Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour of the entire Babylonian Talmud.
And today, we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the history and ideas around the Haggadah. Now, we just finished our overview of Tractate Pesachim. The final chapter in Tractate Pesachim finally gets to the ideas and the rituals and the practices of what we are likely most familiar with as it relates to the holiday of Passover, and that is the Haggadah, the night of the Seder.
And I’m sure most of our listeners have participated in some sort of Passover Seder. You might remember the Mah Nishtanah, the questions that are asked. You might remember how long it takes to actually get to the meal. That’s my favorite bit from Sebastian Maniscalco about going to a Passover Seder and being like, “What is taking so long to eat over here?”
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Sebastian Maniscalco:
I went to my first Passover dinner. That’s what she said, “My mother’s going to have Passover.” “Okay, we’ll go to the dinner.” 7:30, we sit down at her mother’s house. I’m starving, right? Starving. They start passing out pamphlets, like reading material? I’m like, “What’s going on? What are we doing here? What’s with the…?” She’s like, “No, we read for two hours.” “Two hours?” I said, “Listen, I’m Italian. As soon as I sit at a table, I got to have bread within 15 seconds of sitting down, all right? I need something to do with my right hand. I need a… Is there some oil coming out? We got oil? I need oil now. Hungry.”
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Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
But our question is really what was the Talmudic idea of the Seder? Because most of Tractate Pesachim, as we mentioned, is focused on defining what chametz is, the definition of matzah, and really the bulk of it is about Korban Pesach, the Paschal Lamb, as it’s normally translated, that they would eat on the night of Passover. And our Seder, kind of the main event is known as Maggid. That is the time where in a lot of families, they either go around and they take turns reading about the story of Exodus and the redemption from Egypt. And it’s only at the end of that—if you remember the structure, we first say a little bit of Hallel, we have that second cup of wine, then we eat, and then we say the other half of Hallel.
Now, to really understand what the original bones of the Seder is, you really have to understand this text is not included in the Talmud. The entirety of the Seder, what we read, what we call the Haggadah, is not fully developed in the Talmud itself. We have pieces of it. We have like the skeleton of the actual Seder, and that is in the Talmud. That includes drinking four cups of wine, when we drink the four cups of wine. It includes having charoses, that, I don’t even know how to translate charoses, that’s the honest truth, but that, you know, that apple, cement-looking hors d’oeuvre that we eat. Most of the Seder is there, but really the actual text, all the things that we read, some of it’s there, most of it is not. The order that we read it in, that emerged much later, like everything else.
We’ve mentioned this before when we did our overview in Tractate Brachos and where the siddur came from. The siddur is very similar. We have the structure in the Talmud, but the actual text kind of develops, and the order and everything, that develops later. And the kind of the bedrock, the foundation of everything in the siddur comes from the writings of the Geonic period. That is following the creation and the development of the Talmud, before the era of the commentators, the classical commentators of the Talmud: Rambam, Rashi, all of those figures, the Tosafists that we described. There was a period before the Rambam, but after the Talmud, that’s called the Geonic period. These were Geonim who had yeshivas in Bavel still operating. And at the very end, this is really like a thousand years ago, in the ninth century, there was a Gaon named Rav Amram Gaon. Gaon literally means brilliant or genius, but it was a superlative, a phrase that instead of calling somebody rabbi, you might call them a Gaon.
So, Rav Amram Gaon was the one who kind of figured out the structure, and all subsequent siddurim are based on his writing. The same is true for the Haggadah. Kind of the prototype of the Haggadah, who gathered all of the teachings of the Talmud, added in customs that were prevalent at that time, but kind of began the final emergence of the Haggadah we are familiar with. That is from the ninth century of Rav Amram Gaon.
But there was a major shift between what is described in the Talmud and what was practiced really when the Temple actually stood, and what we do on Passover night at the Seder nowadays. And the most major shift that we should highlight emerges from this phenomenal work that I’m going to introduce you to. I don’t expect any of our readers to either be familiar with this person or to actually read this book, but I do want to put it on people’s radar.
This is David Henshke. David Henshke is a professor in Israel, and also happens to be an outstanding traditional Torah scholar in the most classical sense. And he’s one of the few figures who really combines beautifully, that like everybody agrees, both academic inquiry, classical Judaic studies using the tools of the academy, and integrates them with the classic methodology of Talmud study with all of its commentaries. And he has a really, just a marvelous insights. They’re very, very, very advanced. And I mean that honestly. And he writes in kind of a Hebrew that’s both academic and traditional, and his insights, they’re long, they have very long footnotes.
The reason why I am mentioning this is because I think the person who really explores how the Haggadah has actually developed is David Henshke. And his most central idea comes from noticing a few oddities that we have in the Seder that we have today that’s discussed in the Talmud that don’t really make sense, and I’ll highlight three.
Number one: He says it’s very strange that in the Talmud it says that we pour the second cup of wine. The first cup of wine. We have four cups of wine the night of the Seder. The first cup is the classical kiddush.That was the same always. The second cup of wine nowadays we have at the end of Maggid, and then the third cup of wine we then have at the end of Hallel, and the fourth cup of wine we have at the end of bentsching. Those are the four cups of wine.
