The Oral Talmud Episode 49: Passover in the Talmud
SHOW NOTES
“ People often take rites and rituals and they miss the point. It would be like if your doctor wrote you a prescription if you were sick, and then instead of taking the medicine, you take the prescription and you put it on your altar, you bow down, you recite the prescription, ‘Oh, wonderful doctor, wonderful doctor,’ and you keep reciting the prescription. You're not gonna get better. You have to actually take it.” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
Passover is supposed to be a ritual. Instead, it starts to look like a construction site. In this episode, Benay and Dan pull apart the Seder we think we know and reveal something far messier, more alive, and more unfinished. The Talmud doesn’t hand you a script. It barely even describes a meal. What it gives you instead is fragments: a story to tell, questions to provoke, and a tradition that’s still being built in real time.
Then the deeper disruption lands. The “Haggadah” isn’t a book, it’s an act. The questions aren’t a checklist, they’re the curriculum. And the Seder itself? Not ancient, not fixed, not even fully formed. Benay and Dan expose how much of what we treat as sacred structure is actually later invention, from printed scripts to Maxwell House marketing, and ask what it would mean to stop reciting and start telling. This episode doesn’t just reinterpret Passover. It dares you to rebuild it.
By the way, we are aware that this episode is coming out a couple of months after Passover. That’s because we are re-releasing the Oral Talmud as a podcast, and we’re releasing it in the same order that we recorded it. We recorded this one just before Passover. But if you find that it gets you thinking about doing Passover differently next year, you have many months to make your plans.
This week’s text: Pesachim 116b and Mishnah Pesachim Chapter 10:4
Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.
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DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 49: “Passover in the Talmud.”
Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY LAPPE: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN LIBENSON: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
Passover is supposed to be a ritual. Instead, it starts to look like a construction site. In this episode, Benay and I pull apart the Seder we think we know — and reveal something far messier, more alive, and more unfinished. The Talmud doesn’t hand you a script. It barely even describes a meal. What it gives you instead is fragments: a story to tell, questions to provoke, and a tradition that’s still being built in real time.
Then the deeper disruption lands. The “Haggadah” isn’t a book — it’s an act. The questions aren’t a checklist — they’re the curriculum. And the Seder itself? Not ancient, not fixed, not even fully formed. Benay and I expose how much of what we treat as sacred structure is actually later invention — from printed scripts to Maxwell House marketing — and ask what it would mean to stop reciting and start telling. This episode doesn’t just reinterpret Passover. It dares you to rebuild it.
By the way, we are aware that this episode is coming out a couple of months after Passover. That’s because we are re-releasing the Oral Talmud as a podcast, and we’re releasing it in the same order that we recorded it. We recorded this one just before Passover. But if you find that it gets you thinking about doing Passover differently next year – you have many months to make your plans.
DAN LIBENSON: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Oral Talmud. I'm Dan Levison. I'm here with Bene Lapi. Hey Bene.
BENAY LAPPE: Hey Dan. How are ya?
DAN LIBENSON: I'm good. So we are doing a special edition of the Oral Talmud today Passover edition, which is because Passover, when we're recording this, who knows when you're gonna be watching or listening to this, but when we're recording this, Passover is actually starting the day after tomorrow, the night of?
The day after tomorrow. Yeah. Uh, I'm not prepared and looks like you're not either.
BENAY LAPPE: I, I'm not. My daughter said to me this morning, can't we just skip Passover this year?
DAN LIBENSON: Interesting.
BENAY LAPPE: Not that I hadn't thought of it. I said, no, but, and I didn't, I didn't let on that. I had the same desire, but yeah, well, hopeful you barely keeping it together with what we had to do every day.
Anyway, here comes Passover, just to make life a little more interesting.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, hopefully your daughter won't be watching this. Um, but the, um, well, actually, like what you just said, I think, I think it's interesting, and actually this is something that I've been trying to tease out, uh, more broadly, and I haven't really, I don't think I've done a great job, but in the Torah, there's the first Passover and then there's future Passovers.
And you could argue that there's the first Passover, then there's the next 40 Passovers when they're wandering in the wilderness. And then there's the Passover of the ages, you know, for forever. And the Torah talks about that, the Passover of, of the Exodus. Uh, and the Passover of the ages, the OTs Right.
You know, the generations, but, um, but the pa, the first Passover is like in this chaos of the last plague and, right. You know, the whole idea is that they slaughter the goat and put the. Put the, uh, blood on the doorpost so that the, uh, angel of Death will pass over their house. Right? I mean, like, there's that, and that's what's going on there.
The, the Matza has to do with that. They're right racing out of Egypt and they don't have time to something, you know, maybe to let it rise, whatever that's controversial, but you know, there for some reason their bread ends up gone wrong. And, uh, and, and it's the chaos of the first Passover. So that, that I feel very much was last Passover, the first Passover of the Coronavirus when we really had no idea what we're doing.
And you would think that we'd be more prepared for this Passover. I'm pretty sure that we're, most of us are not, you know, we're like a little bit more, at least a little bit less nervous about like the zoom aspect maybe and other things, but it feels almost as chaotic. So I think it's actually helping me a little bit understand the wilderness period in a way that I didn't before, because I think it's almost like equally chaotic, even though you would think that it would be a little less so.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, I, I'm actually finding this Passover harder than last Passover. Last Passover. It was like, okay, Pesach is going to bring us back to something of our usual lives. It, you know, and I had that energy to clean and to pull it together. Now I'm just exhausted. Yeah. I'm just exhausted.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: And, and, and you know, as you were talking, I was thinking what, when you were making the distinction between the first Passover and the subsequent Passovers, it, it's always struck me, um, that the genius in remembrance is the first time you say, let, let's, let's remember, you know.
