by rights, one should have said “ve’ahavta et re’acha,” with the word et. Yet here the text changed. Instead of et, it says lere’acha.

Quite simply because love of the stranger and love of G-d are of a different nature. For how can you love the Holy One, blessed be He? How can you love Him? The ger — well, you will love him; but if he asks you for your daughter’s hand, you will hesitate. You will try to see whether it is truly compatible; it is difficult, because if his antecedents came back, it would be serious for all the generations after. But “ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha” — this you will do by performing deeds. It is not theoretical; these are not fine words. It is lere’acha kamocha. “Kamocha, ani Hashem” — that is why I told you. How does it say “ve’ahavta lere’acha”? “Kamocha, ani Hashem.” “Ani Hashem” is “ve’ahavta et Hashem Elokecha.”

That is the first. Next, “ve’ahavta lere’acha” — that is ohev et haberiyot, love of one’s fellow creatures. Very good. What remains now is the third element: “kamocha,” as yourself — you must love your fellow as yourself. I was expecting you to say: the world stands on three things — on Torah, on avodah, and on gemilut chasadim. Torah is for your personal formation; avodah is the service of G-d; gemilut chasadim, the practice of kindness, is toward one’s fellow. So there are three theses that have been put forward and that can sum up the whole Torah, say our sages. What are these three theses that can sum up the Torah?

There are three opinions. One holds: “One lamb in the morning and one lamb in the evening” — that will be your sacrifice of morning and evening, that is, the service of G-d in the happy moments of life, the morning, and in the dark moments of life, the evening. […] Then Rabbi Akiva said no: “ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha.” Then Ben Azzai says no: “Zeh sefer toldot Adam.” Sefer toldot Adam is the book: you are writing a book of the history of Adam, of man. You must know that what you do has a cosmic reach. You do not realize it, you do not know it, but it may have an infinite reach; nothing is lost.

You are writing the history of all humanity. And in fact, that is what the Torah of Rabbi Akiva is. Only, in the way it is lived and interpreted, of course, it may lack this element of sod — that is, of gathering together — where it becomes man who makes the Torah of Hashem his own Torah; so it has become his Torah, his Torah alone. But as I said a moment ago, it must not remain my Torah. Such a Torah suffers from its limits, from my own limits; but Torat Hashem, the Torah of G-d as it is, stands beyond. Rabbi Akiva had it, since, as I told you, he had reached the fifty degrees. What Rabbi Shimon added are these elements.

Now, you say that he was more extreme. In what was he extreme? It is because once, when he came out of the me’arah, the cave, and found people busy working the land, he looked at them so fiercely that he burned them — a flaming gaze. Then the bat kol (heavenly voice) says to him: “Go back. If all you have learned from devoting yourself to the study of the Torah for twelve years in the cave is to condemn others, then you have learned nothing.” He goes back, he stays another year, and when he comes out again — his son Elazar is not cured of it, but he himself, now, when he sees someone carrying fragrant branches in honor of Shabbat, and that all this labor is in order to enter into Shabbat, he says: in the end, one should also devote oneself to working the land, because the Torah said that the land must be worked. But how could he proscribe working the land? He said that strangers would work for us. Yet he himself did not want that.

Why did he condemn it? Because at that time it was an economy that served only the occupier, the Romans. He said: when it is the Romans who profit from all the toil of the Jewish people, from all the Jewish people’s love for its land, one must go on strike; one must devote oneself to the study of the Torah in order to grow stronger, and not hand them the usufruct of our labor and of our land. That said, I do not think Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai excluded the kind of work that expresses the deep bond between the Torah and Eretz Yisrael, since it is said: “There is no Torah like the Torah of Eretz Yisrael.”

All the Torah of chutz la’aretz, outside the Land, is a Torah altered by the fact that, outside Eretz Yisrael, we are adapting it to what people will say and muzzling it so that it does not disturb others. So, in such a milieu, it remains somewhat diminished compared with this Torah that breathes total freedom in the Land of Israel. That is my answer to your question.