It’s happening again this year — that odd Jewish calendar quirk where the Torah readings in Israel and the diaspora fall out of sync.

This year, Shavuot in the diaspora is celebrated on Friday and Saturday, and the special Torah readings for Shavuot are read. In Israel, however, the second day of Shavuot is an ordinary Shabbat, so Israelis read the regular weekly Torah portion instead.

That means that for at least a few weeks, Jews in Israel and the diaspora will be reading different Torah portions until the schedules eventually realign through a double parsha.

But an especially unusual situation occurred a few years ago, in 2022. That year was both a Jewish leap year and a year in which the last day of Pesach in the diaspora fell on Shabbat. As a result, while Jews in the diaspora observed the eighth day of Pesach, Israelis treated that Shabbat as an ordinary one and read the regular weekly portion — Parshat Acharei Mot.

Now here is the interesting part: in the diaspora, it took more than three months to catch up to Israel. We........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)