Seven Haggadah Passages That Must Bug You

If you read through the Haggadah and it all made sense to you, you didn’t read the Haggadah.

The Haggadah is a living, growing, organism with a trunk older than the oldest giant sequoias. In every generation, as we reach deeper and deeper into the underground channels from which its roots are nurtured, the Haggadah's branches spread yet wider, its twigs and leaves multiply, and its fruits gain yet more succulence.

The learned sages together with the collective mind of our people have intentionally crafted this Haggadah-tree to puzzle and to fascinate, to provoke questions and prompt discussion, to act as a stimulating playground for creative exploration and new discoveries in every age and circumstance.

It’s alive, and nothing that’s alive can be made to fit into neat parcels of sensible data. Yet, with some gentle, persistent prodding, it will release to you its wondrous wisdom.

Here, let me give you some examples:

This Is the Bread of Affliction

This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, come eat with us! Whoever is needy, come join our Seder! This year we’re here; next year in the land of Israel! This year we’re slaves; next year we will be free!

The Puzzle:
Your rabbi told you to make sure you get hand-baked matzah shmurah for Passover. He said it was delicious, authentic, and good for you too. The Zohar calls it “the bread of faith” and “the bread of healing.”1

And now you discover that the Haggadah calls it “bread of affliction.” That’s documentation that could stand up in a court of law.

The betrayal doesn’t stop there. Everyone knows we came here to celebrate our freedom. But what’s the first thing we say? That we’re still slaves, but don’t worry, next year we will be free. So why are we celebrating now?

But here’s the biggest problem with this opener: You come home, lock the door behind you, shut the windows, and then quietly announce, “Anyone who’s hungry or doesn’t have a place for Passover, we’re here for you! Come on in!”

Who are you fooling?

The Key:

There’s one answer to all these questions and it starts with one basic fact: We’re not really free. Not yet. We started the long haul when we walked out of Egypt. It’s been a few thousand years on the road, but we’re planning to wrap it up tonight.

Turns out that tonight, we’re not celebrating freedom. We’re rehearsing it. Getting in the mode.

That’s why the first thing we have to do is to affirm that things are not how they’re supposed to be. There are people out there that are hungry. There are Jews who don’t even know they’re supposed to be at a Seder tonight. We’re still slaves—to the world, to its darkness and hatred, and to our own egos.

We point out the bread that we ate when we left Egypt. It’s called bread of affliction because it takes us back onto the road of that great trek, as slaves running from their masters, on the threshold of freedom.

And that gives us faith. It heals our souls. That matzah speaks from within our kishkes and says, “You began this long journey on this night more than 3,300 years ago. Tonight, you have the power to finish it off. Become one with your people, with your people’s destiny, with our Torah, with our G‑d. And we will all liberate ourselves, as one.”

So that by next year, we will have long been in Jerusalem.2

For more on this, see “The Passover Seder Is a Disruptive Ritual.”

Five Rabbis Arguing All Night

The Puzzle:

We finally got everyone around the table, made kiddush, drank some wine, nibbled down a wet veggy, broke a matzah, asked lots of questions, and just now finally arrived at telling the story of what this night is all about, which is why we came here in the first place.

But no, instead, in walk these five rabbis who spent their entire night discussing some important matter and the only detail we get is that everyone disagreed with Rabbi Elazar be Azariah, just when he had finally figured something out after 70 years.

The Key:

Hold on. How did we get here?

We said that the more you tell the story of the Exodus, the better. Which means you’re supposed to be telling and discussing the story. Not just reading. Not just reciting words. Talking about it. All night long. Like these five rabbis.

So the Haggadah provides this story, to say: If such learned people who knew the story inside-out already could stay up the whole night discussing it, for sure the rest of us need to discuss even more.3

And what about them all ganging up against poor Rabbi Elazar?

If you read a little deeper into their words, you’ll see that they actually agreed on something big.

They agreed that in the Times of Moshiach, the main topic of the Seder night is not going to be the Exodus from Egypt, but the miracles, wonders, and freedom that made that time possible.

Ben Zoma, represented by Rabbi Elazar (who just looked 70, but was actually still in his teens, which is for another essay), is of the opinion that the Egyptian Exodus will fall into the background altogether. With the great miracles of that time all around you, ten plagues and a thoroughfare through the sea will be about as exciting as this morning’s scrambled eggs.

