If you were in Israel yesterday, you might have encountered crowds of joyous celebrants dancing around bonfires. The occasion? The 33rd day of the Omer (knows as Lag Ba'Omer). In fact, the northern city of Meron (near the mystical city of Safed), draws an annual crowd of 500,000.
One of the reasons for the festivities is to commemorate the end of a plague that struck the students of the great sage Rabbi Akiva. The Talmud explains that this was because the students did not treat each other with proper respect.
Wait! What? Rabbi Akiva was the very one who is famous for his emphasis on the commandment to "love your fellow as yourself", and his students couldn't get along?
A beautiful perspective on this is, that the students loved each other so much that they could not bear watching their friends make "mistakes". Each one was convinced that their way of understanding the Torah, serving G-d, doing the Mitzvahs, was the correct way, and they wanted the others to see things their way. They were incapable of accepting that someone else had a different approach, a unique nuance. They felt compelled to correct them, to enlighten them.
The lesson to us is twofold: We absolutely have to care about our fellow so much that we don't want to see him of her make a mistake. To simply accept and tolerate, might actually show and underlying indifference to the other's welfare. On the other hand, we must never allow our commitment to their betterment to lessen in the slightest our respect and esteem toward them.
And no, this isn't just for the primaries ;-)
Rabbi Dovid Bush
This Sunday is Pesach Sheni - the second Passover; a mini holiday with a major message. The scene was the desert, the time was early spring, and the topic was inclusion. A small group of Jews was taking up their issue with Moses. They had been entrusted to carry Joseph's coffin out of Egypt, to fulfill their promise to bury Joseph in Israel. As per Jewish law, contact with the deceased, renders one spiritually impure, requiring a seven-day fix. They were going to miss out on the Paschal sacrifice, the lamb roasted and eaten with Matzah on Passover eve.
a custom to make a "Schlissel Challah" - Yiddish for "key challah", symbolic of G-d opening his storehouse of blessings to rain down upon us. May we be blessed with health, prosperity, and peace and may all our prayers be answered!