Lag BaOmer: The Thirty-Third Day, Rabbi Akiva’s Students and the True Star of Yaakov

The Omer and the Season of Mourning

The Torah attaches no sorrow to the count. The forty-nine days are days of harvest and expectation (see Shavuot). How did they become a time of mourning?

The main source is a short passage in the Babylonian Talmud:

It is said that Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of students, from Gevat to Antipatris, and all of them died in one period of time, because they did not treat each other with respect… It is taught: all of them died between Pesach and Atzeret.

The Talmud says they died of askera, a disease of the throat usually identified as diphtheria or croup. Then Rabbi Akiva went south and taught five students: Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua. “They are the ones who upheld the Torah at that time.”¹ A parallel tradition in the midrash says Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand students and that they died because “their eyes were narrow toward one another”. In other words, they were stingy and envious toward each other.²

From this story the Geonic and medieval communities developed the custom of mourning during the omer.³ The Shulchan Aruch records the custom not to marry or cut hair in these weeks, because Rabbi Akiva’s students died then.⁴ Communities differ on which days are observed: some mourn from Pesach until Lag BaOmer, others from Rosh Chodesh Iyar until Shavuot, and there are other customs. In every system Lag BaOmer is a day of relief.

Where Does Lag BaOmer Come From?

The historical record of Lag BaOmer is thinner and later than many assume, and most of the explanations given for it are traditions, not documented history.

The earliest mentions. The earliest known mention of the day is a note in a manuscript of Machzor Vitry, from twelfth-century France. It says only that Lag BaOmer always falls on the same weekday as Purim. It does not give any reason for the day.⁵ In the same period, Rabbi Avraham ben Natan HaYarchi recorded in Sefer HaManhig a custom in France and Provence of beginning weddings from Lag BaOmer. He reported that, according to an old Spanish manuscript, Rabbi Akiva’s students died “until pros ha-Atzeret”. He explained this as fifteen days before Shavuot, which is the thirty-third or thirty-fourth day of the count.⁶

The Meiri. In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Rabbi Menachem HaMeiri of Provence wrote in his commentary on Yevamot 62b that there was “a tradition from the Geonim” that the dying stopped on the thirty-third day of the omer, and that people therefore did not fast on that day.⁷ No such Geonic statement survives in the writings of the Geonim themselves, so historians treat the Meiri as the earliest clear witness to this explanation, not as proof of an earlier source.

The codes. The Tur and the Shulchan Aruch say that haircuts are permitted from the thirty-third day “because it is said that they stopped dying then”, and the Rema adds that Tachanun is not said and there is some rejoicing.⁸ The fourteenth-century Spanish liturgical commentator Rabbi David Abudarham is among the authorities the Rema cites on the customs of these weeks.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (Rashbi), one of the five surviving students, was a great sage of the second century who, the Talmud says, hid from the Romans in a cave for thirteen years, studying Torah.⁹ Much later, tradition held that Lag BaOmer was the day of his death, when, as the Zohar’s Idra Zuta describes, he revealed the deepest secrets of the Torah and his house was filled with light. In kabbalistic language the day a righteous man dies is his hillula, his “wedding”, so the day became a celebration. Historians note that this claim is not found in the Talmud or the medieval commentators. It spread through the Safed kabbalists, and some scholars think a copyist’s error in a text of Rabbi Chaim Vital turned “the celebration of Rashbi” into “the day Rashbi died”.¹⁰

The Zohar. The Zohar, the central work of Jewish mysticism, presents itself as the teachings of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his circle. It first circulated in Castile in the late thirteenth century through Rabbi Moshe de León. Traditional Jews regard it as an ancient work transmitted from Rashbi. Most academic scholars, following Gershom Scholem, date its composition to thirteenth-century Spain, whether by Moshe de León or a circle of kabbalists drawing on older traditions.¹¹ Both views can be stated with respect.

Meron, Bonfires and First Haircuts

The hillula in Meron

Rashbi is traditionally buried in Meron, in the Upper Galilee near Safed. Visits to the tombs of the righteous in the Galilee are recorded from the Middle Ages, and by the sixteenth century, when Safed became a center of kabbalah, a pilgrimage to Meron on Lag BaOmer was established. Rabbi Chaim Vital records that his teacher, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (the Arizal), went to Meron with his family on Lag BaOmer and cut his young son’s hair there, as was the known custom.¹² The hillula grew into one of the largest Jewish gatherings in the world. Some rabbis, including the Chatam Sofer, criticized making a festival of a day with no basis in the Talmud, but the custom continued.¹³

The Meron disaster of 2021

On the night of Lag BaOmer in 2021 (in the early hours of 30 April), a crowd crush on a narrow, sloping walkway leaving one of the bonfire areas at Meron killed forty-five men and boys and injured about one hundred and fifty. It was one of the worst civilian disasters in Israel’s history. An Israeli state commission of inquiry, chaired by former Supreme Court president Miriam Naor, later found that years of warnings about the site’s safety had not been acted on.¹⁴ The victims are remembered with the prayer that their memory be a blessing. Since then, attendance and safety at Meron have been tightly controlled.

Customs of the day

• Bonfires. The most widespread custom in Israel is lighting bonfires on the night of Lag BaOmer. Kabbalistic tradition explains them as a sign of the light of Torah that Rashbi revealed. A modern explanation links them to signal fires of the Bar Kochba revolt; that link is not documented.
• Bows and arrows. Children in many communities go out with bows and arrows. One explanation draws on a tradition that no rainbow appeared in the lifetime of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, because his merit protected the world and the sign of the covenant with Noah was not needed (Genesis 9:12–17).¹⁵ Keshet is Hebrew for both “bow” and “rainbow”.
• Upsherin. In many Chassidic and Sephardi communities a boy’s hair is not cut until he turns three. His first haircut, called upsherin in Yiddish or chalakah among Sephardim, is often done on Lag BaOmer, at Meron or elsewhere. The boy’s side-locks (peyot) are left, he begins to wear a kippah and tzitzit, and he starts to learn the Hebrew letters.
• Weddings and haircuts. Because the mourning customs lift for the day, Lag BaOmer is a popular day for weddings.
• Liturgy. Tachanun is not said. There is no special Torah reading.