But the rest of the sages believe that it will still be worth mentioning—probably as a sort of prologue to get into the real big stuff.4

Now, that’s a neat way of telling the story of the Exodus: Talk about what it will be like when the job is done, all the way. Talk about the ultimate freedom.

The Wicked Child

The Puzzle:

The kid came to the Seder. He can’t be all bad. And here you’re telling him that he has nothing to do with the entire evening. “If you had been there, you would not have been liberated.”

This you call education?

The Key:

We’re reading it wrong. Try this: “If you had been there, you would not have been liberated.”

Upon which the kid asks, “There? Where? Who? What?”

So you explain: “Back there in Egypt you would have stayed behind with all the rest who did not identify with their people and said, ‘Goshen is our home.’ But this time around, every Jew will be liberated. No one will be left behind.”

What happened between the Exodus and now? The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson of righteous memory, explained: We were chosen at Mount Sinai and given the Torah. That choice and that Torah reached down to our very core and flicked a switch. From that point on, no Jewish soul can tear itself away from its people. We're stuck together with crazy glue.5

Upon hearing such words of chosenness and love, the child’s bite is dulled, and the hardest heart melts like honey.

For more on this, see “Redeeming the Wicked Child of Passover?”

Maybe We Missed the Boat

The Puzzle:

It seems there’s no passage more awkward, more out-of-place, and more arcane than this. Out of nowhere, it seems, we're pointing out that maybe we missed the boat and should have been doing this on the first of the month. But everyone knows that's just not true!

How did we get here? Just before, we heard that there are four kinds of children at the Seder. Good. That’s informative and helpful. Now we know how to adjust the story to match the audience.

But which child is it who needs to hear, “You know what? Maybe we should have been doing this two weeks back, at the beginning of the month!”

That’s a question that literally subverts the entire Seder night. It could easily cause undue trauma.

The Key:

Yes, that’s precisely what it’s supposed to accomplish. Because it’s in response to the last child, the “Child Who Doesn’t Ask Questions.”

Why doesn’t this child ask questions? Because everything at the Seder is okay. We did this last year, and the year before last. It’s a routine. So this child just switches into autopilot, brain in sleep mode, heart switched off.6

So to disrupt that, we ask the child a disruptive question, something that pulls the tablecloth out from under the entire Seder: Show me where it says the Seder is supposed to be tonight. After all, it was the first night of the month that Moses was instructed to tell the Jews about the Seder. And they took the roasted the lamb for the Seder on the day of the fourteenth.7

Questions are good. They sit at the focal point of Jewish learning. They are good because they make you uncomfortable. And then you can learn, you can grow.

Read more about that in “If the Haggadah is Right, We’ve Got Education All Wrong.”

And if you want to know how the dialogue with this uninquisitive child plays out, you're going to have to look inside the Chabad.org Haggadah.

Originally, Our Forefathers Worshiped Foreign Gods, But Now...

The Puzzle:

Hold on. We did this already. We already started the story a few pages back, when we said, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt." It sounds now like we just did a reboot and started the Seder all over again.

The Key:

That’s because we did.

The Mishnah teaches that when we tell the story of the Exodus, the general structure is to be “begin with disgrace and conclude with praise.”8 Yes, that’s rather ambiguous. In fact, the Talmud records two heavyweight opinions on what exactly it means—the opinions of Rav and Shmuel, the two rabbis who revived and taught the Jewish community in Bavel (current-day Iraq), after the desolation of the Jewish community in Israel.

Rav was of the opinion that “disgrace” means, “At first, our fathers worshiped foreign gods.”

Shmuel said “disgrace” means, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.”

In typical Jewish form, we resolve this argument with three conclusions: Rav may be right, and Shmuel may be wrong. But then, Shmuel may be right, and Rav may be wrong. Or perhaps Rav and Shmuel are both right.9

The result? The Haggadah has two heads, as you noted. One puts the emphasis on our escape from slavery, the other on our embrace of true spiritual freedom, which is our connection to the one, boundless G‑d.

So you’re going to say, “You mean we told the whole story twice, each time in just one line? We were slaves, now we’re free. We were idolaters, now we’re Jews. So let’s eat.”

No, not really.

Because that is still “the disgrace.” It’s a problem. As long as we are only free because G‑d broke our chains and took us out of there, we are still slaves. And as long as we are Jews because G‑d draws us close to Him, we are still idolaters. It’s just latent, suspended in animation, ready to pop out, only that G‑d’s divine arm won’t let us go.

