You know that feeling when you realize you missed something important?

Not something small. Not a text you forgot to answer or an errand you pushed off one more day. I mean the kind of thing that makes your stomach drop a little. A birthday you should have remembered. A moment with your child that you were too distracted to notice. A relationship that should have been handled differently. A chance to show up for someone, and somehow, you did not.

And now that it’s gone, it feels gone forever.

Some things can be rescheduled. Some things can be fixed or replaced. But other things feel like they only come once, and once you missed it, it’s over. You lost your chance. You can move on, but you can never really go back.

Today is a unique day on the Jewish calendar, called Pesach Sheni, the “Second Passover.”

In Temple times, the central mitzvah of Passover was not only eating matzah and telling the story of the Exodus. Every Jew had to join in bringing the Passover offering on the afternoon before Passover, which would be eaten with the entire family that night together with matzah and bitter herbs.

The Torah tells us that on the first anniversary of the Exodus from Egypt, when G-d commanded the Jewish people to bring the Passover offering, there were some Jews who had become ritually impure and therefore were unable to participate.

They could have accepted their situation. After all, they had a legitimate reason. They had not been careless or lazy. They had been transporting the bones of Joseph, and because of their contact with a dead body, they were ritually unable to celebrate Passover properly.

But they did not accept the situation.

They came to Moses and Aaron with a powerful plea: “Why should we lose out?” Why should we be deprived of the opportunity to bring G-d’s offering together with the rest of the Jewish people?

And G-d agreed with them.

He gave them Pesach........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)