How many righteous people can you name? A hundred? Fifty? When Abraham played that game with God, they couldn’t even find ten. (Admittedly, the two were looking in Sodom and Gemorrah, the two evilest cities on Earth, but still.)
The new Twitter stream, @DailyHillulah, marks the yahrzeit—anniversary of a death–of a different rabbi or tzaddik who died on virtually every day of the year.
In Jewish tradition, a yahrzeit is a time of reflection and appreciation. On a yahrzeit it’s customary to visit the grave of the deceased person, and spend the day thinking about them and their accomplishments. This can be a sad practice, but it doesn’t have to be: Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, for instance, told his followers to use his yahrzeit for celebrations–and even today, hundreds of thousands of people flock to his grave site to dance, feast, and tell stories by campfire.
Most of @DailyHillulah’s featured righteous people aren’t very well-known–recently they memorialized Rabbenu Tam, grandson of the Torah commentator Rashi, and the niggun-writer Yisrael Dan Taub of Modzitz. While we can’t attend a tweetup to meet these righteous people, a reminder of their yahrzeits manages to introduce us to their life and works.