The, the life changing event for the queer community wasn't so much Stonewall. It was the year after Stonewall
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: It was the year after when we said that was a thing, Uhhuh. And every year we're gonna think about that thing. Um, that I think is the genius. It's, it's the next year. And when I think about Passover, like when we do Stonewall, we don't, um, you know, every year at Gay Pride, it's used to be a march, and then it was, you know, a protest and now it's sort of a celebration, if that.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: But it's interesting that we don't afflict ourselves like the riot and the being beaten by the police. But it's interesting that the Jewish way to remember is to afflict ourselves,
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh to
BENAY LAPPE: really re-experience that thing, which I think is also smart. It's just that when you already feel afflicted, it's hard to really get into more of that.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. Well, well, that, that's what I was gonna say. Like, I don't know a whole lot about the history of the remembrance of Stonewall, which is itself an interesting subject that I'm sure, you know, PhD dissertations have already been written about. But if not, it sounds like a good, a good topic. But my guess is that the first, it's actually less the first anniversary of Stonewall and maybe the fifth or the seventh or the 10th.
Right. But where they finally, it was like, it, it wasti like enough had happened where you can now turn it into more of a, of a ceremony where there's enough distance to reflect and there. Right. I I, I bet the first anniversary of Stonewall was a little bit chaotic or not, didn't fully live up to its pot.
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, but it would be interesting to, to find out. Um, the, the other piece is that, I mean, I'll speak for myself here. The whole thing is a myth in the sense that, uh, I mean a passover in the sense that, uh, you know, I, I, I think that the idea of. Using Passover to mark the Exodus, et cetera, et cetera, was something that was developed long after, long after the Exodus, if the exodus happened, or how the exodus, you know, and so it's like, it's a little bit not even accurate to be making these comparisons because it's not really how it happened.
But, so, you know, but I'm, but within the story at least, I mean, let's, let's take the story as as true any, uh, just for the sake of the conversation, uh, what I'm getting out of this experience is that we, I, and also I would say the Jewish people have insufficiently identified the 40 years of wondering the wilderness as its own era.
Of course, it is its own era in the story, but I don't think that we've really, um, built into our mythmaking and myth telling. I don't think we've fully built in. What would that time have been like? And like, I'm almost thinking it would be cool to have a TV series about it. There's actually a, an Israeli like, uh, sketch comedy series that, that has a lot of really funny skits that happen in the years of the wandering in the wilderness.
And the point is kind of that the people are chaotic and they're, you know, not cooperative, which the Torah says. But I, I really would be interested in kind of, well, what was that second Passover really like? And you know, my guess is that it would've been kind of like this year's Passover, you know, it's kinda like, okay, uh, 2.0, it's not 2.0, it's like 1.2, right.
You know, it's like, it's not quite there yet, or 0.2, you know, it's not, it's just a little better than the last one. But, um, so, so what we wanted to do today is a little different from what we usually do, uh, on the show in the sense that we wanna refer to the Talmud and talk about the Talmud and its connections to Passover or what we can kind of glean, so to speak, from the Talmud in terms of understanding Passover better.
But we're not doing our usual deep dives into a, a particular text or just a few lines. We we're trying to cover, not a ton of ground, but a little bit extra ground here, where usually we, you talk a lot about how the talmud's not what the talmud's about, you know, the talmud's really about a process of thinking and not so much the cases that it talks about.
And, and here today we really are talking a little bit more than usual about the case itself, the case of Passover in the Talmud. Uh, so I, I say that only because it's a little, a little bit not our usual format, but, um, so people should understand that if we talk a little bit more than we usually do about the actual case in question, we're not shifting gears for the show.
We just thought it would be an interesting thing to do to talk about Passover a little bit.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Um, so just structurally, I, I wanna first lay out the structure of, of Passover in the Talmud. Because there, because just, uh, you know, have we ever fully explained this? Uh, actually my wife was confused about it, and it took me a while to understand that she was confused about it because it was something that I had understood as sort of fundamentally known about the Talmud and, and kind of clear, but just to be, be clear about it, there's a, a book which started as oral, but it was the Mishna.
And the Mishna is basically a collection of mostly rules and regulations with a little bit of storytelling peppered in and very,
BENAY LAPPE: very little,
DAN LIBENSON: very little. But, and when there is, it's just kind of a clarification of some law. It's very much in the form of a code of law or, or something like that. And that was, um, developed.
Well, who knows exactly when all those laws started to be developed. But, uh, but you know, it kind of accelerated sometime after the destruction of the second temple, which is in the year 70 ce. And it, the, the process is at least understood to have been completed, uh, around the year 200 ce. So we're talking about a hundred years or so of, uh, development of this law code.
And then it's put in, it's, it's, you know, quote published. It's not published, it's a book, but it's kind of, it's a thing. It's there and then at that point that, that people start to study it and to, to, you know, see, oh, well, there's not clear about something. What, what about this, what about that? And, and all of those kinds of, uh, uh, all that history of trying to grapple with this.
This code of the Mishna, uh, is uh, a process that goes on itself over a number of hundreds of years, and around 400 years or so later, it gets codified in a new book or set of books called The Gamara. And the structure of the Gamara is, it goes, there's a little piece of mishna and then there's all these like discussions about it in, in, in a chunk of gamara.
That could be a few paragraphs, it could be a bunch of pages. And then there's like the next piece of Mishna in order of how it is in the mishna, just sort of broken apart with the Talmud sort of talking about it in between. So, so, and the, and the Mishna is divided into a series of subsections about various topics.
