הגדה ברורה

Haggadot and essays for Pesah and all year round

Tosefta

עדים זוממים (iii): A response to Prof. Shamma Friedman

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Around a year ago, I wrote an article (and a short follow up) arguing that the famous d'rasha of הרגו אין נהרגין, widely believed to be an unimpeachable teaching of Hazal, is, in fact, a דעת יחיד found only in one late, and highly dubious, source recorded in the Talmud Bavli and tacitly ignored by codifiers until the advent of a revolution in the way the Bavli was conceptualized, spearheaded by the scholars of France. I happened upon this analysis while working on one of my unfinished projects, …

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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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Parshat Bo: Why did they bake their dough into matzot?

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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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