Visiting the Graves of the Righteous: Inns of Molten Blue

On a Friday morning in early March 2025, three months after Israel and Hezbollah struck an uneasy truce, hundreds of Jewish men, mostly Hasidim, flocked to a small tomb on the peak of Mount Shinan, a few miles west of the Israeli border town Kiryat Shmona. They rushed past an imposing concrete wall spray-painted with an arrow and the words “to the grave of Rav Ashi.” The cover of the tomb was freshly painted in the vivid shade of blue that coats walls and ceilings, doorways and window frames throughout Israel’s North (an old Galilean line, attributed to the sixteenth-century messianic pretender Shlomo Molcho, flirts, “Three things captured my heart: the blue skies of Galilee, the blue walls of Safed, and the blue of your eyes”). For about an hour, the worshippers wept, sang Psalms, danced, jostled each other for position, and generally jumped around, while a lucky few prostrated themselves on top of the tomb.

After the First Lebanon War, the Israel Defense Forces established an outpost on Mount Shinan overlooking the Lebanese village of Hula. When Israel retreated from Southern Lebanon in 2000, Sheikh ‘Abbad—which is what the Lebanese call both the mountain and the grave—became a hotspot. Shia hardliners would gather to pray there, burn Israeli flags, lob stones, and chant anti-Israel slogans. A Norwegian UN diplomat, Terje Rød-Larsen, drew a line down the center of the tomb, one side for those who came to visit Sheikh ‘Abbad, the other who came for Rav Ashi, though for decades, few Israelis reached the grave. After the October 7 attacks, Hezbollah used nearby positions to shell northern Israeli towns. Within months, almost a hundred thousand Israelis were evacuated from the North, and over a million Lebanese were displaced on the other side of the border. The tomb was closed.

A ceasefire was declared last November, but the border remains in flux. As I write, the IDF has five outposts in Lebanese territory and continues to strike Hezbollah targets whenever it perceives a threat. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Israeli Right, an organization called “North, Arise! The Movement for the Settlement of Southern Lebanon” has brought dozens of Israelis to, and sometimes beyond, the boundary. And then there’s Rav Ashi’s tomb. This February, a group of Bratslav Hasidim snuck into the area, tore down the UN-compromise fence that divided the tomb, and repainted the grave blue (there are unconfirmed reports that Israeli authorities arrested eight people for unauthorized entry to a closed military zone and for stone throwing). This set the stage for the visit last March, which was supervised by the IDF.

Rav Ashi lived in Babylonia at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century CE, when the Persian King Yazdegerd I ruled the region. A famous passage in the Talmud says that Rav Ashi and a certain Ravina (it is not entirely clear which one) were “the end of instruction.” This led to the medieval tradition that Rav Ashi was a key figure in the composition of the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps its editor. The Talmud records hundreds of Rav Ashi’s teachings and many hagiographical tales, including a story about the time he put his bed in a local synagogue under construction to make sure that the builders finished the job. Still, we know hardly anything about Rav Ashi’s life—or his death. In all likelihood, he was buried in or near Sura, the site of an important talmudic academy, in what is now southern Iraq. It is possible that Rav Ashi arranged for his remains to be carried over to the Land of Israel, as some Babylonian Jews did (and some diaspora Jews still do), but the first mention of his tomb being anywhere in northern Israel is in Hebrew shrine itineraries from the fifteenth century. These early modern Jewish travelogues locate Rav Ashi’s tomb near the Banias stream, a difficult thirteen-mile hike from Mount Shinan.

As a scholar who works on the Babylonian Talmud, I’ve always dreamed of visiting the places in present-day Iraq where rabbis like Rav Ashi helped shape Judaism as we know it. I’ve also sometimes tagged along curiously—half participant, half observer—on Jewish spiritual pilgrimages. So, when I learned about the Hasidim visiting Rav Ashi’s tomb just a few hours from my home (albeit in a war zone), I was tempted to go. I spoke to reporters who covered the trip and ranking members of the IDF who served in the area. I even had a friend who lives among Bratslav Hasidim discreetly inquire about any planned visits to the tomb. Unfortunately, my friend was unsuccessful, my army contacts were discouraging (a lieutenant colonel serving in the North was especially disdainful of “those wackos who visit old graves”), and the journalists had little to offer. And so, I did what I always do when I’m out of luck: I went to the library.

