“Does God Accept ‘Extenuating Circumstances’?” - Beha’alotkha 5781: Rabbinic Intern David Chapman

The Torah, for the most part, is not loosey goosey with the timing of the holidays.  Ritual observances are set down at specific moments in the calendar.  Deadlines are set.  We honor that fixedness on festivals, when we open the kiddush with the verse from Leviticus: 

וַיְדַבֵּ֣ר מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֶת־מֹעֲדֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֑ה אֶל־בְּנֵ֖י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ 
So Moses declared to the Israelites the set times of the LORD.

The fixedness of the calendar, in fact, is one of the unique and special features of Jewish life. The very first mitzvah given to the Israelite people, while they are still slaves in Egypt, has to do with time when they are told that the month we now know as Nisan shall be the first month for them.

And there is no festival whose time is more set than pesach.  It is the baseline holiday, the one all the other ones are counted from.  Both sections of Torah that list the holidays, in Leviticus 23 that I quoted above and Deuteronomy 16, both times Pesach comes first in the list.

The same set of instructions given in Egypt that identifies Nisan as the first month includes the rituals around the special pesach offering that the Israelites will make on the night of the exodus.  

And now, in our parsha, it is a year later. The Israelites are in the midbar, the wilderness, getting ready to finally set out on their journey towards Eretz Yisrael.

It is time for the pesach sacrifice to be made again, this time, as a commemoration of that awe-filled night 12 months earlier when the bonds of slavery were broken.  Even back in Egypt, when God was explaining the Pesach sacrifice, God was saying “this will be a commemoration for you.” Even before b’nai yisrael takes one step out of Egypt they are told, on this exact date next year, and the year after and for all generations, tonight will be commemorated.

In our parsha for this week, Moses tells the people, v’ya’su v’nai yisrael et ha-pesach b’moado.

Let the people of israel make the pesach sacrifice b’moado, in its set time, there’s that same word again.  This is the set time – the 14th day of the first moon of the second year following the exodus.  The evening after Nisan 14, the date we will mark as Pesach today.

This is how the system is supposed to work. God sets a time, and Moses instructs the people to keep to it, and then … the people do it.

But almost immediately after the system is put in place, it gets turned on its head.  Moses does not even get one good installment of the commemorative Pesach before something gums up the works.

What happens? Real life gets in the way.  Messy, unpredictable, unavoidably human real life.   

We’ve already learned that anyone who is tam’eh, or ritually impure, is ineligible for the Pesach sacrifice. But we’ve also learned that anyone who doesn’t take part is liable to become karet, cut off from the people.

So in Numbers chapter 9 right after Moses reminds the people that the time has come for the first commemorative Pesach … a group of Israelites approach Moses with a problem.

Anachnu t’mei’im – we are tam’e, we are in a state of ritual impurity … but here’s why: l’nefesh adam.  Because we have been in contact with a corpse. Now we know still to this day one of the most valued mitzvot is what we call k’vod ha’met, honoring the dead. But honoring the dead means coming into contact with their bodies, and this puts someone into a temporary state of tam’eh.  

Quick sidebar here to underscore that tam’eh is not moral impurity. Clearly, these people were doing something honorable, holy, positive.  But they still have a problem. Tam’eh means no Pesach. No Pesach means karet.  But the objection they raise here is about something deeper. They don’t even mention the fear of punishment.  

Right after stating their problem – anachnu t’mei’im lnefesh adam… they say

לָמָּה נִגָּרַע לְבִלְתִּי הַקְרִיב אֶת־קׇרְבַּן יְהֹוָה בְּמֹעֲדוֹ בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

Why – lamah. This is not a question that often gets asked in Torah?

Why should we be nigara – diminished, discounted, restrained, from bringing God the offering b’moado – at the set time, among the rest of B’nai Yisrael.

