Two years ago, less than a month ago, about a month after the disaster in Meron, I found myself in the vicinity of Mount Meron. It was a family tour, and we had to set our agenda going forward. Go? Suggested someone. And I pondered for a moment and said: No. Let's go to Safed. It was the fear of facing the site of the disaster, the fear of reconnecting to that terrible night, but there was something else there. This was the unofficial conflict that was born in my midst with Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai.
Yes, I know it's a bit childish and a little illogical and also a little silly, but I personally couldn't calm down from the anger.
Like that, Rabbi Shimon? Young children who came to dance in your honor? Avrachim, parents of children, old people and teenagers crushed to death and returning home wrapped in Zaka robes? And all this in the midst of the excitement of joy? While dancing and singing? With such cruelty? In such a shocking amount?
I remember that anger and remember that it was really personal and really tangible. I didn't calm down until almost a year later, when someone shared the exact same feeling with me, and I realized I wasn't the only idiot. A few months later, I visited Zion in Meron and forgave Rabbi Shimon, personally. Public - I have never forgiven.
In those days leading up to the revelry, like everyone else, I was bombarded with incessant reports about the organization's comprehensive work in Meron, designed to prevent overcrowding and prevent disasters. Three times a day I keep abreast of what the projector said, and four times I watch the minister in charge brief reporters, read Psalms, open a meeting in the war room and lock up a meeting in the bureau. I love their dedication and wish them success.
These lines are written on the eve of the revelry, and I am tense and trembling, praying for the peace of the celebrants and for the event, and I am sure that with God's help everything will pass peacefully.
That's not the story. The story is Lag B'Omer 5721. Blacker than black. And the story is all too natural a way in which we relate to what was then.
I am not busy finding the culprits, and I do not interfere in the work of the commission of inquiry. That's not the point at all. The reality in which the routine of revelry and preparation for it continues normally seems abnormal to me. On the radio, they casually talk about "the greatest civilian disaster in the history of the state," as if it were an item in a trivia test of 20 questions about Lag B'Omer or civilian disasters. Inside the ultra-Orthodox street, collections were held, actions were taken, but in practice, the world as usual. 45 victims in an unimaginable disaster, a disaster unparalleled in the modern world for decades, an unnecessary, monstrous, tragic disaster - all around in a "the show must go on" atmosphere.
So what do I ask for? Don't know exactly. I don't have exact lines to draw. I have nothing but the obvious feeling that the world cannot do as usual. A week after the disaster, I called from here to all those who called for silence and containment, according to the biblical model of "Widom Aharon" - to be silenced. I didn't need to sleep, I thought, but to shout. Shout and shout.
Two years after the disaster and the mountain is organized, lessons have been learned and the committee is investigating, but to the big outcry - I am still waiting.
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