Though one God created us: For Lag b’Omer

Relatively speaking, Lag b’Omer is a new holiday. It sprang up in early medieval Europe with no apparent precedent. Medieval rabbis connected it to a legend in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Yevamot 26b) according to which 24,000 students of R. Akiva died because they did not show each other respect; the Talmud later states that they died of a plague and adds that this plague occurred between Passover and Shavuot. Some medieval rabbis had a tradition that the plague ended on Lag b’Omer, a few weeks before Shavuot. 

This piyyut (liturgical poem) may be the first poem ever written specifically in honor of Lag b’Omer. In the sixteenth century, when Joseph Yedidya Carmi lived, the custom of marking the day as a holiday at all was only a few centuries old. In his community, supplicatory prayers (known as taḥanun) were omitted on Lag b’Omer to mark it as a day of semi-joy; this omission is standard today. Carmi’s Kenaf Renanim provides special liturgy for his synagogue’s Shomrim la-boker (“Morning Watchers”) society (a devotional confraternity that recited early-morning prayers). Among his innovations is special liturgy for each day on which taḥanun is omitted, and for his community, that included Lag b’Omer. 

In this text, Carmi writes about the death of R. Akiva’s students, asserting that its ultimate origin was centuries earlier, when King David wrongly adjudicated a lawsuit between Mephibosheth, grandson of King Saul, and Ziba, a slave of King Saul, telling them to split an inherited field equally. The Talmud indeed states that David’s judgment was in error and sinful, but no source is known for Carmi’s statement that David set in motion the historical process that ultimately caused the death of R. Akiva’s students. In the poem, Carmi preaches that one should pursue shalom—which can be translated as “peace” or “wellbeing”—presumably in order to avoid similar disasters.