In the wake of observing Lag b’Omer, there’s a teaching from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai that is still on my mind. It’s one of those ideas that seems really simple but when you strive to practice it, it begins to ask more of you. It also feels incredibly timely.
This teaching tells us that a plague broke out among the students of Rabbi Akiva. It wasn’t a plague of something external, not because of a natural disaster or bad luck, but because “they did not act respectfully toward one another.” And then, on Lag b’Omer—the day of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s elevation—the deaths ceased. Most of us are drawn to that moment of relief, to the Light that enters and stops the suffering and on Lag b’Omer we focus on connecting with this Light to relieve our suffering.
But it’s a detail that we often overlook in this story that has me intrigued. It wasn’t a disembodied force of negativity from “out there” that drew this plague. It was created by the students’ very own actions of negativity.
Is Disrespect a Modern-Day Plague?
If we apply this teaching to our lives then we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: what are we creating?
Disrespect doesn’t usually show up as blatantly as it does in the movies. It’s more internal in the real world: the judgment we don’t challenge, the gossip we unconsciously spread, the tiny ways we withhold patience or kindness. It moves through our conversations, our relationships, our behaviors. It shapes the way we see people and, eventually, the way we experience the world itself. Over time, it creates a kind of emotional and spiritual atmosphere where division feels normal and where criticism feels justified.
Think of how a plague begins. One person is infected and slowly another, and another, and another until it’s rampant. And while it’s easy to point outward and identify where this exists in the world, the deeper work asks us to turn inward. Not to ask where we are being disrespected, but where we might be the ones doing the disrespecting. We forget, even if only for a moment, that they carry the same spark of the Creator that we do.
How Choosing Respect Can Transform Your Life
Maybe we feel justified. Maybe that person has been difficult, or unkind, or even hurtful. But the question isn’t whether our judgment is understandable. The question is what continuing to nurture our judgment creates. According to the wisdom of The Zohar, the power available to us, especially during this time, is not only to remove negativity after it appears, but to remove its cause. And the cause begins within our own consciousness.
Before he left this physical world, Rav Berg shared that the end of chaos is already here; it simply hasn’t revealed itself because we haven’t yet earned the ability to see it. And what is required of us to reveal it? Not perfection, not brilliance—just the willingness to truly get along with one another. It sounds almost too simple, and yet it may be the most demanding spiritual work we are asked to do.
Because getting along doesn’t mean agreeing or allowing harmful behavior. It means choosing, again and again, to look deeper than the surface, to resist the instinct to reduce someone to their worst moment, and to remember that every person is carrying a story we cannot fully see. The way we think about others is not neutral, it is creative. It either contributes to connection or to separation. And if that’s true, then every interaction becomes an opportunity. Every moment of irritation becomes a doorway. We can walk through it in the direction we’ve always gone or we can pause and choose something different.
All we have to do is close our eyes, even briefly, and bring to mind someone we struggle with—not someone easy to love, but someone who challenges us. And instead of trying to change them, we ask for help in changing how we see them. We can ask the Creator to help us see more clearly, to reveal the spark that exists beneath the behaviors. Because perhaps this is what it really means to end a plague—not just to hope for relief, but to become someone who no longer contributes to the conditions that allow it to exist.
Invitations to Practice
We don’t have to look far to see what happens when judgment becomes the dominant force in the world. Division, conflict, and even violence often begin in the smallest moments of disconnection, in the subtle ways we deny each other dignity. But the opposite is also true. When we choose real respect, not conditional or convenient, but rooted in the recognition of another person’s humanity, we begin to shift something. And if enough of us make that choice, we set a higher energy in motion. The world we experience starts to reflect that energy.
Here are three ways you can start:
Choose one person you tend to judge and, for even a single day, practice seeing them differently—interrupting the narrative, replacing criticism with curiosity, noticing what changes within you as you do.
Pause in real time, especially in moments of frustration, and ask yourself what it would look like to respond from dignity instead of reaction, and then to try, even imperfectly, to act from that place.
Make a conscious commitment to become someone who contributes to connection rather than division, to healing rather than harm. Because if the end of chaos is already here, then perhaps all that remains is for us to learn how to see it—and to become the kind of people who can reveal it.
As within, so without is more than just a pithy statement. It’s a guide. The negativity we experience within us, though we might think another person is the cause, is negativity that belongs to us. As we work to dismantle and erase it, we are given new eyes. When we see the world around us and the people in it differently, we become conduits for the Light to flow through us. Before you know it, the plague is gone and all that remains is peace, joy, and connection.