I turn my eyes to the mountains,” wrote the psalmist (122:1), and then asked: “Where will my help come from?” This line, sung by the Levites on the steps of the temple, contained a gap between pagan thinking and Jewish faith.
Mountains have troubled mankind since the beginning of history. Looking from afar at Mount Olympus, the ancient Greeks considered it the nest of a god. So did the Japanese when they looked at Mount Fuji, and the Chinese in the face of the five mountains that stretched along their east. In a similar vein, biblical Israel’s Aramaic neighbors suspected that “their god is a god of mountains” (1 Kings 20:23).
This is not what was said to Israel. The prophets believed that God is unlimited and thus not limited to any place, no matter how high, foggy, or untouched. However, what the prophets thought was one thing, but where the people were going was another. This is why the Bible repeatedly rebuked the Israelites for “setting posts and posts…on every high hill” (2 Kings 17:10).
Among our ancestors, as well as the surrounding civilizations, there were impressionable people who were tempted by the idolatrous manipulation of feelings through size, color, fire and death.
Now the idolatry that haunted our ancestors is returning to the Promised Land, as evidenced by the pilgrimage to Mount Meron next week.
HOW MUCH will arrive at the Galilee’s highest peak for Lag Baomer this year, remains to be seen. Attendance fell to 130,000 last year, compared to more than half a million who gathered for Israel’s largest annual event before a 2021 stampede in which 45 people, mostly ultra-Orthodox pilgrims, were killed.
The Mount Meron disaster, as it is known, convinced thousands to avoid the pilgrimage and forced the Bennett government to control the ascent of the crowd to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, an ancient mystic whose commemoration is at the center of the festivities. on the mountain.
The descent on the mountain was so massive that 1,000 buses were deployed, which brought pilgrims not only from the north, south and center of the country, but also those who flew in specially from abroad, just as Muslims travel from afar to touch the Kaaba , and Catholics travel. see dad.
It is difficult to predict what will happen at the mountain next week. The minister overseeing the event, Meir Porush of United Torah Judaism, sounded so smug this week that he took the time to attack Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for another reason (the Likud’s slowness in passing the bill).
One can only hope that what is happening on the mountainside will end as peacefully as Porush seems to suggest. The insurance industry is less confident; so much so that no company was willing to insure an event that brings crowds to a densely forested mountain with poor infrastructure and planning.
And yet, outside of public safety, a religious question looms: what, exactly, is all this psychosis, why does it attract so many people, and how, if anything, justifies the risk associated with it?
The Feast of Mount Meron is not part of the Jewish faith
The embarrassing truth is that Mount Meron is not part of Jewish faith, let alone Jewish law. Invented by the Galilean Kabbalists in the 16th century, this holiday is not mentioned in the Mishnah and the Talmud.
The most iconic luminaries of rabbinic Judaism, from Rashi and Maimonides to the Vilna Gaon, have never observed it. European Jewry was almost unaware of this novelty; and when it became known, the great ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Moshe Sofer (1762-1839) banned its celebration.
However, the Kabbalists of Safed revered Shimon Bar-Yochai, a sage buried in the mountain opposite their city, a Roman-era scholar who they believed wrote The Zohar, the seminal work of the Kabbalism. Historians and philologists believe that the voluminous work was written more than 1,000 years after it, but such a reality check often proves ineffective in the face of pagan motivation.
What exactly the date of Lag Baomer has to do with the life of Bar Yochai is not clear – it could be his birthday, the day of his marriage, or the day he was ordained a rabbi – but whatever his biographical affiliation. role, the spring festival has become a celebration at the grave.
Now, surrounded by blazing fires, cacophonous music, and the smell of roasting meat, one can imagine Moses watching this feast and reacting in the same way that he responded when the sight of the pagan feast at the foot of Mount Sinai caused him to break the tablets. Such was and is the clash between his religion of law, rationality and introspection and the pagan worship of sensation.
Moses himself decided to be buried in an unknown place so that his grave would not cause worship. Jews did avoid building mausoleums like those intended to deify many non-Jews, from Lenin and Chiang Kai-shek to Kim Il Sung and Atatürk. The only such structure ever built for a Jewish leader, King Herod, was subsequently so thoroughly destroyed by believing Jews that it took several generations of archaeologists to find its fragments.
Yet people, including Jews, want to worship what they can see, hear, smell and feel. This is why the pagans gave so much to the fire, and why the fire plays such a central role on Mount Meron, where rival rabbis festively light bonfires separately, each for their blind followers.
The same pagan spirit causes so many people to replace the Jewish path to God and His laws with a journey to bricks over the bones of the dead, to bricks on which oil is sprinkled and candles are thrown, seeking in this way the meaning of life. but the spirit of death.
Watching the turmoil, smoke and fire of Monday night on Mount Meron, the inhabitants of Central Israel will remember the psalmist who sought God beyond the mountains, and will ask the question: if the rabbis do not fight idolatry, then who will?
Writer, fellow at the Hartman Institute, bestselling author Mitzad ha-ivelet ha-yehudi (Jewish march of stupidity)Yediot Sepharim, 2019), a revisionist history of the political leadership of the Jewish people.