What he notices, the Talmud says we pour the second cup of wine like right after we do the first, and we’re just kind of sitting there, and like, why are we doing this now? We have the hors d’oeuvres and we pour the cup of wine, and we only drink it at the very end of Maggid when we go through all the stories around the table. Why is the Talmud mentioning this so early?
Number two is even the hors d’oeuvres that we’re having are kind of strange, like what’s the point of them? The reason the Talmud always gives is that the children should ask. Is there a deeper reason?
And the final point that he kind of extrapolates and builds a very central idea is the question of ein maftirin achar haPesach afikoman. The idea, and that’s from the words of the Talmud, that we do not have any afikoman after the Pesach, which we now interpret that after we have that final little piece of matzah, we should have that taste linger and you shouldn’t eat anything else.
And he takes all of these oddities, and he actually says something that makes a tremendous amount of sense, but explains how the Seder evolved. And his central idea is the original Seder in the times of the Temple, when we were bringing a Korban Pesach, actually, instead of Maggid, instead of us reciting the story, at the heart of the Haggadah was actually eating the Korban Pesach itself. Instead of telling over and reciting the story as the center action, you know, the main event, so to speak, of the Passover Seder, the main event was actually eating the Korban Pesach, which is why we would first drink a little bit before we ate. We had these hors d’oeuvres. The hors d’oeuvres literally says to kind of get the stomach ready to have this massive meal.
The most important thing is he says the idea of ein maftirin achar haPesach afikoman, that we do not have this afikoman, we don’t have anything afterwards, and we symbolize that with bread, it meant something totally different. What it actually meant was that there should be no space after eating the Korban Pesach and then reciting the second half of Hallel. It was very important that we recited the Hallel as bookends over eating the Korban Pesach itself. We were saying Hallel over the act of eating, which is why we split the Hallel into two. The original Passover Seder would be the first half of Hallel, then we would eat the Korban Pesach, and then we would have the second half of Hallel bookending the eating experience with the praise. You can’t say Hallel as you eat, but this bookended it to say we are eating this as an expression of praise and thanks to God for the formation of the Jewish people through the Exodus in Egypt.
And that is his basic idea, and what I think is so amazing that emerges from this is you’re able to see, by going through and almost mining the archaeology of the Passover Haggadah itself, we see how halacha evolves, and how it’s able to respond to even these cataclysmic tragedies like the destruction of the Temple, and figure out a way that the very idea, the memory of the Exodus even without a Temple, without a Korban Pesach, is still going to be preserved.
And this way what the Haggadah really is is every generation subsequently is adding in a little bit. And if you look at the printing and the history of printing of the Haggadah, it is the exact same thing. You see the different struggles and concerns of the Jewish people through each subsequent edition of the Haggadah, which is, if not the most printed Jewish book, I think it’s the number one most-commentated upon Jewish book by far. I think number two is Pirkei Avot, Ethics of our Fathers, but number one, I think by a wide margin, is the Passover Haggadah.
One of the earliest Haggadahs we have… They go back already… The actual text we have from the 14th century. There’s a very famous Haggadah that I like to mention called the Birds’ Head Haggadah, where all the Jews are depicted, instead of having human heads, they have the head of a bird. I don’t think we have an exact definitive theory of why they do that, but it may have to do with some of the prohibitions about depicting people and staying away from idolatry. Jews never liked depicting too much in art, and that’s a whole other class we could talk about, but not for right now. And instead, they had bird heads.
I think the most famous Haggadah that is worth mentioning is the Maxwell House Haggadah. That became a staple of the American Passover experience. The Maxwell House Haggadah was first printed in 1932, and I think what makes it so fascinating and so interesting is why is Maxwell House printing a Haggadah? Well, the answer was is Jews were really not sure, and there were a lot of concerns and questions, are we allowed to have coffee on Passover? Maybe even if it’s not chametz, maybe it’s one of the types of foods that we stay away from because it looks like chametz, it resembles chametz. There are a lot of customs and added prohibitions that we have of staying totally away from anything that even resembles chametz.
So, one of the things that Maxwell House did, which is really brilliant, but it also shows you what Jews were struggling with in early America trying to figure out how do we keep Passover on this soil. Are we allowed to have coffee on Passover? And one of the ways that Maxwell House kind of advertised the fact that you are allowed to have coffee, consult your local rabbi, because a lot of coffee now has all these additives and stuff like that, and a lot of coffees we don’t have on Passover, but classical coffee beans, unflavored, you can have on Passover, and one of the ways that this was advertised to the world was through the Maxwell House Haggadah.
But the history of the Haggadah, and this is so true because it’s what Passover is all about, is the history of the Jewish people. We see how we took a ceremony with a sacrifice at the center. We then reimagined the ceremony after the Temple was destroyed, where we verbally recite this story as Maggid, instead of reliving the story through the actual eating of the Korban Pesach, and how this text slowly evolves to the contemporary text that we have now, the Maxwell House Haggadah or whatever you use. But you see the struggles of each generation, because really what the Haggadah is, is the record of the creation, the formation, and the development of the Jewish people itself. It is the repository of our collective memory and what we turn to when we celebrate it each and every Passover.
So, thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.