In 1972, an Israeli archaeologist named Zvi Ilan was hiking in the Galilee and stumbled on a contemporary sign near Mount Shinan saying that Rav Ashi’s tomb was there. His subsequent newspaper column is the first published reference to Mount Shinan being the location of Rav Ashi’s grave. Trekking down the paper trail, I found that the next reference was in a 1981 Yiddish-language pamphlet published by the “Council for the Protection of Ancestral Graves,” which presents charming images of young Hasidim working with construction tools and before and after (frier un heynt) pictures documenting the building of a sturdy platform to ease access to the site. Later issues of Qadmonenu (Our Ancestors), the council’s official publication, show a handsome stone gate that now marks the space.

As I read further, I noted that the association of Mount Shinan with Rav Ashi’s grave was based on references to an “al-‘Abbad” in the fifteenth-century Hebrew travel itineraries that locate the tomb at Banias. “Al-‘Abbad,” which can mean “servants” or “worshippers” in Arabic, currently refers to Mount Shinan where Sheikh ‘Abbad, who seems to have been a sixteenth-century Muslim hermit, is supposed to be buried. But “al-‘Abbad” might also have been a generic term for the tombs of holy men located in the region. As I looked up from Qadmonenu, worried that I had reached the end of the road, I realized that it was not the grave and the deceased saint, whoever he was, that intrigued me but the living people who are drawn to it.

Jews love dead Jews. They obsess over family trees, carefully maintain cemeteries, and fervently pray at the grave sites of tzaddikim. The aim of the Council for the Protection of Ancestral Graves is to protect Jewish burial grounds from secular Israeli politicians, real estate developers, and archaeologists, all of whom it regards as trowel-happy grave robbers. They do this not through protests but by creating facts on the ground. As the council’s journal puts it, “A pile of stones and an abandoned cave won’t prevent the brazen members of our nation from destroying [the graves]. But a large and solid building will, with God’s help, prevent them from realizing their evil designs.” They also oppose the brazen modern disciplines of archaeology and history, but they do have their own methods of investigation. Alongside “oral traditions transmitted from one generation to the next,” their scholars consult “tens of books and tens of photographs of early editions and old manuscripts regarding the holy sites.”

These books include premodern Hebrew writings that describe Middle Eastern Jewish shrines in detail, such as those fifteenth-century itineraries that mention Rav Ashi’s tomb. More tantalizing are the best-selling Hebrew travelogues of the High Middle Ages, such as Petachiah of Regensburg’s Sivuv (“circuit”), which was written around the end of the twelfth century. Petachiah left his rabbinic colleagues in Central Europe and set out for the Caucasus and then traveled on to Armenia, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Greece. Like any good travelogue, his Sivuv has its share of fancies: a ravenous elephant in Nineveh, a flying camel in Baghdad. Yet, the work can also be quite grounded; indeed, it is largely devoted to what, or rather whom, lies buried in the ground.

Petachiah’s first big break was a letter of recommendation from a Babylonian rosh yeshiva, declaring that “in every place which [Petachiah] arrives you should guide him and show him the burial places of the sages and saints.” Among the pilgrimages Petachiah describes is the massive annual gathering at Ezekiel’s tomb held during the festival of Sukkot, when tens of thousands of people, both Muslims and Jews, would pray for fertility. Some of the most revealing sections of the book describe a robust shrine economy in which donations not only paid to keep the lamps lit and the building maintained but also provided support for other communal causes, from synagogue repairs to supporting orphans and Torah scholars in need.

It’s easy for modern people to mock the cult of saints, with its irrational fears, childish hopes, and profane economy. Yet, one cannot deny that these places continue to draw sincere worshippers who stand humbly in prayer with hearts open.

A few years ago, I went to Tiberias and visited the tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal Hanes, who is the patron saint of people who’ve lost things or who feel lost. His large shrine sits on a hill above the Sea of Galilee, a few steps away from a gourmet ice cream parlor. After ducking in to see the place, I stood in the sun outside, listening to an impromptu lecture from a visiting cynic who described the establishment of the tomb as a fundraising ploy by nineteenth-century rabbis. But then, turning back to face the building, I noticed a young woman standing alone, swaying rhythmically in prayer and holding a prayerbook tight to her chest, as tears—real and copious—streamed down her face. It is a scene that repeats itself at places like Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, where barren women gather to pray for children, the grave of Jonathan ben Uzziel in Amuka, where single people go to beseech God for a suitable husband or wife, and, of course, at the graves of relatives, where the feeling of the site as a numinous borderland between the living and the dead is palpable for the mourners.