And one of those topics is called Passovers, whatever that means exactly. It probably means more like Pascal Lambs. But the, the, this particular part of the mission of is where the vast majority, if not all, the discussion of Passover in the Talmud is, is, is, uh, present. And that's some of what we're gonna be mining today.
Right,
BENAY LAPPE: right.
DAN LIBENSON: Anything else to add to that?
BENAY LAPPE: Nope.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So the one last thing that I wanna, um, say for folks who, who are interested, because I, I've said a few times that my wife and I have been doing this daily, uh, Talmud page study, and recently just we completed the track Tate of, uh, in the Kamara of em.
It's about a hundred and something pages. And I have to say that I was very surprised about it because I hadn't studied it before and in the Gamara, and I hadn't studied it before, really in the mishna, except for this one chapter, chapter 10, which is the last chapter of the Mishna, which has to do, or at least I thought it did with the Seder.
The other nine chapters have nothing to do with the Seder. They actually have nothing to do pretty much with Passover as we experience it today. There are about two major topics. One is the Paschal Lamb, which we don't, haven't done since the temple was destroyed if by the way we ever did it, question mark.
Uh, but the, the sort of Paschal Lamb ceremony. And the other piece is basically about getting rid of your mates, getting rid of your whatever, however we wanna translate that leaven, leaven bread, you know, but it's not quite, probably isn't quite leave bread, but getting rid of all this stuff that you're not supposed to have in your house during Passover.
So the other nine chapters are basically those two topics and only the 10th chapter is, uh, really about kind of what we think of as, as elements that relate to the Seder. And I have to say that I always assumed that. We had chapter 10, and that was where all this stuff was about the Seder. But the other nine must have had something about Passover as, as sort of, we think of it.
And I was like, profoundly disappointed that it, it was like nothing, you know, really relevant, almost nothing really relevant in there. So just a note on this structure.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And I'm still puzzled as to why, why that is. I mean, I can imagine spending one chapter of the Talmud going into the details of the temple, right?
That no longer exists for the, for the purpose as you often describe of mourning it and knowing that, you know, we're not forgetting it. It's, you know, we still love it. We still have an attachment to it and we're moving on. But, you know, nine out of 10 chapters essentially, I, I'm not, I don't understand that.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, it's online 'cause like a few of them are, are about the getting rid of the, the mates. So that's, to be fair. Okay. But
BENAY LAPPE: there's a, there's a lot.
DAN LIBENSON: It's a lot. It's really a lot. Really a lot. And, um, yeah, and I, I don't, we can talk about that later if we have time. I think like that's an interesting question in itself.
But one of the, um, so, so, so, you know, I, I, I assumed that we would have a show like this and I would've read chapter 10 of the gamara of, you know, and, and I would be bringing all kinds of interesting new information here that I didn't know before because I had read chapter 10 in the Mishna before, but not in the Gamara.
And now that I've read chapter 10 in the Gamara, I actually don't have a whole lot of new information to bring. Uh, there isn't much about. The, again, what we think of as, as Passover. So let me just give you an example. The Mishna talks about the four cups of wine at the pass at, at the Passover meal. I, I, I, one of the questions that I wanna raise is whether there's any such thing as the Seder in the Mishna, or even in the Gamara.
But there is some kind of meal that you have when you have bring the Pascal Lamb and it includes four cups of wine. And the majority of the discussion in the Talmud, in the Kamara is basically two questions. Number one, do you first say the blessing for the wine, or do you first say the blessing for the day, the holiday, when you make kiddish?
Uh, and the second one is that they're very concerned about there being four cups of wine because apparently, and I didn't know this, there is a deep seated fear of even numbers. Either in, in, among the, the Jew, in, in other words, even like, maybe the rabbis have this fear, or maybe the society has this fear.
I wanna give them the credit, the, the benefit of the doubt that the society around them, maybe the Jewish society, maybe the sort of Persian society had a terrible fear of even numbers. And maybe the rabbis are trying to constrict the category of even numbers to be feared to the bare minimum so that people wouldn't be so crazy about them.
You know, like wouldn't be so freaked out about them. Uh, but, but the whole thing here is there that they're struggling about how can there be four cups of wine required when we know that four cups is an even number, and that brings horrible demons and bad luck. So they say, well, it's not really four, it's three plus one.
You know, there's all kinds of things that they do. Anyway, the point is, is that, you know, there, there is like nothing about like the, the meaning of these cups, you know, the, the, the symbolism. You know, anything that we discussed today, it's just not there.
BENAY LAPPE: My recollection was that the four cups were to mimic the Roman symposium, like to create this, you know, royal meal where we get to feel, you know, dignified like them.
Is
DAN LIBENSON: that Yeah, well it's very possible, but it doesn't say that in the Talmud. And, um, and the other thing is like, why four? You know, was it, is it that four was the way the Romans did in the symposium? I, I don't know. But, but yeah. You know, so, so, um, there, there definitely is stuff, by the way. There's a little bit of, you know, here and there in the Tom, like there in the Gamara, there's here, here and there.
You can pick up a little something interesting, you know? So for example, when it talks about reclining. There are a few things. It's really clear that when they talk about reclining, they mean reclining. In other words, we're doing it. You put a pillow behind you at the Seder. That's not what they, that's not what they mean.
