In the Haggadah, in contrast to the story told in the Bible, Moses plays a lower-profile, less-heroic role than, say, Judah Maccabee does in our telling of the Hanukkah story. I was curious myself. The concern was that if Moses were prominent in the Haggadah, one might mistakenly conclude that he was the hero of the story and not God, or that God needed Moses in some way.
To avoid hero worship and keep it at God worship? Like other books, the Haggadah was revolutionized by the invention of printing. Was a 16th-century printed Haggadah a prized possession, a thing of beauty, like a menorah? No, not at all. Certainly during the medieval period, if you had an illuminated version made by hand, perhaps as a gift to a married couple, it meant you were sufficiently well-to-do to afford to commission or purchase such a document.
That would have been quite the prized possession. But when printing emerged, the first copies were not particularly fine, and they included a lot of illustrations that were copied from other volumes, sometimes not even Passover volumes. We have pictures from the Book of Esther, the Megillah, repurposed for Haggadahs. The Haggadah has always been a cozy, homey book. When it comes out, you have to shake it to get out the matzah crumbs. But that being said, in many homes where there is no prayer book and no Bible, and that would include many Jewish homes, there will be Haggadahs—either a bunch rubber-banded together and tossed in a box, or a nice Haggadah put on a shelf.
People also have very special memories of the Haggadah they used in their childhoods. Or was that more likely to be true of high bourgeois Jewish families in the cities? In that era there might have been one Haggadah in the family, if people were quite poor, and hence we have this notion of the leader of the seder. This is what my grandfather did. That person said all the blessings and directed the ritual practice.
The youngest child was supposed to ask the Four Questions, and then we chimed in once again for the grace after meals, which we knew from everyday use. So the practice of years gone by is not like the current democratic one where everybody goes around the table and says a few lines.
You describe the great variety of Haggadahs. I remember one—by Arthur Waskow, I believe—in which buying an electric car is a mitzvah. It must be one of the more recent ones, when electric cars were already possible.
There are 6, to 7, Haggadahs now in print, which is crazy. I teach a course in which my students learn about the Haggadah while also volunteering in the Charlottesville community. One student was volunteering with an organization that helped people with their taxes, and he made a filling-out-your-taxes Haggadah, with four cups of coffee instead of four cups of wine.
I never thought about that. I would say that what makes a Haggadah a Haggadah is that a parent tells the story of what the Exodus means to her or him, and a child listens and registers the story as important. And perhaps the child knows that one day he or she will have to tell it in turn. You write about three kinds of flaws in the traditional Haggadah that might help explain why it invites so many additions and improvisations: liturgical flaws, pedagogical flaws and theological flaws.
The dwindling number of rabbis transmitting the law and the fear that all would be lost led Rabbi Judah the Prince, the leader of the small remaining Jewish populace of Judea, to write down the oral law in a compilation of Jewish code called the Mishnah. The Mishnah is our oldest source prescribing the order of the Passover Seder. Its description - though brief - is very similar to our modern-day Seders, though at the time no fixed Haggadah had yet been written.
This happened during the time of the Talmud, probably in the 3rd or 4th centuries CE, as the earliest reference to the Haggadah is in a Talmudic discussion of which Abba ben Joseph bar ama , known as Rava, c. The Haggadah is mentioned as a book one may lend out in order to be copied, making it clear that during his lifetime people were already making copies of the Haggadah.
The earliest manuscript to survive is an 8th century Haggadah discovered in the Cairo Geniza. It is strikingly similar to both our modern day Haggadahs and the text of the Mishnah. As is done in the contemporary Seder, the Mishnah tells us to start with Kiddush. It does not however provide the text , though the Talmud written two centuries later does c.
According to the Mishnah, the House of Hillel says we should first bless the wine and then the day. Like in most cases when the two houses disagreed, the Jews wound up siding with the House of Hillel.
The Mishnah is mute about the washing of hands at his point, though it is mentioned in the Talmud. The earliest manuscripts of the Haggadah dictate that a benediction should be chanted after washing your hands.
Why this change took place is not clear but it happened sometime during the Middle Ages. The Mishnah is very terse on the herb. As for the nature of hazeret, in modern Hebrew that means "horseradish" though this is due to a misunderstanding.
Today, different families have different customs for the actual vegetable or leaf used. This portion only appeared in the Middle Ages, it is based on a Talmudic passage in which Rav Papa describes breaking his matzas..
Ma Nishtana? Please consider supporting TheTorah. By using this site you agree to our Terms of Use. A postmodernist perspective would suggest that all reading is subjective, and that texts mean nothing until they are read—that readers, rather than the text itself, create meaning. Exodus tells the story in the clearest way possible. For example, the Bavli tells a story that once, Rabbah bar bar Chana was led into the desert by a Bedouin guide. Since they had observed the mitzvot meticulously, Rabbah attempted to cut the tzitzit off one of their garments in order to settle a rabbinic dispute, but his plan misfired Bavli Bava Batra 73ba.
What happens when the Rabbis bring their distinctive hermeneutic to bear on the words of Torah? So if we read four times Exod ; ; ; Deut that we are to tell the story of the exodus to our children, this must refer to four different kinds of children. There are four kinds of Jews who read the Haggadah today relate them to scripture if you can. What are the rules, statues and ordinances that I must follow? How do I do the mitzvot properly?
What does God want from me on Seder night? What do these rituals and this story teach me about God? The seder is a way of enacting this covenant. What are the meaning of these words?
How was the Haggadah put together? How did these rituals evolve? Find out here. Learn all about the holiday here. There is usually a break in the seder for the meal and the Haggadah is picked up again before the seder is completed.
Haggadot usually include the 10 Plagues , the Four Questions — customarily read or sung by the youngest seder participant — and songs about liberation and freedom. It is more than 1, years old and thanks God for all of the miracles and gifts he has given to the Jewish people. A detail from the Sarajevo Haggadah, in which maror, the bitter herb, is illustrated with an artichoke. Wikimedia Commons.
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