Nevertheless, over the centuries, complaints have been lodged against the Jewish cult of saints by rabbis and others, like this polemic by a tenth-century Karaite:

They sit among graves of saintly persons and spend nights among tombstones, while they seek favors from dead men, saying “O Yose the Galilean, grant me a cure!” or “Vouchsafe me a child!” They light lamps at the graves of saints and burn incense upon the brick altars before them.

Of course, defenders of such practices—then and now—insist that they pray only to God above and merely enlist the saint’s support. They also invoke traditional sources, such as the midrashic story about Caleb praying at the Cave of the Patriarchs before setting out to scout the Land of Canaan or the Talmud’s recommendation to pray in cemeteries during a drought.

Proof texts aside, what draws so many to these tombs is the potent sense of religious energy, locally distributed. The stubborn biblical insistence on worshipping a deity who “was brought back from the infinite future, an abstract God: neither painting nor graven image nor tree nor stone”—as Yehuda Amichai once put it—can leave the heart cold. It’s hard to feel close to such a God, and harder still if the primary place consecrated to do so was a temple that was destroyed in 70 CE. Jewish shrines satisfy the passionate desire to encounter the overflowing divine plentitude in special places—and especially when in need.

In the medieval period, the identification of graves was a matter of tradition, preserved and handed down by the elders. Petachiah tells a story of how one generous sage copied out a long list of the location of Jewish shrines for him to visit. But by the time he got back to Bohemia, he had lost the list.

In the early modern period, visionary new methods for discovering or rediscovering shrines were developed, along with new ways to worship at them. The transformation was led by a remarkable group of kabbalists, who had recently come to the Galilee in the sixteenth century from the diaspora. Early modern Safed, where these unique souls congregated, was a wellspring of fresh ideas, practices, and ways of being, which flowed into the stream of Jewish tradition. This is certainly true of the new cult of saints that the kabbalists helped establish. Take Shaar ha-Gilgulim, a book on reincarnation by Rabbi Chaim Vital, a student of the most influential mystic of the period, Isaac Luria. After speculating on the transmigration of ancestors ranging from the prediluvian (Cain and Abel) and patriarchal (Jacob) to the medieval (Moses Maimonides) and early modern (Joseph Karo), Vital concludes with a tour of some sixty Galilean grave sites:

And now I will write of the burial places of the righteous as I have received them from my teacher of blessed memory. I have already told you how he would look at and gaze at the souls of the righteous all the time and everywhere, all the more so at their gravesites, where, as is known, their souls remain. Even from afar, his eyes would perceive the soul of the righteous standing at its grave. In this way, he would learn the grave of each and every tzadik and he would speak with them and learn from them all the secrets of the Torah.

Vital’s prose unfolds like a well-worn map pointing out landmarks, pathways, nooks, and crannies (“From there take the path that goes south, and there’s a road called al-medan . . . below that there is a valley to the east . . . and there is a great crevice carved in between the rocks, where Rabbi Binyamin bar Yefet is buried”). Sometimes, Vital simply confirms identifications, as when he notes that “in the village of Meron, there is buried Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son Rabbi Eliezer, just as everyone says.” On other occasions, he issues a correction: “The world says that in that cave is buried (the biblical prophet) Hosea son of Beeri. But that is not the case. Rather, Rabbi Yehoshua the Tanna is buried there, and the people mistakenly call him Hosea.”

This is not the only rabbinic redirection in Shaar ha-Gilgulim, which consistently prefers the graves of rabbis to that of biblical figures. As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes in his recent Hebrew book, Mishna Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness, unlike modern Zionists, whose efforts to reestablish Jewish sovereignty in the land were inspired by biblical military heroes like Joshua, the early modern kabbalists, many of whom came to the Galilee after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, were drawn to the pastoral scenes and roving rabbis depicted in the Zohar.

The abiding mood of the Safed kabbalists was a kind of spectral sexiness. They wrote movingly of their erotic yearning for the Shekhina—the feminine manifestation of the divine—who had been exiled during Jerusalem’s destruction and now flitted like a lost dove from one place to another. They joined her in exile by “exiling” themselves through mystical wanderings in the fields and orchards. They also laid themselves down on the graves so that the soul of the saint buried there could impregnate their own and transmit his aura and teaching.

