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Haggadah

Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism: Moses in the Shadow of Jeremiah and Muhammad

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.

Dr.

Yosefa Raz

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I (God) and Not an Angel: The Haggadah Counters Jesus and the Arma Christi

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.

Prof.

Steven Weitzman

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Passover Seder: A Night of Questions

Around the Seder table with scholars.

Staff Editors

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The Seder as a (Children’s) Literature Festival

Prof. Rabbi

Wendy Zierler

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The Curious Case of Cats

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.

Prof.

Joshua Schwartz

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Tips for the Passover Seder

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

Staff Editors

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It Came to Pass at Midnight—From the Amidah to the Passover Haggadah

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.

Prof. Rabbi

Laura Lieber

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The Angel of YHWH

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?

Dr.

Daniel O. McClellan

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Laws of the Firstborn: How They Were Connected to the Tenth Plague

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.

Prof. Rabbi

David Frankel

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The Original Reason for Spilling Wine: Protection from the Plagues

R. Eleazar of Worms in the 12th 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.

Dr. Rabbi

Zev Farber

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Spilling Wine While Reciting the Plagues to Diminish Our Joy?

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?

Dr. Rabbi

Zvi Ron

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God Took Us Out of Egypt “Because of This”

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.

Harvey N. Bock

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Retelling the Story of Moses at Dura Europos Synagogue

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?

Prof.

Hagith Sivan

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The Four Sons: How the Midrash Developed

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.

Dr. Rabbi

Zev Farber

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Why “Passover”? On the True Meaning of Pesaḥ-פסח

Dr.

Barry Dov Walfish

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The Omission of the Sinai Theophany in the Bikkurim Declaration

Prof. Rabbi

Pamela Barmash

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The Haggadah: A New Telling of the Exodus Story

In the Second Temple period, the core ritual of Pesach was eating the sacrificial meal and praising God. With the destruction of the Temple, the seder, with its focus on telling the story of the exodus, took the place of the paschal sacrifice as the core ritual.

Dr.

Malka Z. Simkovich

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The Haggadah: Toward a Pedagogy of Freedom

Prof. Rabbi

Wendy Zierler

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A Copper Laver Made from Women’s Mirrors

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

Prof. Rabbi

Rachel Adelman

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The Right Way to Read the Haggadah

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

Dr. Rabbi

Norman Solomon

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Arami Oved Avi: The Demonization of Laban

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?

Naomi Graetz

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Did an Aramean Try to Destroy our Father?

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

Prof. Rabbi

Marty Lockshin

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Connecting the Mitzvah of Maggid to the Seder Night

...יָכוֹל מֵראשׁ חֹדֶשׁ? תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא

Prof.

Azzan Yadin-Israel

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