They're talking about couches, you know, that's obviously Roman Greek, uh, in terms of how people, you know, how kind of, uh, the aristocrats would eat that, that somebody would bring them the food while they recline, and, and the Talmud does talk about it again by, mostly by implication. Talk, actually, the mission talks about they would bring him, meaning that, that, that there's an understanding that there are kind of, uh, waiters or at attendants who are bringing the wine, bringing the food.
So there's some sense that you're supposed to structure, you know, your experience is kind of really supposed to be one of, of great freedom slash you know, almost even, uh, what's the word? Like, like, um, you know, really
BENAY LAPPE: privilege or power.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, like, like, like, like privilege. Like almost a show, a show of privilege.
It's even if you're poor, right? And it says like, even the poorest person should be brought four cups of wine. Like there's some sense that you're really like, we think about that. You're supposed to act out. Our slavery, like we're supposed to reenact our, our experience as slaves. And I think that's potentially true, but you're just as much, and maybe even more so in the, in the mishna and the gamara, the point is to act out our liberation.
Mm-hmm. And so even if you're a poor person or maybe even a Jewish slave, I'm not sure who is, uh, actually not living a very good life in, in a lot of ways. Like, you're supposed to act that night as if, as if you are. Um, so stuff like that. But the, those are just little, little hints. It's really not spelled out.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. I really appreciate you naming that. I don't think it was ever that clear to me. 'cause in certain moments it feels clear that we're trying to reenact the experience of slavery. And at other times I feel really clear, oh, this is about acting like free people. But I don't think I've ever thought of them at the same time and realize, oh, that you're supposed to do both.
Mm-hmm. What's going on there? It's funny. But anyway, I appreciate you putting them in my head at the same time.
DAN LIBENSON: No, and, and the whole thing, it's like, um, I mean, one of the questions that arises I think from really studying the Talmud about Pesach is like, when did the Seder, as we know it arise? And I would say that my conclusion from having studied it is it, it was after the, the ceiling of the Talmud, meaning after the year 600 or so.
So, so for example, you know, when people talk about how Jesus' Last Supper was a Passover Seder, that's not only wrong, it's, it's 600 years wrong. You know, it's, it's, it's a, um, you know, it's, it's a, um, uh, anachronism, right? And, um, by the way, I, I, well, uh, we'll get to other anachronisms later, but, um, the, the, so.
So there's something, so the idea is basically this, that there is, there's a ceremony described in the Torah of the Pascal Lamb. Which was basically a kind of sacrifice. There are two kinds of sacrifices, right? In the, in the Torah. I mean, there are more than two, but there's some that you sacrifice and it's basically for God, and the priest can eat it.
And then there's other sacrifices that it's not quite right to call it a sacrifice because it's more like an offering, or that's not even quite right either. But you're bringing this, this, uh, animal to the temple, but you are, you're eating it. So it's basically like a deli, you know? I mean, it's like the, the priest in this case are kind of like the kosher slaughterers more or less.
Uh, it's a little more complicated than that, but, um, and the Passover sacrifice is really that kind of sacrifice. So you're bringing this lamb or she, or goat for you to eat. Uh, but you, you bring it to Jerusalem and there's kind of a ceremony that takes place. There's a slaughtering ceremony and there's, and there's all kinds of things that you do with the blood, the priests do with the blood.
And, but at the end of the day, you, you broil it. It has to be broiled. And you, um. Then you eat it, your family eats it, and you can kind of, it's, it's a whole thing that you can't leave any over for the next day. It has to be burnt. Any of leftovers from the next day and a and a and a goat or a sheep would be too much for one family to eat a whole goat in one night.
So you would kind of go in, go in on it with another family or another couple of families, by the way, like, so in a certain sense, that idea that we have guests over to the Seder is like the most ancient, the Mo. And I, I, I don't, I don't mean it's ancient. I mean, it's the most ancient practice that we have of Passover for the simple reason that it was too much food for one family to have a goat, you know?
And so the idea is that we would basically have a barbecue at the temple, and I think a barbecue, it's like a 4th of July barbecue. Because, because Passover was the day of, uh. Sort of liberation, like basically Independence Day of, of the ancient Hebrews, right? And so it's basically like we have a 4th of July barbecue.
They had a 4th of July barbecue, and they would all, you know, gather. Again, we don't have this really happened in this way, but the, in, at least in the story, they would all gather at the temple and have this huge barbecue and with another family. And then there's some implication in the mishna, right, that there was some additional ceremony beyond just the eating of this barbecued lamb, right?
And, and it involves four cups of wine and it involves a few other. Garnishes, and it's not at all clear that these are anything other than garnishes. Like, it's not clear that there's all kinds of like symbols. I mean, there's some, but you know, it might just be that it tastes better to have broiled lamb with lettuce, you know?
Right. I mean, like, you know, or, or it's the beginning of the harvest, so there's lettuce, you know, is that maybe that's why we have the bitter herb, you know, because it's Right. So, so it's not at all clear. So, but, but anything that we think of as a Seder where there's like a, a specific order and a specific text, and certainly a book is completely absent from the, the Talmud.
And, and I actually wanna, uh, get to that in a little while to show a mistranslation that comes from a assumption. I'll give the credit of the doubt, the benefit of the doubt to the translator that he actually believes, other than what I just said. But it's certainly a, in my opinion, a mistranslation that completely changes your sense of what the Talmud is saying.
And, and it's wrong. It's not what Theum would say.
BENAY LAPPE: Yep. That's very exciting. I'm excited to get there.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So, um, so that's the basic, I mean, that's the basics of the mishna. We, we, we'll get, I think if we have time, we'll get into some of the mishna, uh, in a little while. But, uh, let's take a look at this one passage from the Gamara that, uh, I came across.
