The second part of the Reactionary Haggadah series is now ready. Click here to take a look or here to see the whole series so far. …
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‘Three days into the wilderness.’ Why lie?
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?
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 …
What is the sword in the Haggadah?
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 …
Did Rabi Yose haGlili eat chicken with milk? (No)
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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Parshat Bo: Why did they bake their dough into matzot?
In the Geonic Haggadah that we use, we find the most well-known explanation for eating matzot on Pesah: the children of Israel brought dough with them from Egypt and baked it as matzot because there was not time for it to rise. This is based on reading Shemot 12:39 as a series of clauses each explaining the one before: and they baked the dough they had brought out from Egypt into matzot because it had not risen because they had been driven out from Egypt and were not able to tarry… This …
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