April 11, 2023|כ' ניסן ה' אלפים תשפ"ג The Evolution of the Seder
Print ArticleI am a firm supporter of chazal, of their rulings, that help preserve Jewish faith, Jewish continuity, Jewish engagement and Jewish practice, but I have to say that I’m a little taken aback by the fact that they made me eat dinner last night at approximately 11:30 pm. I get the whole seder theme, the sippur yetziat mitzrayim, the special night with special memories, memories that are etched in our hearts and minds for many years as one of our most authentic, holistic annual religious experiences, but why on earth do they set up a ritual and meal whereby we eat late at night when we are so exhausted? Is this just another example of their interesting sense of humor?
Truth be told, I don’t think that this was always the plan. I think that the mealtime on seder night evolved. What do I mean by that? I would like to compare what our modern day seder looked like with what it looked like according to two other sources. Source number one: the Mishna. If you read the tenth chapter of Masechet Pesachim, there the Mishna tells you what to do on seder night. It tells you to pour a cup of wine and recite kiddush, dip a vegetable, and bring the matzot and seder foods to the table. It tells you to pour a second cup fo wine, say the ma nishtana and then begin telling the story from the bad to the good and to expound on the pesukim of “Arami oved avi” until the end of that section in the Torah. It tells you about the Rabban Gamliel section of speaking about the mitzvot of the night, pesach, matza and maror, and how we have to imagine that we left Egypt and we praise Hashem with paragraphs of Tehillim. It tells you to pour a third cup for birkat hamazon and to recite Hallel on a fourth cup.
This is very similar to our seder, although there are some notable differences. There is no mention in our mishna about the nature of the obligation, how everyone has to tell the story and the more we tell the story the better and there is no mention of the rabbis who are staying up all night or the four sons or the debate about the plagues or the dayenu. Additionally, in the Mishna we must recite “Arami oved avi” until the end of the section in the Torah. Now the section, taken from Parshat Ki Tavo, includes five pesukim. The first pasuk is “Arami oved avi va-ye-red Mitzrayim” – we went down to Egypt. The second pasuk is “Va-ya-rei’u otanu ha-Mitzriyim” – the Egyptians enslaved us. The third pasuk is “Va-nitz-ak el Hashem” – we cried out to God. The fourth pasuk is “Va-yotzi-enu Hashem mi-Mitzrayim b’yad chazaka” – God took us out with a strong hand. The fifth pasuk is “Va-yevienu el ha-makom hazeh va-yiten lanu et ha-aretz ha-zot” – God brought us to Eretz Yisrael. According to the Mishna, on the night of the seder we say that we went down to Egypt, we were enslaved, we cried out to God, we were freed, and we were brought to Eretz Yisrael. But that’s not what we do. We only read and explain the first four pesukim in our seder, but not the fifth – not the pasuk about going into Eretz Yisrael. The mishna’s seder was similar to our seder but there are some notable differences.
Source number two is the Tosefta. If you read the Tosefta, a work that was compiled around the time that the Mishna was written 1800 years ago, it describes a different seder experience. You must drink four cups of wine, but there is no structure as to when the last three cups must be drunk. There is no maggid section and the waiter brings sweetbreads or some sort of hors d’oeuvres for the meal. There is a mitzvah of simcha, of happiness and it seems from the Tosefta that after the simcha – the wine, the hors d’oeuvres and probably the meal, Hallel would be recited. There is also Rabbi Elazar saying that “chotfin matza la-tinokot bishvil she-lo yishnu” – that we should snatch the matza so that the children stay awake at the beginning of the meal. There is also a halacha that “chayav adam la-asok b’hilchot ha-Pesach kol ha-laylah” – that there is an obligation to have a study session after the meal, all night if possible, and the Tosefta then tells a story of “ma-aseh b’Rabban Gamliel u-zekeinim she’hayu mesubin b’beit Baytus ben Zunin b’Lud v’hayu asukin b’hilchot ha-Pesach kol ha’laylah” – Rabban Gamliel and other elders spent the Seder in Lud and they were actually having an all-night study session. Now the Tosefta’s version of the seder is radically different than our version of the seder. In our version, our obligation is to tell the story. In the Tosefta, the obligation is to study the halachot. There is no maggid section, there is no structure regarding when to drink the wine. We simply dip hors d’oeuvres and eat and say Hallel and then have a study session after the meal.