And it's a couple of things really struck me about it. One is that it refers back to the benzo Morere, which we spent a lot of time on recently, the stubborn, uh, wayward and rebellious sun. And, uh, it's actually, it's actually what we talk about all the time. 'cause what's interesting about it in part is the, the, um, the, the process of of, of, uh, you know, of thinking of.
The, the, uh, what do we call it? The, um, you know, process of, of the logical manipulation, you know, that they use. So that, so that is what we like to talk about. And also some, some of the substance that's, that's going on here. Uh, and, um, so, so here's where, so again, I, I wanna, I, I, I wanna at least as a starting point say that I think it's important and correct to understand that this is not actually a Seder that's being discussed here.
It's that meal at the, that barbecue at the temple is, is what's being referred to here. Um, and it, it's, this is, uh, Saim one, 16 B, uh, there's some stuff to start with here. I'm not gonna start there, but there's a little bit of, of context where they are talking about. Lifting up, you know, there is a part in the haha that we have today where they lift, where we lift up and we say, you know, Robin Gole says that whoever hasn't said these three things hasn't done what they have to do.
And the pe the PE and ro and you hold them up and you talk about them a little bit. And, uh, so that's the context here. They're, they're talking a little bit about that part and, um, and they, they, by the way, they say that, um, after the destruction of the temple, you should actually only hold up the Matza and the Maro and not hold up your meat from the, from the, the pa the say the Passover meal that we're having.
Because, um, because, uh, you know, it, it's not the Passover lamb because the temple's been destroyed. So we don't want anyone to be confused. So, so the, the meat, you actually don't hold up. And so they, so anyway, this is the context and then they, then there's this question, rev, aha. Barko said a blind person is exempt from what is translated here, reciting the ha.
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. So what I wanna say is a couple of things, and one is that. Um, this reciting, the haha here is to look in the, in the Hebrew or the Aramaic. It says here, Ammar Barko. So that's a blind person. Ur is exempt me. Lamar Hagada from saying haha. Now, elsewhere here, there's an Aramaic version, which is down here, and it says DeMar Agata.
So the fact that the same, that this concept here, you see, uh, oer, and here you see de Amar that we hear is the same to say, uh, and, and here. Ha ha what hear in Hebrew ha gata is translated. You know, or they're talking about the same concept in Aramaic as Agata, right? And we know that in Aramaic, agata means stories, right?
Basically, so, so Hagada, so, so here's the, the first thing that, so this is the first thing that I wanna talk about, is that I think that recite the haha is a complete mistranslation of Lamar Hagada or de Amar Agata. Because, because, um, it, it, it, and I was thinking that maybe a good analogy is that there's some, there was something before the United States was founded and we just talked to Richard Primus about, you know, constitutional law before the United States was founded, Britain had something called a Cons, the Constitution of the British Constitution.
But the British Constitution was not a document. There is no document there. To this day, there is no document called the British Constitution. But British Courts talked about, and I imagine still talk about the British constitution all the time because. What you have to think about is, what does the word constitution mean?
It means the way our government is constituted. So the British constitution means the agreements in our society about how government should be constituted. That's what the British Constitution is. So when they were, when you talk about the British Constitution, you say, like our understanding of like, the queen does this and the Parliament does this, and the House of Lords says that, and you know, we, we gotta make sure that we're living up to the British constitution, meaning our understandings of how.
Is supposed to work. When America was founded, they wanted to have an American constitution, which was the same, basically an oral tradition. Uh, this is how, this is how America's gonna work, but sort
BENAY LAPPE: of clarity about how this thing works.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, but Amer originally, I'm just saying they just, they, I mean a con, every country had a constitution.
It was like, this is how, this is how government is constituted, right. Uhhuh. But at a certain point they, they wrote it down, you know, and, and this is where, uh, oral Torah and written Torah is, is, there's an interesting piece of this year because, because in America, we, 'cause in England it's an oral tradition, right?
And in America, it, at least in part. Became a written text. And so the US Constitution is understood to be a document. When we say the US Constitution, we don't mean this larger oral tradition of how America's supposed to work, although, and I think some of this comes out in our conversation with Richard, that there is still vestiges of that.
There's some sense that it, that there is more to it than the text. Right? But when we talk about the US Constitution, we're, we're almost always talking about a document. Whereas when we're talking about the, the British Constitution, we're talking about the exact opposite, not a document. Now, if you were to read a British court case from, uh, you know, from, from after 7 17 93, I think is when the US Constitution, the, it would say something about the constitution.
If you were like translating it to another, another language and you, you translated it with a word that in that other language meant a text, you would have mistranslated it and you would've completely missed the whole point of what they're talking about. And so, what I am trying to say here is that now we have a text called The Ha, that text was only the first version.
And I, I should have read Vanessa Oak's wonderful biography of the Ha, um, which is, which you can read. And I, I'm not sure exactly when we think is the first book ever called The Ha that we have. I mean, obviously we don't have the original, but when do we think it happened? But it was long. It was, it was after this.
Uh, and so here in the Talmud, when they say Hagada, they don't mean a book. And so, so to so, so to now, you know, 1,015 hundred years later when we do have a book called The Hagada, if you translate the Talmud. As when it says OER hagada as recites the haah, which is a legitimate way to translate those words in like modern Hebrew.
It's not what it means. And it's a complete misinforming of people including me. And whenever I have read the, the, the mission in translation before the Talmud in translation, before, it didn't really dawn on me that it wasn't talking about a Seder and it wasn't talking about a Hagar because the words are actually there.
And, but they're mistranslated because they're anachronistically translated out of context.
