Fifty-Three Years and One Day

This was my first Yom Tov living in Eretz Yisrael, and therefore the first time in my life that I observed only one day of Yom Tov.

Much has been said and written about Yom Tov Sheni. There are halachic discussions about who keeps one day or two, especially for visitors and those who divide their time between places. Practical discussions abound, and there are no shortage of opinions about which people prefer. I’m not interested in weighing in on any of that, and I don’t think I have anything new to add. But having lived it for the first time, I found myself thinking about two things.

The first was about rhythm.  For more than fifty years, Yom Tov had a particular shape for me. Two days back to back, and everything stretched out across them: the meals, the tefillos, the long afternoons. It felt something like a doubled Shabbos. I never thought of it as an extended version of Yom Tov. It was simply what Yom Tov felt like.

This year, the first day came, and then Yom Tov was over. It wasn’t that I missed the second day. It was the absence itself that struck me. For my whole life there had been another day of Yom Tov in that space, and now there was nothing there. That void felt very strange and very unfamiliar, in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

None of this was new to me intellectually. I knew how Yom Tov is observed here, and I knew the halachic background. I also knew that the single day is the Torah’s own picture of Yom Tov. The second day, for all the meaning it has taken on over the centuries, arose from circumstance. For those who live in chutz la’aretz it is exactly what halacha requires, but it is not the original design.  

And yet when I stepped into the original design, it felt like the departure. I found myself thinking: wait, this is the ideal. I know this. That is what stayed with me. Something can be completely familiar to us conceptually and still feel foreign when we actually live it. What we are accustomed to can take the place of the ideal in our minds, so that when we finally meet the ideal, it feels like the exception.

It made me wonder how often that happens in other areas of avodas Hashem. We all develop patterns, assumptions, and expectations, and over time they begin to feel self-evident. Often they are exactly right. They reflect mesorah, family, community, and years of meaningful practice. But sometimes what feels natural is simply what has become familiar.

What are the things we think of as the ideal that are really just what we’re used to? I’m not going to offer my own answers here. The question is the point, and each of us can think about it for ourselves.

The second reflection had to do with safek and vadai.  The whole institution of Yom Tov Sheni is rooted in safek. I have known that my entire life, but this year I felt it, and it happened in davening. In chutz la’aretz, the Musaf of Chol HaMoed carries the safek. We say the korbanos of two days. We know perfectly well what day it is, but we daven as though we did not. In a sense, we step into the uncertainty of an earlier time and hold both possibilities. That is part of what we do, and it is what we are supposed to do.

On the first day of Chol HaMoed this year, none of that existed. The siddur had no instructions to account for another day. I said the korbanos of that day, and the day was simply what it was.  I found that clarity comforting. It was not something I had ever felt was lacking. For many years, two days of Yom Tov never felt uncertain to me; they felt like Yom Tov. Only by meeting that clarity did I notice it at all.

We live with a great deal of safek, in religious life and in life generally. We don’t always know the right decision, or where things are going, or even how to read the situation in front of us. Often, uncertainty is simply part of life, and we learn to serve Hashem within it. But when there is vadai, it grounds us.

The phrase that came to mind was one we have said many times over the past two weeks, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: Vadai shemo, kein tehilaso. His name is certain, and so is His praise.

Those days bring uncertainty, of course. We stand before Hashem not knowing what the coming year holds or what has been decided for us and for those we love. And yet the comfort of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur does not come from resolving that uncertainty. It comes from what we know to be absolute. Hashem is King. He is present. That vadai steadies us, even when so much else remains unknown.

And perhaps that steadiness is the very source of joy. Sukkos, zman simchaseinu, follows directly, and the Torah’s charge is u’semachtem lifnei Hashem Elokeichem, to rejoice before Hashem. The joy is not in any particular outcome. It is in the certainty of standing before Him.

That, I think, is why the words came back to me. Only days after saying them, I felt a small measure of that vadai in the day itself, and I noticed how naturally that clarity turned into joy.

Only now, as I put these reflections into writing, do I realize that they are connected. The first was about how habit can replace the ideal, so the ideal itself feels foreign. The second was about the comfort of vadai. At first they seemed to have little to do with each other. But on reflection, they meet. Habit can feel like vadai. What we are used to carries the calm of certainty, even when it is only familiarity. This year I found myself on the other side of that. What felt unfamiliar turned out to be the ideal, and the ideal carried a clarity of its own.

I kept two days of Yom Tov for fifty-three years. It took one day to teach me something new about both.