It’s happening again this year — that odd Jewish calendar quirk where the Torah readings in Israel and the diaspora fall out of sync.
This year, Shavuot in the diaspora is celebrated on Friday and Saturday, and the special Torah readings for Shavuot are read. In Israel, however, the second day of Shavuot is an ordinary Shabbat, so Israelis read the regular weekly Torah portion instead.
That means that for at least a few weeks, Jews in Israel and the diaspora will be reading different Torah portions until the schedules eventually realign through a double parsha.
But an especially unusual situation occurred a few years ago, in 2022. That year was both a Jewish leap year and a year in which the last day of Pesach in the diaspora fell on Shabbat. As a result, while Jews in the diaspora observed the eighth day of Pesach, Israelis treated that Shabbat as an ordinary one and read the regular weekly portion — Parshat Acharei Mot.
Now here is the interesting part: in the diaspora, it took more than three months to catch up to Israel. We eventually combined Matos and Maasei into a double parsha, while in Israel those portions were read separately.
Why not double up immediately by combining Acharei Mot and Kedoshim, allowing the schedules to sync after just one week instead of fourteen? There were also two other opportunities before Matos-Maasei: Behar-Bechukotei and Chukat-Balak. Why wait so long?
I asked Rabbi Dovid Heber, a world-renowned expert on the Hebrew calendar, and he offered an explanation. There is a longstanding custom to read certain Torah portions at specific times during the year. One example occurs around Shavuot: we strive to read Parshat Bamidbar on the Shabbat before Shavuot, while avoiding reading Parshat Bechukotei — with its passages of curses — immediately beforehand.
To preserve that pattern, we do not combine Acharei Mot and Kedoshim or Behar and Bechukotei in a year like 2022, when the calendar creates this divergence between Israel and the diaspora.
What about combining Chukat and Balak? There is a similar consideration there as well: there is a custom to read Parshat Pinchas during the Three Weeks, and combining Chukat-Balak would prevent that from happening in the diaspora. So instead, we wait until Matos-Maasei to reunify the schedules with Israel.
While this explains the reasoning behind the custom, it still does not entirely satisfy me on a rational level. After all, in Israel in 2022, they did not read Parshat Bamidbar before Shavuot as diaspora communities did — they had no choice. If the custom could not be maintained in Israel, why couldn’t the diaspora also deviate in order to restore synchronization earlier?
The extended period of mismatch creates all sorts of practical complications. A visitor traveling from the United States to Israel for Shabbat could entirely miss hearing the weekly Torah portion being read back home. Someone traveling in the opposite direction might hear the same parsha twice and then miss another one upon returning to Israel.
The divergence also creates the unusual phenomenon of different synagogue announcements, differing halachic discussions tied to the weekly reading, and rabbis in Israel and America preaching on entirely different parshiyot. Torah-study schedules diverge, weekly parsha publications differ, and confusion can easily arise. Although I have never personally heard of such a case, I would not be surprised if a bar mitzvah boy planning to celebrate in Israel during the summer suddenly discovered that he had prepared the “wrong” Torah portion.
I am certainly nowhere near as wise as the sages who established the Jewish calendar and arranged the Torah-reading cycle. Still, it seems to me that keeping the Torah readings synchronized between Israel and the diaspora as early as possible would outweigh customs regarding the timing of particular portions.
That said, I do not expect the system to change anytime soon. And perhaps there is something meaningful in the temporary divergence itself. Despite the split, Jews everywhere still complete the Torah together on Simchat Torah — a fitting symbol that, in the end, the Jewish people remain united even when temporarily out of sync.
Michael Feldstein, who lives in Stamford, CT, is the author of “Meet Me in the Middle,” a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish life. His articles and letters have appeared in The Jewish Link, The Jewish Week, The Forward, and The Jewish Press. He can be reached at michaelgfeldstein@gmail.com