The following is a vintage piece by Rabbi Wein, drawn from the Destiny Foundation's archives. We are delighted to share it with you.
A truly unique and exceptional idea is embedded in the
commemoration of Pesach Sheni. The Torah generally provides no opportunities to
make up for what one has missed. One cannot fulfill the commandments of shofar
or lulav at any other time except those set aside for those commandments in the
month of Tishrei. Yet here, regarding the Pesach offering, complete with the
commandments of matzah and maror, the Torah provides that if, under certain
circumstances, one was unable to fulfill those commandments in the month of
Nissan, it was still possible to do so in the month of Iyar.
There are many ramifications to understanding this
exceptional situation. If one was ritually impure or was too distant from
Jerusalem to perform the commandment in the month of Nissan, the Torah provides
an opportunity to fulfill this
obligation a month later. Since the holiday and commandments of Pesach are
inextricably associated with the general concept of the redemption of Israel
from exile and persecution, the ramifications of the laws regarding Pesach
Sheni have special relevance and importance in Jewish history, even when a
fully operational Temple no longer stands in Jerusalem.
There is an immediacy associated with this concept and that
immediacy perhaps has even greater relevance and insight for our present time
and national circumstances. For, in effect, our generations have been granted
another opportunity to rebuild the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland. If we
were unsuccessful, as apparently we previously were, or that earlier Jewish
generations lacked or did not take the opportunity to return to the land of
Israel, we their descendants have certainly been granted that ‘do-over’, a
make-up opportunity that Pesach Sheni represents. We will be charged as to what
we did or did not do with this opportunity and situation.
Over the centuries many opportunities for Jewish settlement
in the land of Israel were ignored or even aborted by the Jewish people
themselves. There were many historical and even religious reasons for this
behavior. But the main reason was that they felt themselves to be impure and
unworthy of success in such a momentous endeavor. They were also physically
very far away from Jerusalem, a city mostly desolated and physically
unattractive, dominated by foreign faiths and by rulers who were not
particularly friendly towards any sort of Jewish presence within their
domain.
So the idea of redemption, national revival and the return
to the land of Israel was, in practical terms, placed on the back burner of
Jewish life. The very idea of a messianic redemption served to postpone if not
even negate any action on the part of the Jewish people themselves in returning
and rebuilding themselves as a nation in their ancient homeland.
The messianic idea of a supernatural person who would
rectify all wrongs and overcome all problems in an instant became a legendary
truth amongst the people of Israel. Because of this we have suffered from false
messianism, which allowed both charlatans and other, more well-meaning
individuals to claim that they had the keys of redemption in their hands. For
nineteen centuries the Jewish people dreamt of Jerusalem, but dreams by
themselves are no substitute for actual progress.
The state of Israel as it is presently constituted, after 77
years of its existence and success, is a national illustration of the idea of
redemption as expressed in the concept of Pesach Sheni. This time, against all
odds, predictions, religious sentiments and political experts, the Jewish state
arose after thousands of years of exile and persecution. And it did so in a
completely unpredictable and perhaps very uncomfortable manner. It was headed
by Jews whose loyalty to Torah and Jewish tradition was questionable and
sometimes not apparent. It had with it many moments of matzah and maror—disputes,
violence, half-baked ideas and no shortage of enemies both from within and from
without. Yet it has weathered these storms and the miracle of the ingathering
of the exiles has occurred before our eyes, just as the ancient prophets of
Israel stated that it would.
The challenge before all of us is how to deal with this
opportunity that the Lord has granted us in an intelligent, realistic and
faithful manner. We will have to admit to ourselves and perhaps even publicly
that the ways of the Lord are not discernible to us and that it is arrogant for
us to think that the One Above must somehow conform to our preset ideas and
imagined processes. We are living in an era of Pesach Sheni.
