Wednesday, April 3, 2013
The Laws of Mourning Between Passover and Shavuos and the Death of the Students of Rabbi Akiva
11:26 AM | 
Posted by
Rabbi Chaim Coffman |
There is an obligation to start counting the Omer from the second night of Passover until the holiday of Shavuos. During this time, there are customs of mourning due to the fact that 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva died. We don't have marriages, get haircuts or listen to music.
One question that we may ask is why did these students die? If they were great rabbinical scholars in their own right, shouldn't they have realized that something seriously was amiss when more than 700 people died a day until they stopped dying on Lag B'Omer?
The Talmud (Yevamos 62b) tells us that the reason they died was because they didn't show proper respect one to the other. If these were truly rabbinic scholars, how could it be that it didn't dawn on them to show proper respect for their fellow colleagues?
This can be understood in the context of a Yeshiva. In a Yeshiva, men learn with a chevrusah (study partner) trying to understand the text that they are learning. The reason one learns with a study partner is that even if one is very smart, he has his biases of how he looks at situations. Therefore, it is good to learn with someone else to bounce off ideas to see if they are getting to the truth of what they are learning.
As one is learning though, they have to remember that if they think their chevrusah is wrong in his understanding of the topic at hand, why is that? Do they think that only their opinion is right and therefore they will tear apart the other's opinion just to show that they are right or are they interested in debating the issue to get to the crux of the argument and understand the intricacies of the complexity of the text?
If the idea is to make yourself look better at the expense of the other regardless if the person may be right or not, is wrong. Then the idea is to make yourself look better at the expense of your learning partner and what you are doing is just mental gymnastics.
The purpose of the Torah is to make you a better person and learn to the best of your ability of what the texts tell us and how it impacts our lives. If we don't take the lessons the Torah teaches us to heart, then we are just learning another discipline that has no connection to our lives.
This is what the students of Rabbi Akiva lacked. Although they were great rabbinical students, they seemed to have forgotten the basic idea of having proper respect for the people around them. They didn't understand that the most important thing was getting to the truth regardless if your idea was right or wrong.
It is a tremendous knock at one's ego to hear that their opinion is flawed for this or that reason. The truly great person as long as they are learning for the sake of analyzing the truth will admit they have made a mistake and take the other opinion and move forward. The problem is that we don't like to admit we have made a mistake but that is how we learn and expand our knowledge!
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