WHAT IS the only festival that is repeated twice on different dates of the year? This parashah reveals that it is the festival of Pesach. An interesting and even surprising point is that the repetition of this festival arose at the request of a group of people who were impure during the first Pesach, (the state of purity is a requirement for offering animals), or people who were not in Yerushalaim to bring the animal to the temple. These people, knowing the importance of this offering, did not want to miss the opportunity, so they addressed Moses and Aaron asking them: We also want to perform this mitzvah like all the children of Israel, why do we have to be less than our brothers! Moses listened to their complaints and asked them to wait until they heard God’s word on the matter. And so, surprisingly, God accepted their request and added to His Holy Torah a new mitzvah that was a consequence of Am Israel’s request. I believe that a valuable lesson we can learn from the above is that it doesn’t matter what your state of mind is, or if you are “on a journey” and feel far from God, because if He was willing to add a law in His Torah to express His love and mercy towards His “impure” children or those who were on a journey, the only thing we have to do is to manifest our desire to be close to Him.
George Deek is an Arab-Israeli diplomat. In 2018, Deek was appointed Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan. He is the first Israeli Arab Christian to become an ambassador. Deek grew up in an Eastern Orthodox Christian family in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, in a building where the other tenants included Muslims, Catholics, Jews and a Catholic priest of Jewish ancestry.[2][3] His father, who worked as a tax advisor,[3] was one of the leaders of the Christian community in Jaffa who served as chairman of the Orthodox Association, and was considered a well-known and popular figure in the city until in 2015 a square was inaugurated in his memory in Jaffa in the presence of Mayor Ron Huldai.[4] According to Deek, his grandparents fled to Lebanon for safety when the 1947–1949 Palestine war, having been told that the Jews would slaughter them if they remained in their homes, but expecting to return home once Arab armies defeated the Jews.[3] According to Deek, when the war ended, his grandparents felt that they had been “deceived”, and decided to return illegally to their home in Jaffa rather than remaining in Lebanon as refugees. Since reentering the country was illegal, Deek’s grandfather, an electrician, was arrested and jailed.