It seems to me that the Tosefta version, the Mishnaic version and our current version of the seder reflect different eras of the seder. The first era was the era recorded in the Tosefta, the era of the Beit Hamikdash and shortly afterwards. Originally, we did not wait until almost midnight to begin our seder night meal. We began our meal with kiddush, we drank a lot of wine, at least four cups, we ate an elaborate meal with hors d’oeuvres and maybe during the appetizer we snatched the matza to keep the children awake. We ate the korban pesach and after the meal we sang Hallel and then we studied the halachot of Pesach all night or until we fell asleep.
Originally, the Pesach seder experience was not about an in-depth explanation of the story. Maybe a short explanation while eating the korban pesach was necessary, but the original way of experiencing the night of Pesach was the korban pesach followed by the study of halachot. The children would go with their father to the Beit Hamikdash and it was an unbelievable experience. Remember how excited we were as children when we baked matza at the matza factory with our families? Well, imagine going to the beit hamikdash with Dad on erev Pesach in the afternoon and witnessing hundreds of thousands of people visiting the beit hamikdash with the Leviim singing and slaughtering the korban, followed by a nighttime discussion about Pesach in the context of a meal, singing Hallel to God and then adults learning all night.
This was a great, meaningful way to experience Pesach while the beit hamikdash was standing, but what happened after it was destroyed? A crucial part of the experience was missing. No korban pesach. So if you’re a Rabban Gamliel, who led the Jewish people in the aftermath of the beit hamikdash, then you can study the halachot of Pesach all night long and you can feel inspired, as indicated in the Tosefta. But I have news for you. Not everyone is a Rabban Gamliel. Most people can’t feel inspired without a beit hamikdash if they are just studying the halachot of Pesach. So a new type of seder emerged – the Mishnaic seder.
The seder recorded in the Mishna reflects a transformation in the Pesach experience: Originally, it involved a study session of halacha at end of the evening, but now, by the time of the mishna, the Pesach experience formally became an interactive storytelling session of the exodus in the form of questions and answers. At this time, there was no mikdash, no korban Pesach and the halachot and the Pesach meal were insufficient to generate interest and excitement to the next generation. Therefore, at some point, the seder experience transformed itself. We already see that a group of five rabbis are gathered in Bnei Brak who are not studying halacha but they’re telling a story and they are creating an emotional experience and it’s probably at this time that the meal was moved to the latter part of the seder.
During the era of the mikdash, the children’s experience during the slaughtering and consumption of the Pesach sacrifice was sufficient, but shortly thereafter, at this stage in history with no mikdash, without the sacrifice, we had to garner the children’s interest from the beginning of the seder through the interactive maggid section, and the meal took place later on in the evening. And it was during this time that when we retold the story of yetziat Mitzrayim, we read the fifth pasuk in Parshat Ki Tavo, that the story didn’t end with the exodus, but it ended when we were brought to Eretz Yisrael and thereafter built the beit mikdash. At this time in Jewish history, we celebrated seder night as the beginning of a process that finally led to the conquest of Eretz Yisrael.
But soon, it became just too painful to mention Eretz Yisrael. After the failed Bar Kochba revolt, after Jews weren’t allowed to live in Jerusalem and were only allowed to visit Jerusalem to mourn on the ruins of the beit hamikdash on Tisha B’av, soon we came to the grim realization that we weren’t going to rebuild the mikdash that fast, that exile was going to be a long process. Therefore, at this point in time, it seems that the seder ritual was further transformed to our current seder. We don’t mention the fifth pasuk in Parshat Ki Tavo anymore. We don’t mention Eretz Yisrael because it’s too painful.
