It's Not Too Late

Pesach Sheni Through A Queer & Quintessential Lens

There is an old story, maybe you’ve read it. It’s about the creation of the world. It goes something like this: Elohim (which is plural grammatically, but is treated as singular here) creates light out of confusion and chaos, and a darkness hovering over the face of the waters. Each day for five days, Elohim creates — light and dark; water and sky; earth and all the myriad trees, fruits, and plants; celestial luminaries to organize days, nights, and years; creatures in the waters and winged beings in the sky; herd-animals, crawling things, and all the wildlife of earth after their kind.

It was all good.

Then something strange happens about halfway through day six. Elohim says, “Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness!”

Wait, what do you mean, us?

Up until this point in the Torah’s creation mythology, God has never talked about Godself before. This leads to many midrashic stories about God and the malachim (angels). There is a swelling of imagination around this plurality of opinion about the creation of humankind only. With plurality comes difference, and the possibility of other thoughts and perspectives. The question that was not asked about the creation of anything up until this point can finally be asked — is this actually a good idea, or would it be better to not do it at all?

Leaving aside the Infinite One’s omnipotence and omniscience for a midrashic moment, as soon as God brings in this plurality, there is the possibility of receiving feedback that says, “No, don’t do it! As much as they’ll try and act like mentches sometimes, they’re also going to act like assholes much of the time. Save your breath!”

But the One of Being goes ahead and creates humankind anyway. Defects be damned. In this sense, our flaws becomes our gifts. Or what Reb Zalman would call the “Glory Flaw.”

We are the Creator’s plurality. Human consciousness is what does that. We are the only ones with the capacity to imagine ourselves as other from the world; as separate. The brain enables us to do that for better or worse. Instead of simply experiencing ourselves as one with nature in a stream of belonging with all that is; we have the ability to separate and differentiate. We can imagine God, Great Mystery, Enduring Lifeforce — as other than us. As far as we know, there is nothing else in the natural world that does that.

In developmental psychology, differentiation is what creates identity. It’s important, even vital, to differentiate on some level. But it’s not Emet, it’s not the ultimate truth.

If the truth is Ain Od Milvado(da), and differentiation creates a falling out of belonging, what’s good about it? Well for one thing, without distinction, there is no Love. Differentiation makes relationship possible.

Without this separateness, there would also be no Pesach Sheni (literally, the Second Passover), which occurs on the 14th of Iyar, or tonight and tomorrow as I write this. The origin of Pesach Sheni is that there was a small group of folks out of the larger Am Yisrael, who were not able to make the Pesach offering at its appointed time with the rest of their community because they were ritually impure from contact with a dead body. Although the Torah doesn’t tell us exactly how this happened, the commentaries have a good ol’ time imagining. My favorite is that these folks were rendered tamei because they were carrying the bones of Yoseph out of Egypt.

Whatever the reason, this group approaches Moshe and asks for a second chance. They want to be able to partake of the mitzvah to make a Pesach offering, but the appointed time has passed. Is it too late for them? Moshe takes the matter up the ladder, so to speak, to the Infinite One, and the response is a resounding, “It’s not too late!” Thus Pesach Sheni is initiated exactly one month later. Anyone who was rendered ritually impure from involvement in the holy work of communal death and bereavement, or who was on a distant journey and was not physically able to make the offering on the 14th of Nisan — they get a second chance.

When I was living in Jerusalem years ago and co-leading a queer community, Pesach Sheni was the queer chag. We had a huge gathering to celebrate.

What’s so queer about Pesach Sheni, you might ask? The question that’s brought to Moshe from this marginalized group is:

לָמָּה נִגָּרַע — Why should we be diminished/left out?

Sounds like the heart cry of so many who have stood at the edges of religious or communal life. The original Pesach system was quite binary:
pure / impure
inside / outside
eligible / ineligible
on time / too late.

Those excluded step forward and speak out. They don’t disappear quietly, self-erase, or accept spiritual diminishment from the established authority. They demand inclusion amongst their people; a return to belonging.

This mythic scene echoes throughout generations of queer and marginalized Jews:

• Why should we be excluded from the covenant?

• Why should our love bar us from holiness?

• Why should our bodies or identities remove our share in ritual life?

• Why should belonging belong only to some?

Pesach Sheni becomes the story of marginal voices changing and enlarging sacred structure — and going beyond time to do so. We see here how both differentiation and reconnection are not static, but fluid as the waters of creation. The first Pesach was inherited, but Pesach Sheni is longed for and turned towards. Ultimately, both play pivotal roles in our sacred, spiraling calendar.

In the words of mythology scholar Michael Meade, “Myth opens immediate feelings for the great wonders of spirit as well as for the intricate territories of the soul. Mythic imagination can awaken the soul and fill it with energies and images…When the key images and core ideas that reside in myths are allowed to speak for themselves, they shed light on both the conditions of the world and the plight of living souls.

By seeing our own story through the lens of myth we can gain a psychological and poetic grasp of our own lives and the events of the world. In times of crisis the story of the soul tries to break through and become more conscious. Each time we align with the inner thread of our soul, we can experience an awakening of imagination and a renewal of the flow of life energy.”

We are in a time of crisis collectively. But let’s remember what our creation mythology is telling us — the angels warned the Infinite One that we would act like jerks a lot of the time, and here we are. But there is always a way back, it is never too late. A second chance is opening up if we have the courage to ask for it; to see it; to demand it even.

The truth is, behind and beneath all the words, it’s about being in relationship — with our own hearts, with what actually is, with the Divine in each other, with what’s hard to witness as well as what’s easy, with the in-between.

What changed when God created the world? The most basic thing that changed was that there was now something else, something other than Infinity. Otherness allows for all possibilities, but at the end of every day, what it allows for first and foremost is love and connection.

Let’s not underestimate the power of each of us to engage with our own Pesach Sheni, and the ripple effect that has on the outer world, large and looming as it may seem. Any meaningful change collectively begins individually. Let’s harness the holy chutzpah for a second chance, again and again and again. After all, it’s why we were created.

With immense gratitude to my teacher, Rav Ebn Leader for inspiring this.

Thanks as always for reading,

R’ Ariel