It is a profound question. We were doing something good! We were serving the community. We were performing one of the mitzvot for which there is no repayment.  And yet, we find ourselves discounted, diminished?  Why are we prevented from honoring God with the rest of our community?  

It is one of those questions that cries out to us from the Torah.  It is the same question that eats away at us every time we experience or observe an injustice like this – when someone is diminished in the process of doing something worthy.  It makes me think of that viral video from the London Marathon a few years ago, when a runner slows down and helps one of his struggling competitors reach the finish line. Matthew Rees, the hero of the story, sacrificed his own race, for which perhaps he’d trained for months, to help a complete stranger. In the past year, we’ve gained an even deeper appreciation of the injustices that might befall someone who was just doing what they were supposed to be doing. The people who got sick when they went to work caring for others. The bystanders who become targets when they try to intervene. The public servants whose families suffer consequences because of their moral courage.  Why should they be discounted?

In the Torah, when Moses is asked this question, he does what any good middle manager does when he’s challenged by a customer: he asks his supervisor. Stand by, Moses says, while I go ask God.  

And God offers something unexpected and remarkable.  First God fulfills the request. God institutes what comes to be known as Pesach Sheni, the “do over” Pesach, to be observed on the second month, not the first, at twilight on the 14th day.  So first of all, even just by this concession, it sort of throws into question the initial importance of marking the one-year anniversary. There’s nothing essential or magic about the 1 year mark. If you can’t do it then, do it a month later.  

And in the same breath God goes even further. First of all, he extends this offer not just to the group of people who came forward but l’doroteichem – to all future generations. Or, this could even mean: YOU in a future generation. Maybe this year you made the Pesach offering but next year you don’t.  Fine.  This is a blanket provision for all time at any time. And then, God says:

אִ֣ישׁ אִ֣ישׁ כִּי־יִהְיֶֽה־טָמֵ֣א ׀ לָנֶ֡פֶשׁ אוֹ֩ בְדֶ֨רֶךְ רְחֹקָ֜הׄ

Not just the people who are tam’eh l’nefesh – impure because of contact with a corpse, but also b’derekh rehokah.  On a long journey.  This was a concession the people didn’t even ask for!  If you were away from Jerusalem at the time of the Pesach offering, you get to take advantage of the do-over.

This is already a fairly liberal policy, but our commentators take it even further. Rashi, basing his interpretation on a section of the Jerusalem Talmud, focuses on the highly interpretive word rekhoka, long or distant.  This doesn’t have to be such a long journey.  It applies even if you are just barely outside the temple. 

Chizkuni, another medieval French rabbi, goes in a different direction. Chizkuni supposes that the word rekhoka does not refer to the derekh, the journey, but the ish, the person.  If the person feels distant, disconnected when the time comes for the Pesach offering, they can observe Pesach Sheni.  What a gift this is.  Rabbi Eliyahu Munk, a contemporary rabbi, explains CHizkuni this way: It applies to a person that is spiritually on a journey that has estranged them from Judaism and from God. I know that I have felt on those journeys from time to time in my life, and I imagine I am not alone.  God sees that possibility and accounts for it in Pesach Sheni.

Pesach Sheni is the Pesach of “extenuating circumstances.” I remember when I was a kid, that was the expression we used whenever something happened at home that forced us to turn in an assignment late. I remember the day after our dog died, I was sent to school with a note explaining my “extenuating circumstances” to my teachers.  A few weeks later, our dishwasher malfunctioned and flooded the kitchen floor. I asked for the note again but got a firm no.  Extenuating circumstance only extenuate so far.

But perhaps I was just ahead of my time. There has been a lot written recently about how the workplace and the classroom could or should change post Covid. In the before times, in many professional and educational environments,” deadlines were fixed, set externally, and often left little room for personal circumstances.  Your paper was due when it was due. After that date, you start getting points knocked off.  