In this third stage, what is the theme of the Seder? The theme of the seder in the third stage is to highlight the greatness of God, even in exile. That’s why we incorporate the debate between Rabbis about how many miracles there were at the Red Sea. That’s why we say the more that we tell the story of God taking us out of Egypt, the better. In fact, we incorporate the story of the Rabbis in Yavneh who stayed up all night telling the story, to stress how even now we should stay up late praising God. That’s why we toast to Hashem with the v’hi she’amda prayer, praising God for always being there for us and singing the song of dayenu for all the good that God has done for us.
Finally, in this third era, we include a discussion of how to teach the story to four different types of sons. As we are further mired in galut, in exile, there is much disillusionment. There is a wicked son who looks around and sees the destruction and the persecution and asks, “What’s all this for? There’s no meaning in this ritual anymore. God has left us!” There’s the simple son who’s so far removed from Judaism that he doesn’t understand anything and there’s the son who doesn’t even know how to ask, who’s even farther removed from Judaism. This is the challenge of Jewish life in the diaspora and chazal had to adapt the seder ritual to deal with this challenge. And we try to hold fast to the notion that God will always be there to protect us and we manage to celebrate and continue to find meaning in Pesach despite the persecutions, despite the Crusades, despite the forced conversions, despite the expulsions and despite the pogroms. But all of our suffering wears down upon us. The rasha’s and the tam’s and the she’aino yodei’a lish’ols proliferate, especially in the modern era where mankind selects reason over religion and doesn’t think it’s reasonable that a chosen nation means chosen to suffer, chosen to be tortured and chosen to be killed.
It becomes more and more difficult to find meaning and many try to find meaning in new versions of Judaism, new streams of Judaism, which are not consistent with our traditions and many of us ask how do we find meaning in the Pesach experience in 1945? How can we sing v’hi she-amda, that God has constantly saved us from persecution generation after generation after waking up to the realities of the Holocaust, but, somehow, we persevere. We continue to celebrate, and the truth is while it was difficult, on the one hand, to continue praising Hashem about how He saved us every generation, something else happened in recent history
In 1902, Theodor Herzl publishes a novel, “Altneuland,” where he describes how the protagonist, a thinly disguised portrait of himself, rediscovers his religious roots while attending a seder service. This is how he describes it.
“And so they went through with the Seder ceremony half ritual, half family festival. This most Jewish of all the festivals dates back farther in history than any other civilized usage in modern times. For hundreds and hundreds of years it has been observed without change, while the whole world changed. Nations disappeared from history, others rose. The world grew larger. Undreamed of continents emerged from the seas. Unimagined natural forces were harnessed for the pleasure and comfort of man. But this one people still remained unchanged, retaining its ancient customs, true to itself, rehearsing the woes of its forbears. Israel, a people of slavery and freedom, still prayed in ancient words to the Eternal its God.
One guest at that Seder table pronounced the Hebrew words of the Haggadah with the zeal of a penitent. He was finding himself again, and his throat was often so tight with emotion that he had to master his longing to cry out aloud. It was almost thirty years since he himself had asked the Four Questions. ...Then had come "Enlightenment," the break with all that was Jewish, and the final logical leap into the void, when he had had no further hold on life. At this Seder table he seemed to himself a prodigal son, returned to his own people.”
And it was then, that this first exodus of our people inspired a new return to Zion. Thus, the dream of Eretz Yisrael, the dream of the mishnaic seder, the dream of the Jews in Yavneh 2000 years ago, is alive and well!
Let us continue the work of chazal, who constantly tried to make the seder meaningful for us, for our children and for our grandchildren. Let us feel the passion of the story of our national birth, and let us realize that even though we may not be able to technically change the text of the haggada, the theme of seder night is changing in our very day as we transition in history from our current version of the haggada to the mishnaic haggada, to the reality of Eretz Yisrael and may we merit the final transformation of the seder back to its original state, when we can celebrate with the meat of the korban Pesach in the third Beit Hamikdash and most importantly sit down to Pesach dinner at a normal hour in the evening, bimhaira b’yameinu amen.