[Avodah] Meron live

[Kenneth Miller via Avodah]

R' Zev Sero wrote:

> This way of looking at things also explains whether one should
> say tachanun at mincha of erev Lag Ba'omer.  If it's just "the
> end of shiva", that starts in the morning, so one should say
> tachanun at the previous mincha, just as one does on erev Pesach
> Sheni (which also starts in the morning), erev Erev RH and erev
> Erev YK, and if we said tachanun in Nissan we would also say it
> at mincha of erev Erev Pesach, because it too starts in the
> morning. But once we regard Lag Ba'omer as a day of simcha in
> its own right, then it starts at night, and so we omit tachanun
> in the previous mincha.

I don't follow any of what RZS is saying about Lag Ba'omer, so I'll neither agree nor disagree. But my understanding of the nature of Pesach Sheni is very different from his:

As it was explained to me, there's nothing special about the morning of Pesach Sheni. Pesach Sheni exists only on the afternoon of 14 Iyar and the following night. We omit Tachanun on the morning of 14 Iyar NOT because it is a holiday, but because it is the Tachanun *before* the holiday. Alternatively, one might say that the morning of 14 Iyar actually *is* Erev Pesach Sheni. Either way, the afternoon of 13 Iyar is too far removed to be significant enough to warrant skipping Tachanun.

It is similar to how the *afternoon* of Erev RH and Erev YK are special enough to skip Tachanun, and this is extended even to the morning, but to say that the entirety of those days are so special that we would skip Tachanun even at the preceding Mincha -- No, that just doesn't fly. This leaves us with three days, at most, when we skip Tachanun at Shacharis, but we *do* say it at the preceding Mincha. (And many siddurim - ArtScroll, for example - explicitly list these three days as exceptions to the general rule.)

Akiva Miller
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