הגדה ברורה

Haggadot and essays for Pesah and all year round

Gavriel

How to tie your tzitzit: arguments in favour of Ra’avad

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About half a decade ago, I wrote an article justifying the opinion of haRav Bar Hayyim regarding how to tie tzitzit. It was the first time I had tried my hand at this sort of thing, and it came out a bit of a mess. I recently took another look at it, however, and I found the arguments more convincing that I remembered, though it needed a lot of editing. So without further ado here is my first foray into Rabbinics (Click here). …

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‘Three days into the wilderness.’ Why lie?

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One of the most most difficult things to understand about the exodus story is why, over the entire course of his struggle with Pharaoh, Moshe maintains the fiction that the Hebrews want to go three days into the wilderness into order to celebrate a festival to HASHEM. Since we know from the beginning that the plan is to leave Egypt permanently in order to conquer the Land of Israel, Moshe would appear to be engaging in deception. The most immediately obvious way of reading this is that the …

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Why is Moshe not in the Haggadah?

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One of the most frequently asked questions about the Haggadah is why the second most important character in the exodus story (after G-d!) is never even mentioned. A number of answers have been offered to this problem: The most famous answer is that Moshe is deliberately omitted from the Haggadah because including him would distract from the true message of the exodus story, which is that G-d alone saved the children of Israel without human help (Vilna Gaon and lots of others)Moshe was the the …

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What is the sword in the Haggadah?

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Millions of Jews, if they are paying any attention at all at the Seder, must have wondered from time to time what is meant by the Haggadah when it 'explains' the words ובזרע נטויה (with an outstretched arm) by the comment זו החרב (this is the sword). Sure, it quotes a verse proving that an outstretched arm can hold a sword and, indeed, the imagery is clear enough anyway. G-d isn't holding up His arm to play baseball. But once we have solved the question of how the midrash works, we still have to …

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Did Rabi Yose haGlili eat chicken with milk? (No)

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There is a certain piece of trivia that has become one of those things that everyone knows, or at least everyone Jewish above a certain level of education. You hear it everywhere, for example, I was recently listening to a shiur and someone asked the following question: Like אלו ואלו or the תנורו של עכנאי, it's not hard to understand why this titbit has become part of the library of common knowledge: it's titillating without being salacious, it seems to indicate a remarkable pluralism in …

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