Haggadah

In his Peri Pascha, the 2^nd century Bishop Melito of Sardis critiques the Jews with a list that begins, "Ungrateful Israel, come to trial with me concerning your ingratitude." Centuries later, the song Improperia, inspired by the theme of Jewish ingratitude to God, entered the Catholic liturgy. Scholars have long noted its similarity to Dayenu, a song that first appears in Saadiah Gaon's Haggadah in the 10^th century. Which song is responding to which?

If you could invite any figure from the past — biblical, rabbinic, medieval, or modern — to your seder, whom would you invite and why?

The Bible never numbers the plagues of Egypt, but the number ten has been canonized in tradition, and a canonical list of the ten plagues appears in the Passover Haggadah. The 18^th century enlightenment commentator Naftali Herz Wessely breaks free from the number ten, offering a more persuasive structure of twelve miracles.

After Abram expresses doubt that Sarai will have children and questions how he can be sure his descendants will inherit the land, YHWH establishes the Covenant of the Pieces, lasting 400 years, extending through Israel’s time in Egypt up to their entry into the land. Does this covenant hold lasting significance for later generations, or is it replaced by God’s “everlasting” Covenant of Circumcision?

In his famous essay on Moses, Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am 1856–1927), an influential Zionist thinker, recasts the revelation at the burning bush as Moses encountering his internal voice. His heroic Moses is shadowed by other, more melancholic figures, such as Jeremiah, and even Muhammad, as imagined by Thomas Carlyle. Rather than a figure of strength and power, Ahad Ha’am’s Moses comes to express the anxieties and ambivalences of early Zionism.

The Haggadah’s insistence that God, without an intermediary, saved the Israelites from Egypt is a veiled retort to the Christian belief that God relied on Jesus as an agent of redemption. Moreover, the midrash replaces the Arma Christi tradition of recounting the weapons Jesus used to save humanity during the Crucifixion with its own distinctively Jewish arsenal of redemption: pestilence, a sword, the Shechinah, the staff, and blood.

Around the Seder table with scholars.

Cats were known and domesticated in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, but are absent from the Bible and Second Temple literature. The Persians despised cats, but the Talmud tolerates them.

We invited our authors and friends to share practices, ideas, experiences, and analyses from their own seders that enhance their seder-night experience.

The seventh part of the qedushta for the ancient triennial Torah reading וַיְהִי בַּחֲצִי הַלַּיְלָה, “It Came to Pass at Midnight,” was preserved in the Haggadah. This is the only poem of Yannai’s (ca. 5th/6th cent. C.E.) to be retained in the liturgy.

Abraham, Hagar, Moses, and Gideon all encounter the angel of YHWH. What is this divine being and how are we to understand its relationship to YHWH?

The sacrifice of firstling animals and redemption of firstborn sons were originally not related to the exodus story. When they were linked to the tenth plague, the narrative was adjusted to have YHWH also slaughter the Egyptian firstling animals.

R. Eleazar of Worms in the 12^th century, defended the practice of spilling wine when reciting the plagues against detractors who disparaged it, by offering a mystical, numerological rationale. This, however, was a post-facto attempt to explain a folk custom, whose origins lie in the human fear of being struck by these very plagues.

The popular Jewish custom to remove drops of wine while listing the plagues goes back to the Middle Ages, but the ubiquitous explanation that we do this out of sadness for what happened to the Egyptians does not. When did this explanation develop and how did it become so dominant?

Traditional commentators offer various interpretations of the cryptic phrase בַּעֲבוּר זֶה in Exodus 13:8, generally translated “because of this” or “this is because.” But a well-known midrash from the Passover Haggadah holds the key to an entirely different translation which may indeed be the simple meaning of the text.

The western wall of the ancient synagogue in Dura Europos (245 C.E.) is covered with a series of wall paintings depicting the story of Moses. What can we learn by a close reading of these panels?

In four passages, the Torah has a father explaining different commandments to a son by referencing the exodus from Egypt. Comparing the wording in these biblical passages, the rabbis reinterpreted—and even revised—them to reflect a father explaining Pesach to four different sons: wise, stupid, wicked, and one who doesn’t ask.

Who were these women and what were these mirrors used for? Reconstructing the narrative: the historical-critical method vs. midrash. 

The Seder as a Night of Hermeneutic Freedom: Introducing the Four Readers of the Haggadah‍

The rabbis translate the phrase ארמי אובד אבי in Deuteronomy 26:5 “an Aramean tried to destroy my father” and understand it as a reference to Laban, who they claim was worse than Pharaoh. But whereas the biblical Laban can be read either sympathetically or unsympathetically, he is hardly a Pharaoh-like villain, so why demonize him?

A medieval non-traditional interpretation of arami oved avi and the push-back against it. 

...יָכוֹל מֵראשׁ חֹדֶשׁ? תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא