You may not have noticed, but this past Wednesday was Pesach sheni – literally, second Passover. It’s designed for people who can’t celebrate Passover at the proscribed time. It is specifically only for those who cannot; those who want to delay for personal reasons don’t have the luxury. 

But if your work requires you to be away from home, or you can’t go to a seder because you’re ritually impure due to burying a community member (the original reasons) or perhaps you’re in the hospital and can’t make it to a seder, or some other valid reason, then you get to wait a month for a second chance.

The idea of God making provisions for people to have a second chance is… well, it’s simply incredible. The God of the Bible understood that sometimes we don’t get something right the first time round, and in that case, if indeed we didn’t mean to screw up but did it anyway, we get another chance.

Usually in the spring I count the Omer, a period of 49 days from Passover to Shavuot. Today is the 31^st day of the Omer. People have created many lovely and uplifting tools to engage a person in counting the Omer, rather than merely stating the date and the number of the day. Much as I have tried, this year I have felt unengaged, and not at all moved to count the days. 

But I will have another opportunity later this summer, beginning with Tisha B’Av and ending at Rosh Hashanah. It’s the same number of days, and people have come up with really creative tools for counting those 49 days in reverse. Which means I will get a second chance this year.

I realize that I’m extending the commandment far beyond its original intent. I can’t help myself. I am enamored with the idea of having a second chance, especially when we do something wrong inadvertently. Or even purposely. Like Moses.

Rabbi Ralph Genende wrote, “Yes, it is true that some shattered pieces can never be made whole again. The tablets that Moses broke on that awful day were never put together again, not even by all the king’s horses or all the king’s Levites…. Sometimes an object is beyond repair, a relationship irretrievable.”

But Moses got a second chance with a second set of tablets, and we are told in a midrash that the Ark of the Covenant held both sets of tablets, the broken ones and the whole ones.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslov put it this way: “We need to start over every day. And sometimes many times each day.”

This week’s Torah portion deals with just this issue of starting over. It teaches about the sabbath year of rest for agricultural land, and the Jubilee year, which occurs every seven years times seven years. Forty nine. Just like the Omer, which is seven weeks times seven weeks.

Then, on Yom Kippur at the beginning of the 50^th year, the Torah teaches “you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land…and you shall return every man to his possession, and you shall return every man to his family.”

The goal was to achieve some degree of equity in the community; to keep people from remaining in poverty or indentured servitude for generations, and others from gathering too much wealth. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but its goal was aspirational. This is the kind of community we wanted to be, one in which fairness ruled and generations would not be punished for the mistakes of their forefathers. 

The Torah portion (called Behar) speaks at length about how to treat the person who has come on hard times and needs help from his family, neighbors, and the community at large. 

Leviticus 25:35 states: “If your brother, having stumbled and becomes poor, then you shall relieve him; if he comes under your authority and are held by you as though a resident alien, let him live by your side.”

This needs a little unpacking. A resident alien, also called a ger toshav, was a non-Jew who lived in the community. They were welcome to reside in the community and abide by the community’s laws, but they were sometimes treated differently. For instance, they could become indentured servants with no access to communal assistance. 

Over the centuries it was the Jews themselves who became resident aliens, either forbidden to own property, herded into walled ghettos, or simply kicked out altogether.

Lest you think it was just Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, think again: Jews were expelled from France in 1394 and not allowed back into the country until 1791; in England the expulsion took place in 1290 and no Jew was allowed back until 1656; the law wasn’t officially lifted until 1829.

Aside from the Holocaust itself, nearly a million Jews were expelled or fled from Muslim-majority countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly from Libya, Iraq, and Yemen. 

So, we know what it’s like to be resident aliens. We are a tiny minority in the world, and here in the United States.

As has been true for much of our history, we are living in difficult times, filled with strife and voices raised in hatred and antisemitism, often masked as anti-Zionism. And yet, we still strive to be the kind of people who support others.

Over the centuries, Jewish sages have taught that, as Rabbi Neal Loevinger put it, “willingness to reach out to a person in need is a basic religious value, and economic power brings with it the responsibility to act justly.” He didn’t mean just a Jewish person. Our responsibility is to all people.

Rabbi Loevinger points out that the Chofetz Chayyim, a 20th-century rabbinic luminary, said that in the World to Come, one will be questioned about all the observances that one kept or didn’t keep, but it will be a “great and terrible thing” when they ask if one kept the commandment of “strengthening one’s brother.”

Loevinger writes, “He continues by reminding us that there will come a moment in everyone’s life when a poor person, or a troubled person, or a desperate person, will come to you for help — at that moment, you have a choice, to help or not, to fulfill this basic mitzvah or to turn your back.”

In the face of continued strife both here and abroad, may the Jews of America continue to hold strong, continue to do what is right, continue to be the kind of people that God asks us to be. And if we sometimes forget, we get another chance tomorrow.