Rabbi's Chayva's Chat

Welcome back to Ask the Rabbi! Let’s cover a few very important questions that have come up in the last month or two. Before we begin, I’d also like to add an aside that I will be away on vacation from tomorrow, May 24 through Thursday, May 30. I hope everyone has a good Memorial Day and Lag Ba’Omer! Which brings us to our first question…

Why do we traditionally cut our hair on Lag Ba’Omer?

Traditionally, during the beginning of the Omer (the days counted between Passover and Shavuot) one does not cut one’s hair because it is a partial mourning period for Rabbi Akiva’s many students who died of a plague during the Omer. That period ends on the 33rd day of the Omer. The letter 33 is represented numerically in Hebrew by the letters ל (lamed = 30) + ג (gimmel = 3), which, when combined, can be pronounced “Lag.” Lag Ba’Omer, therefore, is the 33rd day of the Omer and the day when the mourning period ends, so people often do the things from which they have abstained: haircuts, parties, etc. 

This is particularly relevant for Am Tikvah because, as you’ll see below, next year we are going to celebrate Lag Ba’Omer with a party (Lager Ba’Omer) in which anyone who would like may cut their hair and donate them to nonprofits that make wigs. I have already started growing my hair out to reach the minimum 10-12” and I invite you to join me and share this with your hirsute friends!

Did Jesus have a bar mitzvah?

No. Though there is one Talmudic mention of being a bar mitzvah (literally “a son of commandment”), it is not connected to the tradition we know of reading from the Torah to celebrate coming of age at 13. Early versions of becoming bar mitzvah might have included donning tefillin (phylacteries) for the first time, or perhaps by the year 400 CE included having one’s first aliyah to the Torah. Some sources say there was no evidence of a bar mitzvah service until 1400, and most say that even that would not have looked much like our modern b’nai mitzvah. In any case, the lifecycle moment of becoming bar/bat/b’nai mitzvah came well after Jesus.

Are satyrs kosher?

Satyrs are mythological Greek creatures who were most commonly portrayed as having a lower body of a goat and the upper body of a man. Unsurprisingly, humans are not kosher. Goats, however, are kosher: they are mammals that have cloven hooves and chew their cud. One might say that only the goat parts of satyrs are kosher, or satyrs are kosher if their digestive system is part of their goat half and not their human half (so that they would chew their cud). However, I would never recommend eating something that is so highly sentient as a satyr. Furthermore, the issue at hand might not be kashrut; it might be more an issue of kilayim, or forbidding mixture and combinations.