The tomb and the book
Meron holds the grave attributed to Shimon bar Yohai, a second-century sage, and the tradition that he wrote the Zohar, the central work of Kabbalah.
Both attributions are later than they look. The grave is first documented in a thirteenth-century travel account, not in antiquity. The connection between Lag BaOmer and bar Yohai's death appears later still, in an eighteenth-century source. The present structure over the tomb was built in the mid-nineteenth century.
Gershom Scholem argued in the 1930s that the Zohar was composed not in second-century Galilee but in late thirteenth-century Castile, most likely by Moses de Leon. The evidence is internal and cumulative:
- Its Aramaic is artificial, with grammatical patterns borrowed from medieval Hebrew and traces of Spanish and Arabic underneath.
- Its author is unfamiliar with the geography of the Galilee he sets the book in.
- It cites rabbinic works that never existed.
Later scholarship, notably Yehuda Liebes, has modified the single-author picture toward a circle of writers, but the thirteenth-century dating is the settled academic position and has been for decades.
Most of the hundreds of thousands who come to Meron do not accept it, and the pilgrimage has not been affected. That gap is worth stating without condescension in either direction: the academic case is strong, and a devotional tradition is not a historical hypothesis and does not collapse when one is refuted. What Meron demonstrates is that these are two different kinds of claim.
Lag BaOmer
On the thirty-third day of the Omer, the hillside receives one of the largest annual gatherings in Jewish practice: bonfires, all-night singing, and the upsherin, the first haircut given to three-year-old boys at the tomb.
30 April 2021
Shortly after midnight, as crowds left the bonfire area through a narrow passageway with a sloping metal floor, people at the front slipped and fell. Those behind, unable to see, kept moving forward.
Forty-five men and boys were crushed to death and about 150 were injured. It was the deadliest civil disaster in the history of the State of Israel.
The site had been managed for decades under a fragmented arrangement in which several religious bodies controlled different sections and no single authority was responsible for the safety of the whole, and warnings about the passageway had been made before. A state commission of inquiry chaired by former Chief Justice Miriam Naor was appointed in 2021 and published its final report in March 2024, finding long-standing institutional negligence and failures of oversight across the bodies involved.