Rabbi’s Message: Lag B’Omer: The Joy We Choose

By Rabbi Lauren Ben-Shoshan

There is something quietly unexpected about Lag B'Omer, the holiday that we celebrate today. Lag B’Omer arrives during the heart of the Counting of the Omer, a stretch of sacred time between Passover and Shavuot. Traditionally seen primarily as a period of reflection and serious contemplation, these are days that ask us to pay attention — to our habits, our relationships, our inner lives. (Indeed, the theme of our Mountain Mussar Omer Journal focuses on building the skills of awareness and attention that help us do this important spiritual work.) These days invite us into the slow, sometimes uncomfortable work of becoming more honest, more patient, more aligned with who we hope to be.

And then, just after we pass the halfway mark, the tone shifts for the day. Fires are lit. Music is played. Weddings are held. There is laughter on Lag B’Omer where, just a day before, there may have been restraint.

To understand Lag B’Omer, we have to hold its history alongside its emotional wisdom. Tradition teaches that this day marks a pause in a devastating plague among the students of Rabbi Akiva — a tragedy our sages link to a failure of respect, of truly seeing and honoring one another. Lag B’Omer emerges, then, as a moment of relief, but also as a quiet corrective: a reminder that spiritual growth is never separate from the way we treat the people around us.

At the same time, the day is bound up with the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. According to tradition, the day of his passing was one of profound illumination, so much so that it is marked not with mourning, but with light. The bonfires that flicker across hillsides and backyards echo that teaching — that wisdom, once kindled, continues to radiate outward.

So Lag B’Omer is not an interruption of the Omer so much as it is a reorientation within it. It asks not only what are you working on, but why. To me, joy – joy in our relationships, joy in our lives, oneg in our Shabbat, joy in Creation – is a deeply profound “why”. You might have heard me discuss this before, but I have come to think about joy in two distinct ways. There is the kind of joy that arrives without effort — a wild joy found in the spontaneous moments that pop up around us. A burst of laughter, a feeling of connection, the sudden recognition of beauty. It surprises us. This kind of joy is real and necessary; it reminds us that life has its own generosity.

But there is another kind of joy, quieter and more deliberate. A cultivated joy. The kind that requires us to tend to the soil of our souls, to diligently plant seeds, and after careful tending, to watch it grow slowly, sometimes almost invisibly, through the choices we make over time. We harvest this kind of joy through deliberate choices. Through attention. Through repair. Through ritual and holiday practice with one another. Through showing up again and again, even when it would be easier to turn away. This joy is not always immediate, but it is enduring. It is the fruit of a life that is being lived with intention.

Lag B’Omer, I want to suggest, is a holiday of cultivated joy. It does not arrive because everything has suddenly become easy. It does not wait for the work of the Omer to be complete. Instead, it invites us — almost insists upon us — to make space for joy right here, in the middle of this challenging, reflective season. To gather what has been growing, even if it is still tender and new. To notice what has begun to shift within us. To celebrate not perfection, but participation.

In this way, the joy of Lag B’Omer is not escapism from the challenges of a plague or the cruelty and lack of respect in our world or even the grief of loss. Choosing to celebrate even in the midst of difficulty is an act of intentional meaning-making. It is a way of reminding ourselves why we engage in this work at all. Not simply to become more disciplined or more aware, but to build lives that can actually hold joy — lives in which connection, beauty, and presence are not accidental and distant, but possible and a part of the work of our own hands.

This is, in many ways, the heart of why we are building emotional and spiritual skills through our Mountain Mussar Omer Journal. Day by day, week by week, we have been tending something within ourselves — patience, inner calm, order, clarity — often without immediate reward. Lag B’Omer invites us to pause and ask: what seeds have I planted? What has taken root? What, even now, might be beginning to bloom? What can we harvest, even briefly, from the quiet goodness we are cultivating in our lives?

Because when we do, we are not stepping away from the work. We are sustaining it. We are replanting, deep within ourselves, the essential truth that this tradition returns to again and again — that even in the midst of challenge, even in seasons of becoming, life is not only something to be shaped. It is something to be cherished.

Lag B’Omer Sameach.