BENAY LAPPE: Amazing. And a better translation, both for the context, and I would propose for today would be, I would suggest to tell the story.
DAN LIBENSON: To tell the story. And
BENAY LAPPE: Lamar I got it. That literally mean, literally means to tell the story.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. And, and,
BENAY LAPPE: and it just, it just happens that the, the book that we've made out of that story is called The Story. Right. But yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. That, that's it. The, the ha Hagada means like the, the book is. It's called The Story. And you know, I mean, we have all kinds of things like, right. I, people don't necessarily, like in Hollywood, in, in a TV show, there's a book that you call the Bible, which is like this book, like nobody ever sees it.
It's the book that tells all the characters back stories and all kinds of stuff that the writers need to know. So that, 'cause different writers are writing different episodes of the show, so they all have to make sure that they're consistent. So there's just, there's this book that they have in common that they make sure to check against that book so that they're not saying, doing something in an episode that's gonna then throw off other episodes.
'cause it's inconsistent. That's called the Bible. But that's not the Bible. That's not the Bible. Like, that's a different, and it's called the Bible, you know, like, right. I mean, so, so now, now in the, in the Mishna, by the way, I mean we, we, um, have proof of this like the, um, uh, the, the here. So just, whoops. Oh, sorry.
I just, uh. Got a little safaria, um, press the button and something weird happened. So hold on. So, um, okay. So if we just look in the mishna in, um, chap in, uh, Mishna five, it, this is, you know, part five, this is chapter 10 of the mishna, the part about the quote Seder, uh, and it's part five. Um, and Robin Glia would say, this is the part that we're talking about here in the Gamara.
Anyone who did not say these three matters on Passover is not fulfilled. His obligation, the Pascal lamb, mata, and bitter herbs. And, um, and then, um, it says, uh, sorry, it says somewhere. It says somewhere. And, and that's what they call, and that's what we call Hagada. Um, sorry. Now I'm Miss, I'm missing it, but, um, a, a anyway, so, um, lemme just.
I may, I may be ahead of myself. There's somewhere, somewhere in here. It, it is that it has that, that basically hagada is defined as this very limited number of things that you say, not the hagada. Um, and, and so, so anyway, that, that, so that, that's one piece that, so anywhere you see in the Talmud in translation, somebody saying, then the leader would recite the hara.
That's not what it says. It's, it's pro, it should, it should be translated as then the leader or, uh, tells the story or, or says the story. Um, so, okay.
BENAY LAPPE: And, and by the way, I think that that insight is very liberating for how we do our Seder, right? Because. Reciting the hara. Even if you jump from here to there, it, it doesn't really work all that well.
It works much better to actually be in the store telling the story, do a, you know, a chain storytelling and really have it be a alive and a lot of us feel, I remember when I was a kid, I'm sure we, a lot of us remember that experience of having, for me it was our Uncle Dave. We had to read every single word and it was a Yiddish okay.
Every single word. And none of us understood what he was saying, but Okay. Hebrew or Yiddish, but that's not at all what the Seder is supposed to be at. Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Right? And, and, and so, you know, not that, not that, uh. If a tradition has been around for, let's say 1000 years rather than 2000, that's not to say that that's not important, but don't say that it's been around for 2000.
You know, like in other words, and if you, if you think that you're violating some tradition or some law from Mount Sinai, at least rest assured, you know, 3000 years ago, right? At least rest assured that it's not, you know, it doesn't say that anywhere that you're supposed to read out of a book called The Ha and any translation that suggests that, it does say that is an anachronistic translation because we've called the name of the book the story.
Right. You know, that's, that's what it's all about. And, um, and, and by the way, anybody who's like deciding on names for books for the future, you know, might wanna take that into account. You know, sometimes you might wanna do that intentionally, right? Like, like you talk about. That after the Torah, you know, after the, the destruction of the temple, the rabbis called it Torah.
Right. You know, like oral Torah. Right. But good
BENAY LAPPE: marketing.
DAN LIBENSON: So, but, but you know, so you can do that for, for, uh, for intentionally or unintentionally, but in this case, I actually think it was unintentional. Uh, so, so, um, uh, the other thing is that, um. I always like to say too, that like, it cannot be, you know, your uncle's tradition.
It cannot, that cannot be the tradition. Not for a thousand years, certainly not 2000 or 3000, but not even a thousand. Why? For the simple reason that a Jews were illiterate, and b, books were, didn't exist until the printing press in in large numbers. And three most, uh, Jews were too poor to afford a single book in their home, much less a book for everybody at the table.
So there's absolutely no way that this could be the tradition until like the last century or so.
BENAY LAPPE: Maxwell House.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Maxwell House, uh, made, uh, free hagas for everybody and that was, that changed the practice very quickly.
BENAY LAPPE: Did, did you read the, I can't remember where this article appeared, but this year I read an article, I, I apologize, I'm not crediting.
It might have been tablets. I don't remember where. Uh, they published the history of the Maxwell House. Haha. And it named the Reason why Maxwell House came out with a ha.
DAN LIBENSON: You know what? 'cause people thought coffee wasn't kosher feso, right?
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. That's
DAN LIBENSON: right. Right. Um, yeah, because it's a bean and Right.
Like, people thought it was like a legume,
BENAY LAPPE: right. And
DAN LIBENSON: they were like, no, no, it's not a legume. And, and the way that we'll Yeah. Sell it is to, is to give away these hagas. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, amazing. Right? Amazing. How like a marketing, well, a marketing choice, which is actually based on a misunderstanding of Jewish law by the Jews that, that the non-Jewish, I assume Maxwell House people knew and were alarmed by because they would sell less, you know?
