The Ari Dances With a Ghost at Meron

There is a grave on a hillside in the Galilee, in the village of Meron, and every year on Lag ba-Omer, the thirty-third day of the omer count between Passover and Shavuot, enormous bonfires are lit there and hundreds of thousands of people dance through the night. The grave belongs to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the second-century sage who spent thirteen years hidden in a cave to escape Roman persecution, who emerged from that cave with a fire so intense that whatever he looked at burned, who returned to the cave for another year until he had learned to inhabit the world again. He is, by the tradition of the later Kabbalists, the author of the Zohar, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism, composed in Castile, Spain, by Rabbi Moshe de Leon around 1280 CE but attributed to Rabbi Shimon, who allegedly received and transmitted its secrets in Galilee in the second century CE.

Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as the Ari, the Lion, was born in Jerusalem in 1534 and died in Safed in 1572 at the age of thirty-eight. In those thirty-eight years he transformed Kabbalah so completely that we speak of Lurianic Kabbalah as a separate world from what came before. He taught tzimtzum, the contraction of the Infinite to make space for creation. He taught the shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the divine vessels, and tikkun, the repair that human action can accomplish in the broken cosmic structure. He did not write his teachings down himself. They were recorded by his disciple Rabbi Hayyim Vital and form the vast library of Lurianic texts that the Kabbalistic tradition still studies.

But the Ari also danced. Every Lag ba-Omer he led his circle of students from Safed to Meron, to Rabbi Shimon's grave, and there they danced in circles, singing, voices rising in the warm spring night above the Galilee hills.

One year, an old man appeared at the edge of the circle.

He was dressed entirely in white, a white tallit drawn over his head, and his beard was long and white. He swayed at the periphery of the dancers, not quite in the circle, not quite outside it, moving as if the music were carrying him rather than his own feet. A radiance came from him, the tradition says, a light tinged with blue and gold, the colors of the Shekhinah and of divine sovereignty.

The Ari was accustomed to encounters that other men could not see. Elijah the prophet, who never died but ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot, had been present at his circumcision, had held him on his knees while the rite was performed, and had handed him back to his father with the words: Here is your child. Take care of him, for he will spread a brilliant light over the world. The Ari carried that promise all his life, and perhaps because of it, he recognized what others would have missed.

Without hesitation, the Ari stepped out of the circle and took the old man's hand, and they danced together. A great light shone between them. The students watched, unable to speak, unable to look away. The dancing went on for hours, past midnight, until the music slowed and the old man released the Ari's hand and withdrew into the dark.

The students crowded around their teacher immediately. Who was that? Who was the old man who danced with you?

The Ari told them: it was Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai himself.

The story, preserved in the Israel Folktale Archives and in collections of tales from the Ari's circle in Safed, is understood as a succession narrative. Rabbi Shimon had chosen the Ari. Of all the Kabbalists of the intervening thirteen centuries, of all the scholars who had studied the Zohar and built upon it, this one was the true heir. Two sages of the Galilee, one from the second century and one from the sixteenth, joined hands at the grave and the transmission was complete.

Every year the bonfires still burn at Meron. Every year the dancing begins at nightfall and continues until the Galilee hills are lit from every direction. The Zohar, that strange and luminous book first published around 1280 CE in Castile, teaches that light is the first creation, that all subsequent creation is a garment for light, that the righteous dead are more present than the living understand. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai spent thirteen years in a cave and came out radiating fire. The Ari spent thirty-eight years on earth and left behind a cosmology that still organizes how millions of Jews understand the relationship between God and everything else. Between them, at a hillside grave on a spring night, they danced.

The Lurianic school that the Ari founded in Safed in the 1560s understood the Torah itself as a living body, its letters not merely signs but divine energies requiring constant engagement. The doctrine of tzimtzum that the Ari taught held that God had contracted the divine infinitude to make room for the world, and that every act of human righteousness, every mitzvah performed with intention, drew divine light back into the places from which it had withdrawn. This was not a passive theology. It was a program. And the dancing at Meron was part of it. To dance at the grave of a righteous person, in the tradition the Ari practiced, was to draw down the soul of that person and bring their light into contact with the living. The Ari did not merely honor Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. He called him, and Rabbi Shimon came.