But this past year taught us that a different system might not only be possible, but that it was necessary.  Suddenly, every person in the country was in the midst of an “extenuating circumstance.”  Suddenly the need to take time off to recover from illness, care for a loved one, and yes, to grieve, emerged as such a commonplace situation that the previously rigid structures had to yield, or they would break. Of course, these circumstances aren’t new, but their prevalence forced us to rethink some things.

We’ve seen this play out interestingly in the pressurized world of college admissions.  Last year, Princeton was the first Ivy League school to cancel its “early action’ deadline and shift to a single application cycle. The other Ivy Leagues and many other universities followed suit. As they did this, they acknowledged a long-suspected truth: those early action deadlines often put applicants who were disadvantaged anyway on an even steeper slope. Students from low-income backgrounds might not be able to apply early, possibly because they need to compare different financial offers. Meanwhile, it may be that the students who have access to extra test tutoring or coaching are the ones who can get everything together in time to send to a top choice school by November. This is not a new concern in the college world. Frank Bruni wrote about the unfairness of early action back in 2016. But Covid revealed just how vulnerable all of us are to life’s unpredictability, and this caused the system to change. 

Today, dozens of schools have eliminated early admissions deadlines, and some have gone further and eliminated an admissions deadline entirely.  Many schools, including the Ivy League schools and the entire University of California system, are also going test-optional meaning that no one has to submit an SAT or ACT score, another issue that many have long argued would bring more diversity to college student bodies without reducing its academic quality. 

None of this is meant as a critique to those who applied early admission or who worked hard on their SAT scores. We can want the very best for our families and still recognize when the system could be fairer overall to more people.

In my own academic experience at JTS, many of my professors did away with deadlines this year. They would tell us at the beginning of the semester, you need to write X many papers by the end of the semester, but I don’t care when you get them in. Yes, this approach risks making more stress, both for the professor and the student, if there’s a backlog at the end of the term, but a system aspires to treat us like responsible adults who know our needs and can manage our time.

Maybe this wouldn’t work in all settings. I don’t know if I’d want to deposit checks at a bank that cashed them whenever they got around to it, or visit a doctor who’d read my lab results “sometime before the end of the year.”  

But even if we hold up the ideal as presented in our Torah, that a system with some flexibility is more humane, more just, more compassionate, not just during a global pandemic but always, we might move a few notches closer towards a better way.

We don’t do much to celebrate Pesach Sheni these days.  One does not have to clear their home from chametz, like during Pesach, but some will anyway consume some matzah (maybe that last board languishing in the back of your pantry) to mark the day.  But one Pesach Sheni observance has made it into our “Pesach rishon” our first Pesach observance.  In the section of the seder called Korech, we eat the “Hillel Sandwich” the practice attributed to Hillel the sage who made a little burrito of all the different foods on the Seder table.  In our Haggadah when we cite the verse explaining this custom, we actually read from this Parsha – they shall eat it with matzot and maror, not the “original” Pesach.

I think this little reminder of Pesach Sheni embedded in our regular Passover observance reminds us of the spiritual benefit of this “do over observance.”  All of Passover, perhaps all of Jewish observance, is an opportunity to reconnect, to rededicate ourselves, to ask for forgiveness for past mistakes and commit to the right path going forward. Some have said Pesach Sheni is the foundational proof that teshuva is possible – teshuva, return, the notion that no matter where we’ve been in the past we can set ourselves back on a path towards God in the future.

The torah is full of strict deadlines and time boundaries. But God’s offer of Pesach Sheni, not just to those who were engaged in a mitzvah but also to those who were physically or spiritually distant, teaches us that God understands “extenuating circumstances.”  And it all starts when the people speak up to ask for it.

I pray that all of us can experience the grace of a world that is a little softer about deadlines and due dates, a world that holds us a little more gently as we re-emerge into the classroom or the workplace, or even when we make plans with a friend. If God can accept our Pesach Sheni offering, so too may God accept us, whenever we get there.

Shabbat shalom.