And, and so in trying to correct the Jews misunderstanding of Jewish law, they end up accidentally changing the entire way that we observe Passover, the Passover Seder, in a way that actually, in my opinion, makes the Seder worse. You know, an undercut and makes it boring and, and not what it's supposed to be.
So,
BENAY LAPPE: but, but what it did was it made people feel like they know what to do. I can, I can, I've got directions, Uhhuh, and this is a thing that I'm not going to synagogue. When I was a kid, I didn't even know you went to Shoul on Pesach. Uhhuh.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: We never went to Shoul on Pesach. Now, uh uh, some people did, right.
But for us, it was a thing you did at home, right? And there was no rabbi in charge. So to have a book that told you what to do was really helpful because oh my God, we've gotta do this ourselves.
DAN LIBENSON: Right?
BENAY LAPPE: So it was both a success and a failure in its success, right?
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating, right? Because, uh, like I always sort of point this out to people when they have doubts about this whole story and I say, look, what sense does it make that we say the 10 plagues?
And then the very next thing in the Hara is that Rabbi, I forget, yo Hannan, some rabbi had a. Monic for the plagues. It's like, why do we need a MA mnemonic? We just said it like, what is the point of this? And, and like the point of it, I think, is that there was one haha book in the synagogue. People would, you know, check it out before Pesach take a look at it.
And they would have to remember the 10 plagues. And to this day, I can't remember the order of the 10 plagues. So the mnemonic was the way that without a haah, without a book, you would be able to remember the order of the 10 plagues when it was time to, you know, pour out your wine to be sorry about the Egyptians, you know, um,
BENAY LAPPE: that, that idea that you, after you've done it, recite the order of things, which was intended for you to remember what to recite in the first place.
Always reminds me of this story that, that my guru used to tell when I was a, a, a very devout Buddhist meditator. And he used to say it. Th this ex, this practice of meditation isn't a right. It's not a ritual. People often take rights and rituals and they kind of miss the point. It would be like if your doctor wrote you a prescription, if you were sick, and then instead of taking the medicine, you take the prescription and you put it on your alter, you bow down, oh, you recite the prescription.
Oh, wonderful doctor, wonderful doctor. And you keep reciting the prescription. You're not gonna get better. You have to actually take it, but misunderstanding directions for the thing
DAN LIBENSON: right.
BENAY LAPPE: Is pretty much what we've done.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and I, I mean, I've said this before too, that, that like my experience, like my conclusion about how we run the Seder today, it's as if you know our.
Great grandparents, you know, are this, this wonderful recipe was passed down, you know, from generation to generation of this like wonderful, delicious cake. And, and, and, but, but now we've have a ceremony where we sit around the table and read the cookbook, you know, read the recipe as opposed to make the cake.
Like that was never the point. The point was to eat the wonderful cake that we was passed on from generation to generation. But at some point that got stuck and instead we just read the, the cookbook. So, so anyway, the, the, so, so, you know, by the way, if you read this correctly translated and you say the, the pers can, the person should tell the story.
That is a, that is a completely different concept from recite the ha. And if you recite the haha, but the story doesn't really come out, then you actually have not done what the Talmud is saying you should do, which is to tell the story. So I, I, it's not only that I think that many of us are sort of doing the Seder.
Wrong or poorly, I would say that we're actually doing it like the opposite of what we're supposed to do, which is actually get the story told and taken in. So when the mission talks about, you know, then, then the child would ask these questions, or if the child, actually, what the mission says is if the child should ask questions, if the child is not able to ask questions on their own, then here are the questions that you Yeah,
BENAY LAPPE: let's take a look at that text.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. Alright. So, um,
BENAY LAPPE: because this, I, I love this text and it struck me as I'm learning some other texts differently this year than ever before.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: And I wanna tell you what's coming up for me.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: So this,
DAN LIBENSON: we're really jumping around this episode. That's fine. Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So we're in the mission and now we're, we're going back 400 years to this first version of the New Way to Do Jewish After the Destruction.
And, uh, we're in chapter 10, Mishna four. Okay. Here we're right. Okay. I'll let you read it and I'll tell you,
DAN LIBENSON: I'll tell you where. So I think that you wanna start, um, uh,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah. According to, yeah, but right there at the bottom. Mm-hmm. There. And according to the intelligence.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. And according to the intelligence and ability of the son, his father teaches him about the exodus.
When teaching a son about the exodus, he begins, oh, oh,
BENAY LAPPE: I apo I apologize. That wasn't the part
DAN LIBENSON: I had in mind. You wanna, you wanna start over here? I think, um, that, oh
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, yeah, you're right. Right.
DAN LIBENSON: So let's start at the beginning, actually At the be beginning.
BENAY LAPPE: Good. Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: The attendance for the second cup, for the leader of the Seder, again, keep in mind the leader of the Seder here is not in bold.
That means it's not actually in the text. So it's part of this mistranslation, right? We're not talking about a Seder. It's not, it's not at all clear that we're talking about a Seder. Certainly not as we understand it. So what the mish actually says is they poured the second cup, and here the son asks its father.
So, so the son asks questions to his father,
BENAY LAPPE: right? Okay. So let's put a sticky on the fact that they don't seem to be that concerned about the daughters. Okay. And, and nor am I a hundred percent certain that when it says Ben here, it really means male, uh, identified children and not child, right? The, the tradition plays with whether Ben, which typically refers to masculine child, really refers to masculine child here or here or here, or just child generally, because it has to use some gender when it refers to a child.