Along with saints and the Shekhina, the other memorable figures that appear in the writings of the Galilean kabbalists were Arab Muslims. These locals, like some of Petachiah’s twelfth-century informants, helped the Jewish arrivals rediscover old graves. In fact, the Galilean Muslims did more than give the kabbalists directions. They invited them on the ziyārāt—pilgrimages to regional shrines in search of blessings and illumination. This was best accomplished, it turns out, through the Sufi ritual of prostrating on the graves of dead saints to commune with the spirit of the sheikh buried there.

The Jews of the Galilee fell into a kind of drunken love with their sleeping saints, and they developed tomb circuits to regularly rendezvous with them. They also painted the domes of the Galilean shrines tekhelet sky blue, which was associated with the Shekhina and widely believed to repel the evil eye. These blue domes beckoned worshippers to come and connect with the souls of the tzaddikim. (In my New England middle school, I was taught Emily Dickenson’s poem “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”: “Reeling—thro’ endless summer days— / From inns of molten blue— . . . Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats— / And Saints—to windows run.” I never knew exactly what that meant, but it might be a better description of sixteenth-century Safed than nineteenth-century Amherst.)

What happened in Safed did not stay in Safed, and this was as true of its approach to saints as it was of its famous prayers (Lecha Dodi) and doctrines (Tzimtzum). And this is most apparent in modern-day Hasidism. Thousands of people flock to the ohel of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens to get advice; Bratslav Hasidim speak of a desire (ratzon) and a craving (teshuqa)to visit the grave of their own rebbe, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, in the Ukrainian city of Uman, and thousands still show up every year to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in his absent presence despite the war.

In Israel, the best place to encounter a tzaddik’s soul is “in Meron, where Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai”—the second-century rabbi and mystical hero of the medieval kabbalistic classic the Zohar—is buried, “just as everyone says.” The Meron pilgrimage, which takes place a month after Passover on the festival of Lag BaOmer, is famous for being the world’s largest annual Jewish gathering and infamous for a 2021 stampede in which forty-five people died outside the tomb. Lesser known is the numinous nightlife at Meron, which gets going after midnight and continues until dawn. The Zohar writes of the enchantment that comes from rising at midnight to study Torah, when “the Holy Blessed One, together with the saints that are in the Garden of Eden, comes to listen to the voice of those studying, and a thread of kindness is pulled for them.”

I’m not a regular at the Meron night kollels—as the study halls, where devotees gather nightly to study mystical texts, are known. But I have had occasion to visit them with a friend who likes to see Rabbi Shimon as often as he can. “Chaim,” as I’ll call him, wakes me up in his Safed home after a few hours of rest and drives us rapidly along the tree-lined streets in his beat-up van, stopping to pick up Bratslav hitchhikers standing silently at the side of the road. After a quick purifying dip in one of the local mikvahs, we reach the shrine under a full moon in an almost delirious state of exhaustion and exhilaration.

In the building I meet some of the regulars, including a beatific Sephardi taxi driver. He greets Chaim warmly with a kiss and an embrace, exclaiming in zoharic Aramaic, “behavivuta talya milta!” which loosely translated means, “It’s all about love!” Inspired, we sit down together and wind our way slowly and not always surely through the Zohar’s gorgeously meandering sentences. After a couple of hours of study, Chaim and I leave the building and make our way in the dark through a neighboring orchard to find a spot where we can meditate. The nighttime silence is punctuated by the occasional lows of grazing cattle and the sudden cries of “Abba!” and “Tateh!” by Bratslav Hasidim calling out to their long-dead rebbe in the darkness. I am a poor meditator, and my mind wanders, finally settling on the ahistoricity of the shrines and whether it matters.

Israeli historian Elchanan Reiner has shown that Meron was an ancient, premonotheistic pilgrimage site that only came to be associated with Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai more than a thousand years after his death, so there is little reason to assume that he actually lies buried in the shrine that now bears his name, even if his presence was mystically verified five hundred years ago by Rabbi Chaim Vital. I’m not sure what to do with this thought, especially since learning the Zohar at Meron felt incredibly, vividly meaningful to me.

Then again, I know that the Zohar itself was not written by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai and also postdates him by more than a thousand years. Perhaps studying the Zohar at a place that has for centuries been seen as Rabbi Shimon’s resting place is not much different from reciting passages from the Odyssey at stations across the Aegean. Or visiting Mount Shinan to commune with Rav Ashi. “Talmud enthusiasts visit Rav Ashi’s grave and study a page of Talmud in his presence,” reports a 2005 guidebook, Graves of the Tzaddikim in Israel.