So the true ending is not until the end, when we persist through our exile, remaining Jews even when He appears to have abandoned us, taking ownership of our Jewishness and our connection to Him and His Torah, until we and the entire world will be saturated with His light, in the times of Moshiach. May that be sooner than we can imagine.10

Go Out and Learn…

There’s a tragic irony to the fate of the Haggadah in modern hands. The section that is meant to be “And now we get to tell the story” ends up in many homes as “Just read this stuff through and we’ll meet at the wine-spilling ceremony.”

I blame it on the printers. They laid it out in one long string of text. But it’s not a string. It’s a multilayered table of ideas, an ancient, fascinating way to relate a single story on multiple levels at once.

In the Chabad.org Haggadah, we aimed to fix this. We made sure to lay it out in a way that reflects its structure. And, what do you know, our readers report their discovery: The story of the Exodus was hiding in the Haggadah in plain sight all these years!

Here’s how this passage works:

There’s a four-verse passage in the Torah that says everything: Who you are, who your people are, and why you’re here. If you owned a farm, an orchard, or a vineyard in Ancient Israel (as the great majority did), even if you were unable to read (as a small minority was), you would have known this one passage of Torah by heart.

An Aramean was out to annihilate my father. Eventually, he went down to Egypt. He was just visiting, bringing only a few people, but ended up becoming a mighty people there, powerful and populous.

The Egyptians treated us badly and they made us suffer, and they assigned us hard work.

So we cried out to God, the God of our fathers, and God heard our voice and saw our suffering, our labor and our oppression.

And God took us out of Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, with a huge display, with signs and with wonders.11

You had to know these lines because, once a year, you brought samples of your first produce of the year up to a kohen in the Temple in Jerusalem, and you had to recite them as you handed a basket of those samples to him. And actually there's two more lines that come after the above, thanking G‑d for bringing us to a land flowing with milk and honey, which is why you're bringing these first-fruits.

The Haggadah cleverly takes those words, phrase by phrase, and unpacks them, showing you that each phrase relates to another part of the story, so that you really know more than you think you know. Sometimes the Haggadah unpacks some goods for you, and then unpacks those goods as well. But every tidbit is packed with meaning, with drama, and with oodles of material for discussion.

To really get into all this, download or order the Chabad.org Haggadah at Chabad.org/Haggadah.

The Plague Count

The Puzzle:

There were ten plagues in Egypt. Everyone knows that. Count them. Ten.

But for these rabbis, there’s got to be hundreds of plagues. Why? How does that add to the story? We got out of there. We were freed. If it took two plagues, even one, isn’t that enough?

The Key:

So here’s the backstory: The Jews were planted in Egypt to rescue and redeem the good things Egypt had to offer. Their souls were tied up with those sparks of wisdom and goodness, and so they couldn’t leave until all of that had been released. But all the immoral deeds, nasty words, and evil thoughts of Egypt were absorbed by the very soil, water, and air of the land. That was holding onto those valuable sparks.

The plagues weren’t just a punishment for the Egyptians. They were a kind of detox program. When the water turned to blood, for instance, or flees emerged from the soil, it was because the spiritual toxins of Egypt were being purged. Once that was done, the good that was there could be pulled out as well, and the Jews were able to leave.

So these rabbis, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Akiva, are discussing something we all want to know: Just how deeply can people affect their environment?

Rabbi Yossi views our environment as a fairly robust system. Human beings can only affect it at its surface level. That being so, each plague only has to be one plague to clean things up.

But Rabbi Eliezer understands that people’s behavior affects the fundamental elements of their environment. Every environment is composed of the elements of fire, wind, water, and earth. So Rabbi Eliezer multiplies the plagues by four.

Rabbi Akiva goes further. He understands that our environment and our souls are entangled at a quintessential level. All elements share the same quintessence, the raw core of being from which all things emerge. So Rabbi Akiva multiplies the plagues by five.12

"If so," the Haggadah exclaims, “how many levels upon levels of goodness has the One Who Encompasses Everything done for us!”13

Because now we see not only how G‑d manipulated the nature of things at its very core to free our souls, but also how dependent the essential nature of the world is upon our deeds.

For more tidbits on the Seder from the same author, see Haggadah Tidbits.