The Lag BaOmer Pilgrimage to Meron

Lag BaOmer falls on the thirty third day of the counting between Pesach and Shavuot, a period otherwise kept with restrictions on celebration, and the day interrupts them. At Meron it is kept as a hillula, a word that means a wedding feast and is used for the anniversary of a sage's death, on the reasoning that a righteous person's death is a union rather than a loss.

The sage is Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a second century figure whose tomb is traditionally at Meron and to whom the Zohar is ascribed by kabbalistic tradition. Bonfires are lit and kept through the night, singing and dancing continue until morning, and the upsherin, the first haircut given to a boy of three, is performed in the courtyard. Arthur Green's study of the tzadik as a point of contact between heaven and earth explains the underlying logic of the gathering: the grave of a righteous person is treated as a place where prayer is more likely to be effective, and going there is a devotional act in its own right.

Hasidic and Mizrahi communities are especially strongly represented, for whom veneration of a tzadik at his grave is a central devotional practice, though attendance today runs across the whole range of observance and includes many who keep little else. The day is also marked with bonfires by children across Israel and in Jewish communities elsewhere, well away from Meron, which makes it one of the more visible minor festivals of the year.

The Meron gathering is documented from at least the sixteenth century, when the kabbalists of nearby Safed, Isaac Luria among them, are recorded visiting the tomb, and it very probably draws on older local custom that is not documented. The Encyclopaedia Judaica traces the growth of the observance and the scholarly discussion of how the date, the site and the figure of Shimon bar Yochai came to be joined, which is not a straightforward matter and involves several traditions converging.

What is clear is the trajectory. Across the twentieth and twenty first centuries the hillula grew from a regional pilgrimage into the largest annual Jewish gathering in Israel, with hundreds of thousands attending a hillside site reached by a small number of roads. That scale had consequences. A fatal crush at the 2021 hillula led to an official inquiry and to a substantial restructuring of how the site is managed and how safety is overseen, and the atlas records that as the reason the present arrangements differ from those of a decade ago. A pilgrimage that outgrows its ground is a recurring problem across traditions, and Meron is one of the clearest recent instances of it. The atlas records the change in management as fact and does not attribute responsibility for the events of 2021, which were the subject of a formal inquiry whose findings belong to that inquiry rather than to a reference article.