I never made it to the tomb on Mount Shinan, but judging from the photographs and videos, recent pilgrimages have been somewhat different than visits to the established shrines in the Galilee, like Meron, where worshippers roam about dreamily. At Rav Ashi’s tomb, there is a more dynamic sense of excitement, sacred yet supple. On the rainy morning of the IDF-coordinated visit last March, some worshippers bounced up and down while singing Psalm 150 (“Praise Him with blasts of the horn! Praise Him with harp and lyre!”), some screamed out their prayers passionately, others milled around, and one young man smiled mischievously at the camera while making a double V sign. Of course, this tomb hasn’t been associated with Rav Ashi for that long (over the years, there have even been competing Hebrew signs claiming that it is actually the grave of his son Mar bar Rav Ashi). There is also the question of whether it is a rabbi who lies buried on Mount Shinan or a Muslim hermit who is interred on al-‘Abbad. It is this dispute that has kept many visitors away while attracting some intrepid pilgrims, drawn as much by the tomb’s perilous place on the border as in spite of it.

Danger has often lurked at the tombs and on the roads leading to them. Petachiah recorded some of the risks, which can be posed by both the living and the dead. In their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Uman, Bratslav Hasidim have had to contend with all sorts of hazards, from the Russian Revolution to COVID-19 to the current Russia-Ukraine war. But overcoming the perils is a sign of their profound love for their rebbe.

For some, danger is key to the experience, as with a group of mainly Bratslav Hasidim who risk their lives and those of others to reach several shrines in the West Bank. One of these is Joseph’s Tomb near the Palestinian city of Nablus, where in 2000, a Palestinian Authority policeman shot and killed an Israeli worshipper. These perilous pilgrimages sometimes include rock throwing at both Palestinians and Israeli soldiers and high-speed car chases through treacherous terrain. In pushing their devotion to violent limits, the radical pilgrims are at the vanguard of what Israeli sociologist Shlomo Fischer has called “individualist expressionist Orthodoxy.” As it turns out, the first people to reach Rav Ashi’s tomb in February 2025 were members of this motley crew.

It is not only thrill seeking that motivates such visits but the temptation to turn non-Jewish sites into Jewish meccas. The history of religions is replete with such spatial conversions: mosques built over churches, churches over mosques, and pagan sanctuaries transformed into places of Jewish worship, as Elchanan Reiner suggests happened in Meron. Of course, there are plenty of examples, especially in premodern sources like Petachiah’s Sivuv and the writings of sixteenth-century kabbalists, of interreligious collaboration and mutual devotion at shrines. But nowadays, the mood has largely shifted, and religious communities work to control the sites exclusively.

Recently, I visited a formerly Muslim shrine at the edges of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Geula neighborhood with my friend, archaeologist and art historian Tawfiq Da’adli. As a graduate student, Tawfiq had studied this remarkable Ayyubid structure, which was dedicated in May 1251 to Husām al-Dīn Abūl Hasan and Diyā al-Dīn Mūsā, two fighters who fought for Saladin against the crusaders. Tawfiq had heard that the building, deserted for decades, had been remade into a Jewish pilgrimage site, and he wanted to see how the place was faring.

The first thing we noticed was the blue paint splashed over the building’s arched entrance. When we went in, we saw Hebrew embroidery covering the tombstones and naming the deceased as the biblical Benjamin and his sons. (The Arabic inscription at the site, which Tawfiq had helped excavate, had been removed long ago and is presently held in Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum.) The scene disturbed me, though in Tawfiq’s view, it was better to have a site religiously repurposed than for it to remain abandoned, at risk of demolition or collapse.

Despite my unease, I could not help but be impressed by the strange combination of historical gravitas and sacred malleability in this old mausoleum. There are at least two more sites in Israel in which Benjamin is supposed to be interred, one near Kfar Saba, in the center of the country, and another in the Galilee, making the sudden appearance of Jacob’s youngest son in Jerusalem especially puzzling. It reminded me of something anthropologist Yoram Bilu observed in Israeli development towns: domestic shrines dedicated to Moroccan tzaddikim, as if the dead saints had moved with their immigrant devotees from Morocco.

It also made me think of that simple Galilean tomb, high up on Mount Shinan on the Israel-Lebanon border. Rav Ashi’s bones probably lie buried a thousand kilometers away, somewhere in Mesopotamia. Still, for recent Jewish pilgrims, the talmudic master is so close that you can almost touch him.