c.1490. Bonfires at the Tomb: Lag BaOmer Celebration at Meron

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL 

c.1490.
Bonfires at the Tomb: Lag BaOmer Celebration at Meron

In the late fifteenth century, R. Obadiah of Bartenura described Jews ascending to Meron on Lag BaOmer, gathering at the tomb of R. Shimon bar Yochai with bonfires, charity, and prayers for healing and children. His letters offer the earliest surviving written testimony of a Lag BaOmer celebration at Meron with these distinctive features. Across centuries, this celebration would evolve into a uniquely massive public event.

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Today, Meron, a small village in the hills of the Upper Galilee to the northwest of Safed, is one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Israel, drawing hundreds of thousands of Jews each year on Lag BaOmer for what is often described as the country’s largest annual religious gathering. Bonfires blaze across the hillside, music and dancing fill the night air, and families celebrate rites of passage, most famously the traditional first haircut for three-year-old boys. Yet, the roots of this vast modern gathering lie in a small, fragile Jewish community of the late fifteenth century, as described in the letters of one Italian rabbi who chose to settle in the Land of Israel.

R. Obadiah of Bartenura (c.1450-c.1516), an Italian scholar best known for his enduring commentary on the Mishnah, reached the Land of Israel in 1488. From Jerusalem, he wrote three letters to his father and brother in Italy, describing both the hardships of life and the religious practices he encountered. In one of these letters, dated to the late 1480s, he recounts how, on the eighteenth of Iyar, Jews from across the Galilee gathered at the tomb of R. Shimon bar Yochai, the Rashbi, in the village of Meron. They lit large fires, gave charity, and sought blessings, believing that barren couples could merit children and the sick could find healing through the sanctity of the day and place.

Meron is traditionally believed to be the burial site of the Rashbi, a revered second-century tanna and central figure of Jewish mysticism. In traditional circles, he is considered the author of the Zohar, the foundational work of Kabbalah. The identification of Lag BaOmer as his hillula [anniversary of passing] derives from the Idra Zuta section of the Zohar. However, this identification and its later popularization reflect the enormous influence of Safed Kabbalah rather than an unbroken halachic tradition.

The association of Lag BaOmer with Rashbi’s hillula and with bonfires emerged from these mystical traditions. Later Kabbalistic teachings stressed that the radiance revealed at Rashbi’s death should be celebrated rather than mourned, and the flames at Meron came to symbolize that hidden light. In this way, a date in the counting of the Omer, once mainly tied to a pause in a talmudic plague narrative and the easing of semi-mourning customs, acquired a powerful geographic anchor.

It is worth noting that medieval Jewish travelers had already mentioned the tombs of sages scattered across the region. By the thirteenth century, Meron was identified as the resting place of the Rashbi. As such, pilgrimage to the site almost certainly predates this letter. R. Obadiah’s letter, however, stands as the earliest surviving written account of a Lag BaOmer celebration at Meron that explicitly combines the date, Rashbi’s tomb, bonfires, charity, and expectations of blessing.

In the sixteenth century, the rise of Safed as a center of Kabbalah gave the Meron pilgrimage a new intensity and wider reach. Mystic circles around R. Yitzchak Luria (1534-1572), the Ari, who arrived in Safed around 1570, made organized visits to the tombs of sages a central practice, with Meron and Rashbi at the heart of their devotional geography. R. Yitzchak Luria enthusiastically promoted the Lag BaOmer gathering at Meron. His disciple R. Chaim Vital records that R. Yitzchak Luria celebrated the day there with students and family and brought his young son for his first haircut, an early literary attestation of what later became the widespread upsherin/halaqah [First Haircut] ceremony. Scholars have noted, however, that the precise details of this account are not without textual difficulties, since other traditions record R. Yitzchak Luria as discouraging haircuts during the whole period of the Counting of the Omer. Regardless, the emergence of Safed as the world center of Kabbalah in the sixteenth century firmly cemented the spiritual association between Rashbi, Lag BaOmer, and Meron.

Over the following centuries, the Meron pilgrimage drew Jews from across the spectrum of Jewish communities, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, North African, and Middle Eastern, each contributing their own customs and devotional expressions. Bonfires, first haircuts, singing and dancing, and prayers for children and health all became part of a shared repertoire. With modern transportation and demographic growth, the pilgrimage grew from a regional gathering into a national spectacle, attended by hundreds of thousands.

From the modest celebrations recorded in the letter, the newly arrived R. Obadiah of Bartenura, to the immense streams of pilgrims in our own time, the Lag BaOmer celebration at Meron traces an unbroken line of Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel.

Sources and Further Reading

Ben-Naeh, Yaron. “Jewish Communities in the Ottoman Empire.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815, edited by Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe, 185–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Reiner, Elchanan. “Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael, 1099–1517.” PhD dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988.
Ron Marvin, Tamar. “Premodern Travel to Israel and the Aliyah of R. Ovadia Bartenura in 1486–88.” Published essay, T.R. Marvin, 2022. https://trmarvin.org/bartenura/
Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1941.
Yaari, Avraham. “The Custom of the Upsherin.” Tarbiz 20 (1951): 157–169. (Hebrew)