Saturday, July 17, 2010

Lag BaOmer videos

Okay so this happened a couple months ago and I took some videos but never got around to posting them. All of these videos were taken on the 22rd night of the counting of the Omer (Lamed = 30, gimmel =3 Lamed+gimmel= Lag, pronounced 'Log'). It's a special day in Judaism. Very truncated summary: we light bon fires (why? watch the 3rd video for one explanation) in honor of both the ending of the plague which had killed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students and also the yahrzeit (anniversary of death) of Shimon Bar Yochai, one of the greatest teachers of Torah in the first and second centuries c.e.

I wandered around Har Nof from bon fire to bon fire singing and talking with different people. I met a guy who gave a great vort (literally a word, but it means a nice explanation that explains a deeper concept), and I recorded what he said. He speaks quickly and peppers it with some hebrew, but the gist of it is still pretty extractable.

This is a short video of one of the bonfires along Nissim Road



This is me, and one of the guys I met singing the lyrics to song in the previous video:



This is vort on the significance of burning fires, Shimon Bar Yochai's vision of the world, and how it underlies a lot of Judaism (hard to understand, but from the english you can still get a good idea).



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