The Jewish Home | MARCH 28, 2018 The Jewish Home | OCTOBER 29, 2015
sheep in commemoration of the paschal offering in the Temple. In English, we know this festival as “Passover,” a word derived from the Hebrew pasach, as in “the L-rd will pass over” any Israelite home whose doorpost had been sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificial lamb. Philo, first-century Alexandrian philosopher and exegete who interpreted the Greek version of the Torah (Septuagint), called Pesach the “crossing-feast” for a different reason: he traces the name not to the destroying angel passing over the Israelites but to “the crossing of Israel itself” from Egypt to the Red Sea. The etymology of pesach ranges from its root psh which means “to limp, hobble, jump” (as in G-d “jumping” over the homes of the Jews); to the Akkadian sound-alike word pashahu, which means “to appease” (although there is nothing expiatory in the Pesach saga); to an Egyptian expression meaning “a stroke, blow” (as in G-d’s final tenth plague “blow” in “striking” the firstborn of the enemy). Ironically the term passover was introduced into the Jewish lexicon by a die-hard 16th century anti-Semitic Bible scholar, William Tyndale, a talmid of a vicious Jew-hating Protestant, Martin Luther, he of Reformation-fame, and the compiler of the universally accepted King James’ English translation of the Torah (1611), responsible for such theological expressions as “Let there be light,” “Salt of the earth,” and “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
O
n the 10th day of Nissan, the Jews were commanded (at great personal risk) to gather unblemished one-yearold male lambs for a twilight sacrifice (zebach) to be held four days later. Why a lamb? This animal was worshipped by the Egyptians as a sacred animal; thus its destruction is the first of many theurgic Pesach rituals linked to the symbolism of redemption from Egyptian idolatry (avoda zara). This is why the paschal lamb is eaten at night, a time when Jewish mystics believed demonic power to be on the ascendant, thus vanquishing it at the moment of its greatest strength. When the public display of Jews killing the local deity passed by without Egyptian wrath, Chazal declared that Shabbos the first Shabbos HaGadol in
“
The Haggadah is not a “book,” as we understand a book to be, but a mosaic of passages, a tapestry of images, a whole-cloth of borrowings, “a great and mighty Divine poem,” as per Rav Kook.
history, literally the “Great Sabbath,” a term not found in either T’nach or Talmudic literature (although it appears in the Zohar); an absence that sent many Torah scholars of the Middle Ages on a search for its genesis. The Machzor Vitri, compiled by R’ Simchah ben Samuel of Vitry, a 11th-12th century French sage, which also includes responsa from his teacher, Rashi, is brutally honest: it admits that no one knows why or how it got its name. (For Judaica enthusiasts, you can see pages of the original manuscripts of the Vitri Machzor at Oxford Library, England, with handwriting in the margins by R’ Eleazar ben Judah, at the British Museum, at the Biblioteca Palatina library in Psarma, which miraculously survived a heavy Nazi shelling in 1944, and, closer to home, at the [Conservative] Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.) Nearly every year I hear a different explanation for the expression Shabbos HaGadol. Some trace it to the day’s special haftorah where Elijah is identified as playing a primary role in the “great” (gadol) Messianic age. This is based on the Talmud’s vort that Pesach is the archetype of the future redemption (“...in Nissan they will be redeemed in time to come”). This led Rabbi Yechiel Epstein to conclude that Shabbas HaGadol or Shabbas Shuva, between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, should be one of the two contiguous Shabbosim that, if kept, would merit the coming of the Moshiach. Meanwhile, Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, head of Yeshiva University, Manhattan, and the seminal figure of Modern Orthodoxy in America for 50 years, notes that the word geula is only used to describe two occurrences: the Egyptian redemption and the messianic age (by the way, purkan, also a term of salvation, comes from mixing the words ‘Purim’ and ‘Chanukah’). Because Pesach held the secret to redemption, Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (Maharil) from 14th century Worms, Germany, and R’ Moses Isserles (Rama) – whose Ashkenaz customs in the Shulchan Aruch come from R’ Moelin’s Minhagei Maharil, an authoritative codification of German Jewish minhagim – would read the Haggada on Shabbos HaGadol, although R’ Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon, disapproved of this custom for Litvishe Yidden. The go-to place for explanations is
S5 55
Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter, scion of the Ger dynasty known as the Sfas Emes (“The Language of Truth”), after his classic Torah commentary. The Gerrer Rebbe saw it differently: the term Shabbos HaGadol was a post-Liberator declaration that the holy Shabbos had now taken on a new historic-theologic significance; i.e., it had become “greater” than before the exodus. Why? Because this was the first Shabbos of Israel as a people, a national moment of maturity which not only transformed them into “gedolim,” but also catapulted Shabbos spiritually into a Shabbos “HaGadol.” This also explains why there is a “second Shabbos” within the repetition of the Ten Commandments.
G
-d’s presence in history is felt right at the seder table, making the Haggadah’s commercial demand seem inexhaustible, its audience unlimited. It is by far the number one top-seller and by far the most illustrated, of all Jewish books. The 1454 Rhineland Haggadah of the scribe-artist Joel ben Simeon is the inspirational epitome of hiddur mitzvah (“beautifying a commandment”) with wild animals, domestic beasts, and crouching figures all supporting elaborate decorative double arches, festooned with fantastic towers and figurehead medallions, in which are listed the laws of Pesach. In fact, more Torah commentaries exist on the Haggadah than on any other Jewish text, including the Bible. From the day it made its first appearance (1482) in Italy’s Reggio di Calabria, Judaica collectors have amassed more than 3,500 separate editions. Consider: during the entire 16th century only 25 Haggadahs were printed; by the 19th century publishers were churning out 1,269 Haggadahs a year… and this record was broken in just the first half of the 20th-century! (A relatively complete Haggadah fragment, dated to 8th or 9th century Palestine, was discovered among the 300,000 manuscript fragments in the Cairo geniza of the Ben Ezra shul.) Its scholarly lure is underlined by a startling fact: in comparison to the oldest-known, 13th or 14th century Haggadah manuscript (currently in Russia’s Leningrad Library that consists of only four leaves (8 pages), the early-20th cen-