Last year on Lag B’Omer, two months or so in to this extraordinary pandemic, I wrote about my difficulty in holding to the idea that we are all connected, that we all join the same breath, even those who were not, as I felt, treating the public health with respect, and were acting in the same terrifyingly shortsighted and dangerous ways that (according to the Sages of Blessed Memory) were to blame for the plague that killed twenty thousand students of Rabbi Akiva. I don’t agree with the Sages—I don’t think pandemics are Divine Retribution for sin—but as I said, we want to world to have that kind of justice, even that isn’t how it works.
This year we have terrible news: forty-five people were killed and another hundred and fifty injured when an overcrowded Lag B’Omer celebration became a panicky stampede. A hundred thousand people came to celebrate at a place that is rated hold fifteen thousand, and while the death toll wasn’t inevitable, it isn’t precisely inconceivable, either.
I don’t have anything to say. I think it was poor judgement to congregate in such dangerous crowd, but I have surely made worse judgement calls in my life without suffering at all, much less being crushed to death by a crowd.
Lag B’Omer is—or is hoped to be—a kind of oasis in the wilderness between Passover and Shavuot. I don’t count the omer, or observe the restrictions of the period of counting it, and often I don’t notice Lag B’Omer, honestly. But when I do, I like the idea of that oasis, that day off in the middle of what can honestly be a hard grind of life. Not that there aren’t Good Things, even during a pandemic! But a day off from bad news is a valuable thing.
And yet, there it is. Horror and death. Terrifying. I really don’t have anything to say.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.