Rabbi Akiva, Bar Kochba and the Star

In the nineteenth century some historians, beginning with Nachman Krochmal, suggested that Rabbi Akiva’s “students” who died between Pesach and Shavuot were in fact fighters in the revolt of Shimon bar Kosiba (Bar Kochba) against Rome in 132–135 CE, and that Lag BaOmer marked a brief victory.¹⁶ Early Zionist educators popularized this reading. It is a modern hypothesis: no ancient source links the students’ deaths to the revolt or Lag BaOmer to Bar Kochba.

It is documented, however, that Rabbi Akiva supported the revolt and saw its leader as the Messiah. The Jerusalem Talmud records:

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught: Rabbi Akiva my teacher used to expound, “There shall come a star out of Yaakov”: Koziba has come out of Yaakov. When Rabbi Akiva saw Bar Koziba, he said: This is the King Messiah. Rabbi Yochanan ben Torta said to him: Akiva, grass will grow out of your cheeks and still the son of David will not have come.

The verse is from the prophecy of Bilaam: “there shall come a Star out of Yaakov, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel” (Numbers 24:17). Bar Kosiba’s followers seem to have played on his name, calling him Bar Kochba, “son of the star”. The rebellion ended in disaster. Betar fell, according to the Mishnah on 9 Av,¹⁷ and Judea was devastated. Later rabbinic tradition called him Bar Koziba, “son of the lie”.

The revolt was also a painful moment for the Jewish followers of Yeshua in the Land. Justin Martyr, who was born in Samaria and wrote in the mid-second century, reports that during the war Bar Kochba ordered that the believers in Yeshua alone be severely punished unless they denied him as Messiah.¹⁸ Jewish believers could not accept a second messiah while confessing Yeshua as the Son of David, and the war deepened their separation from the wider Jewish community. That history should be told with sorrow and without blame. Rabbi Akiva died a martyr’s death under the Romans with the Shema on his lips.¹⁹ His error was not a lack of faith but hope placed in the wrong man.

Lessons for Yeshua’s Disciples

“Many shall come in my name”

Yeshua warned his disciples about exactly this danger:

Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Messiah; and shall deceive many.

He added: “If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Messiah, or there; believe it not… Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth” (Matthew 24:23, 26). At the end of Bar Kochba’s war, the last of his followers hid in caves in the Judean Desert above the Dead Sea, where their letters and belongings have been found.²⁰ Yeshua’s warning does not criticize the Jewish hope for the Messiah; it guards it. The longing for redemption is holy, and it must be tested against Scripture. His own return will be unmistakable, “as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west” (24:27). In every generation, his followers should not attach messianic expectations to political leaders, movements or dates.

“Love one another”

Rabbi Akiva’s students were brilliant, yet the Talmud locates their failure in how they treated one another, not in their learning. Rabbi Akiva himself taught that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) is “a great principle of the Torah”.²¹ Yeshua told his disciples:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

The command to love is written in Leviticus; what is new is the measure, “as I have loved you”. Setting the two passages side by side is an application, not a claim that one refers to the other. Lag BaOmer is a good day for a congregation to examine how its members speak to and about each other.

The True Star of Yaakov

Bilaam’s prophecy speaks of a star and a sceptre rising from Israel to crush Israel’s enemies (Numbers 24:17). Jewish tradition, from the Aramaic Targum Onkelos onward, reads it as a prophecy of the King Messiah.²² Rabbi Akiva was right to read it that way. He was mistaken about the man.

The Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) also ends with this image. Yeshua says:

I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

The morning star announces the dawn while the night is still dark. Isaiah promised that light would come first to the Galilee, where Meron’s bonfires burn:

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

Matthew applies this prophecy to Yeshua’s ministry in the Galilee (Matthew 4:13–16). Isaiah continues with the birth of a child who will sit “upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever” (Isaiah 9:7). Bar Kochba’s kingdom ended in ruin; the Son of David’s will not end.

Yeshua’s first coming matches the pattern of Mashiach ben Yosef: rejected, suffering, and raised by Hashem. When he returns, he will be revealed as Mashiach ben David, who gathers Israel, judges in righteousness and reigns from Jerusalem. On that day the true Star will rise over Israel, the dead will be raised (Daniel 12:2), and the light that the kabbalists sought in the bonfires of Meron will fill the earth. In that day “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun” (Isaiah 30:26), and the nations will come to Zion’s light (Isaiah 60:3).

Keeping Lag BaOmer

Lag BaOmer falls on 18 Iyar, the thirty-third day of the omer. It begins at sundown the evening before. It is not a yom tov, and work is permitted. See our calendar for the date in a given year. Some ways to mark it:

• Keep counting the omer that evening, as on every other.
• Gather outdoors for a bonfire, picnic or walk with family and friends.
• Honor one another. Make peace with someone you have quarrelled with, or speak well of a fellow congregant.
• Learn a teaching of Rabbi Akiva or Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, with John 13:34–35 and Numbers 24:17.
• Remember with compassion the victims of Meron in 2021, and all who suffered in the Bar Kochba war.
• Pray for the true Star to rise over Israel and the nations.