The tochacha: We have already lived the curses
On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. The Holocaust was over, with six million Jews murdered.
When the news came, the overwhelming feeling was not celebration, but something quieter and heavier — relief mixed with mourning. There was an attempt to make sense of devastation too enormous to comprehend.
And yet we celebrate on Lag BaOmer. We dance around bonfires and sing, although the most well-known reason for the commemoration is that a plague killing the students of Rabbi Akiva stopped on that day (Yevamos 62b).
By the time Lag BaOmer arrived, 24,000 Jews had already died. A seudas hodaah might have made sense. But dancing? Bonfires? It feels almost callous in the face of such loss.
To understand what we celebrate, we need to understand who Rabbi Akiva was and what he lost. He was a baal teshuvah who began learning at 40, whose wife Rachel sacrificed everything, enduring poverty and years of separation so that he could learn (Kesubos 62b–63a). For 24 years he was away. He built an empire of Torah, amassing 24,000 students, one of the most extraordinary legacies in Jewish history.
And then, in just over four weeks, it was gone.
• • •
At that moment, Rabbi Akiva had 24 thousand reasons to go home. He had given everything. He had earned the right to say, “I did what I could.” No one would have blamed him.
And yet, the Gemara tells us that after his students died, Rabbi Akiva began again. He chose five students and transmitted everything he knew to them. What we call the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Sifra, and the Sifre all trace back to those five students and the teacher who refused to stop (Sanhedrin 86a). The Torah we learn today exists because a man who had lost everything chose to begin again. That is what Lag BaOmer celebrates, not that the dying stopped, but how to respond after everything is lost.
That response did not end with Rabbi Akiva. It became the Jewish response to devastation across generations.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin once described making his way one Shabbos morning as a child in Brooklyn to Beth Moses Hospital in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the Klausenberger Rebbe was leading davening. It was Parashas Ki Savo, the week of the tochacha. As always, the baal korei began reading in a lowered voice, quickly, as is the minhag.
Then, from the shtender, came a single Yiddish word.
“Hekher.” Louder.
The baal korei hesitated.
“I said hekher,” the Rebbe repeated, banging on the shtender. “Read it out loud. We have lived these curses. Let the Ribbono Shel Olam hear them. Not a whisper. Scream it. It already happened. Now scream it out loud.”
• • •
After Mussaf, the Rebbe rose to speak. His eyes, which had burned moments before, were now filled with warmth.
“My dear brothers and sisters, pack your belongings. We must make one more move. The Almighty has promised that the blessings which follow the curses will now come. And those brachos will come in Eretz Yisrael. It is time to go home.”
That was the beginning of Kiryat Sanz in Netanya.
The curses are not ancient verses. They are lived memory. And still, like Rabbi Akiva on the thirty-third day, like the Klausenberger Rebbe at his shtender, we do not sit down. We build. We demand the brachos. We light a fire.
That fire is Lag BaOmer.
•It is Rabbi Akiva beginning again with five students after burying twenty-four thousand.
•It is a Rebbe who could scream hekher into a shattered world and, in the same breath, tell his people to go home.
•It is the refusal of a people to lower their voice after history has tried to silence them.
The curses have already come. We have lived them.
Now louder.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach, www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
