Parshas Beha’aloscha: A Month Late… Or Is It?

Beha’aloscha was a month ago. At least, that’s when we read it. Apparently it wasn’t finished with me yet. Which, when you think about it, is actually rather fitting.

You see, it's the parsha that introduces Pesach Sheni—the second chance that comes exactly one month after the first. Of all the parshiyos to come back to late, this might be the only one where “a month later” isn’t a mistake. It’s built into the Torah itself.

When I finished Sefer Vayikra, I made a conscious decision to stop forcing myself to publish something every week. The writing had started as “whenever something felt alive enough to share,” and somewhere along the way it quietly became another obligation. I wanted to return to the original rhythm.

Baruch Hashem, that hasn’t meant becoming less engaged. If anything, it’s meant becoming more alive. The processing has continued. Sometimes it becomes an article. Sometimes it becomes a conversation. And sometimes it simply becomes life.

So when Beha’aloscha arrived, I didn’t write a post. Instead, I wrote a Shabbos Sheva Brochos speech after my brother’s wedding.

The speech centered around Pesach Sheni. It opened with a joke about the first person in history who had two weddings in one night, missed one of them, and showed up the next morning asking, “למה נגרע?” Why should I lose out on the smorgasbord? Maybe, I joked, that’s why Chazal gave us פנים חדשות during the week of Sheva Brochos—not only is someone new invited to come later, now we actually need them there. Without someone new joining the meal, you don’t even get to say the seven blessings.

Of course, that was only the joke. The real point was much simpler.

Marriage—and really life—isn’t about never getting things wrong. It’s about finding the pathway back afterward. If things get tense, you reconnect. If something you’re baking gets burnt, you don’t spend the next forty years convincing everyone charcoal was always the family recipe. You laugh, throw it out, and try again.

I gave my speech. We celebrated the new couple. And I honestly thought that was my Beha’aloscha processing for the year.

Looking back, I realize it wasn't. I'd only written the first draft. Over the next month, life quietly wrote the second.

Some conversations I’d been avoiding finally happened. Stories I thought were already finished asked to be revisited. I found myself apologizing where I’d imagined myself offering forgiveness. More than once, I discovered that the hardest blind spot to see was my own.

Life has always had a funny way of handing us opportunities to live the things we're learning.

What surprised me was how quickly I felt accountable to my own words. Once I’d spoken those words into the world, I couldn’t comfortably leave them sitting in a Sheva Brochos speech anymore. Every time life handed me another opportunity to choose between holding onto an old story or finding my way back, I could hear my own words echoing back at me. Not because anybody else remembered them, but because I did. 

Somewhere along the way, I realized that this is part of what it means to actually learn Torah. Not when we understand an idea. Not even when we can explain it. But when life quietly hands it back to us and asks us to live it. Because Torah isn’t only meant to change the way we think. It’s meant to change the way we walk through the world.

There’s an old saying in construction: 
Measure twice. Cut once.

Once the board is cut, you stop deciding where the cut should have been. You’re deciding what to build with the board that’s now in front of you.

Our words work the same way. Before we send the email, make a promise, share a story, criticize someone, or tell the world what we believe, it’s worth measuring one more time. Not because we’re afraid of speaking, but because once those words leave us, we don’t just release them into the world. They begin asking something of us too.

Today’s words have a funny way of becoming tomorrow’s avodah.

Which brings me back to Beha’aloscha.

The people who approached Moshe hadn’t forgotten about Korban Pesach. They weren’t careless. They weren’t looking for an excuse. They had been busy with another mitzvah. Life had placed something holy in front of them, and because they faithfully showed up there, they missed something else.

The people carrying the dead weren’t outside the avodah. They were inside a different avodah.

I smiled when I noticed a small echo of that in my own week. My brother’s wedding happened to fall on the very same night as my boss’s child’s wedding. Obviously there wasn’t really a dilemma—family is family—but the coincidence became the opening joke of the Sheva Brochos speech.

Of course it wasn’t only a joke. Most of life isn’t choosing between good and bad. It’s choosing between two good things, knowing we’ll inevitably leave something undone.

Hashem’s response is what makes Pesach Sheni so extraordinary. He doesn’t tell them, “You should have planned better,” or “It doesn’t matter—you were busy with another mitzvah.” He hears the longing behind their question.

Looking back over this past month, I think that’s exactly what happened to me. I didn’t miss Beha’aloscha because I forgot about it. I missed it because life had placed something else in front of me. And when I finally came back, I realized I wasn’t coming back to finish writing an article. I was coming back after spending a month discovering what those words were asking of me.

A month ago, I thought I’d already written my Beha’aloscha thoughts. A month later, I realize I’d only written the introduction.

The rest of it wasn’t waiting to be written.

It was waiting to be lived.

Sometimes our own words have to walk around in the world for a bit before they come back and teach us what they were asking of us.

-Berke