#Lag ba omer 2016 professional#
#Lag ba omer 2016 windows#

But not to the extent, I hope, that people can’t relate to the concept. Silently, the adults came out of hiding like the survivors after a nuclear war, prepared to rebuild the world. In the morning, a haze hung over the city and the streets were covered in ash. One year, I watched as the flames of a fire reached up to the street above and destroyed a bus shelter! Another time a fire burnt the telephone wires in another neighborhood, and it took days to repair them. Quiet sedate Yerushalayim turned into a spectacle known as “The Night of the Burning Children.” Children, many of them young and unsupervised, set these giant pyers on fire.

#Lag ba omer 2016 windows#

They were removing their laundry from their lines and closing windows and trissim, as though preparing for some natural catastrophe. On the day before Lag B’Omer I began to notice frightened adults scurrying about.

#Lag ba omer 2016 professional#

Shouldn’t the professional firemakers warn these children away? What then, could these giant pyres, apparently designed to burn the remains of Greek kings, possibly mean? And to make matters worse, all the fires seemed to be constructed by children, many of them preschoolers. We would merely watch from a safe distance, eating the hotdogs we had already cooked at home! Sometimes, because of insurance reasons, children were not even allowed near the fires. The size and materials were heavily regulated. Even then, only professional licensed firemakers were allowed to make the fires. You needed many permits just to have a campfire, and a small one at that. I couldn’t imagine what would be done with them, because, having grown up in America, no one ever made their own bonfires. Some of these towered fifty feet into the air.

Soon I began seeing them reappearing in gigantic pyres throughout my neighborhood. Then wood began disappearing from construction sites, then tree trunks, furniture, household appliances and the like. Weeks before Lag B’Omer, all loose wood began disappearing. Of course, I didn’t appreciate at the time how relatively healthy that experience was until I came to Eretz Yisroel. Needless to say, none of this was filled with deep religious significance. There were special games between different grades and between the faculty and the students. We would go to a local park and play baseball and kickball and volleyball and machanyim. When I was growing up in the New York area, Lag B’Omer was the official school sports day. To complicate matters, the way Lag B’Omer is celebrated is also somewhat of a mystery. Lag B’Omer as a happy occasion remains a mystery. But if that is the reason, why celebrate on Lag B’Omer? He didn’t get those students on that day, but rather at a later date. He suggests that perhaps it is a happy day because of the five students that Rebbe Akiva got after the other 24,000 died. The Pri Chadash gives a cryptic answer to this question. It is unlikely that the person would make the day he recovered into a day of celebration. The relative recovers for a day and then relapses and passes away. The Pri Chadash on his commentary on Shulchan Aruch, asks the following question: why is Lag B’Omer a happy day? If it is because Rebbe Akiva’s students stopped dying, it didn’t make a difference because they all died in the end anyway! Imagine someone has a relative with a fatal illness. Additionally, we know it is the yahrtzeit of Rebbe Shimon Bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar. First, we know that the students of Rebbe Akiva who were being decimated by a plague stopped dying on this day. What is Lag B’Omer? We are familiar with two aspects of the day. The truth is, it’s often hard for us adults to appreciate it as well. Somehow, this doesn’t always seem to come across to our children. Lag B’Omer is a day that we know is filled with deep spiritual significance. We need to recognize, as the Maharal explains, that we are supposed to be living a life that is like a spiral – going over the same ground every year, but always on a higher level. It should not be enough to light the menorah again, or just listen to the megilla again. Before every holiday, we as parents need to examine what messages we wish to focus on for ourselves as adults and for our children.