This could mean child, okay? Let's just say child. Okay?
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So I'll read it as child, but I, I just wanna really call our attention here to the mistranslation again because it says that. If the child, because here's, let me read it as it's translated and then let me read it as it really is. Mm-hmm. Because it says that right.
The, they poured the second cup for, they poured the second cup, and here the child asks the father. And if the child does not have the intelligence, if the child does not have the intelligence, his father teaches him. So the point, the, the, the, the Hebrew says that a certain point in the Seder comes and here, essentially the implication is the father says, say kids, you got any questions?
Yes. And if the kids don't have any questions, the father teaches him. Now in the translation, it, it, it really completely changes our understanding of it. 'cause in the translation it says, the attendance poured the second cup for the leader of the Seder. Here the son asks his father the questions about differences between Passover and a regular night.
It doesn't say that in the original, just as the, the kid asks questions. Right. And then, and if the son does not have the attend intelligence to ask the questions on his own, to ask questions on his own, his father teaches him the questions, the mishna lists the questions that doesn't say that it. Right.
And so, so the, the understanding from the mishna, I think properly understood, properly translated is here comes the point in the Seder where the child can ask whatever questions the child wants. If the child doesn't have any questions, then the father still should teach 'em something, should teach them something.
And here's our suggestion about what the father should teach at that point. Yes. But if the son has different questions, you should address those questions, not these questions.
BENAY LAPPE: Absolutely. And I, I even think it's bigger than, than you've portrayed. It's if the child doesn't ask questions, the father not.
Teaches him to ask these questions. The father teaches him to ask questions, period. I think that's the point. And these are some of the questions as examples that the child might ask, but I think the, the curriculum here is not what are the answers to these questions. The curriculum is how do you ask a question?
How do you, is is just knowing to ask why. Mm-hmm. And this year, um, it pinged for me that this curriculum of teaching your child to ask why is precisely the beginning of the lifelong curriculum to develop Sava. Because elsewhere in the Talmud, the definition of to have savara is to ask why. It's to take your learning.
As your teacher taught it to you, as his teacher taught it to him, back when only guys taught things, and to take the received tradition that you've now memorized and to ask what is the essence of the reasons underneath this thing? That's what is, and for the first time it occurred to me that that's what the father's agenda really is to, to begin to teach the child to develop Sava.
It's to see, experience the world and go, what's that about? Why is that? Because ultimately you want people to have that orientation to everything that happened so that they can evaluate it and then go, isn't this thing actually serving the purpose for which it was intended? If so, fantastic, now I really understand what's going on here, or does it not?
And it's my job to fix it. So this is the beginning of the Savara curriculum. The child, the, the father teaching the child to ask, why, why are we doing this? What's really this about?
DAN LIBENSON: Hmm. Well, you know that, that's really fascinating that you say that because, right, because one of the real questions that I always have about the Seder is there's no, the answers to these questions really aren't given.
I mean, like, it's very poor. I was like, you know, we asked these four questions and then there's a little bit, you know, we were slaves in Egypt, but it's like not very good answers. You know, like meaning in the ha in the ha that we, the printed ha and. 1, 1, 1. My, my take on it has always been like, again, like those aren't the answers.
Like, you're, you're not supposed, those are the answers. If you don't know the answers, you know, you just wanna say something. But like, if you really wanna answer those questions, like have a conversation at that point. But what you're saying, I think is even, even a step beyond, which is even, which is like, the questions are the point.
You know? That's
BENAY LAPPE: right. That's right. That's it.
DAN LIBENSON: Right? That, that it's, it's, it's not about answering the questions. It's about asking the questions.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. And, and in fact, answering, you know, I forget who it was that said that it's an old story. I think it's a co tic story that no answer is as good as a good question.
Mm-hmm. The, the whole point is the question and to answer them is actually to misunderstand what the project is here.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. So, and so, first thing that I wanna just, again, re restate about the translation here, this is the Safaria translation. So if you go in Safaria for Mishna, chapter 10 of Saim, you're, you're gonna see this.
Where it says here, not in bold, the Mishna list, the questions that's not in the text. You know, like it's not, it's not what it, that's not what's going on here. That, that, what's going on here is a few examples are given of questions that that father, and the point is, is that the father, it says his father teaches him, why is this night different from all other nights?
So in other words, it's saying the father teaches, and here's how the father teaches by asking questions. So the father is not teaching him. The answers to the questions. Like you say, the father is teaching him to ask questions. The father is teaching him how to, that the question asking is, is, is really what it's all about?
Something like that. Right? And, and so then the questions, the questions that, that are, that are listed here, again, keep in mind by the way, these are only questions for the son who does not have the intelligence to ask his own questions. Or the child who doesn't have their que intelligence ask their own questions.
If you, if the child has the intelligence to ask their own questions, tear it up, you tear up the, that page outta the ha you don't need it.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. That's right. It, you shouldn't recite the prescription.
DAN LIBENSON: Right?
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And the gemara gives a whole bunch of other examples of things you can do to make, uh, to, to prompt questions.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: It it to, to change up the, like what's happening as different from usual so that it would naturally prompt questions. It's not like these questions.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and, and like Maimonides picks up on that too. I think Robbie Akiva and the Kamara talks about like, they would put like nuts and dates and stuff on the table.
Uh, and I think they would even like, um, they would take out the table at a certain point and they would kind of just do surprising things to try to get the kids to ask. The ideal situation is that a kid is so surprised that they ask their questions on their own. So, so your first step is to try to keep surprising the kids so that they ask their own questions?
Only if the kid is so, you know, dense that they never, nothing you can, nothing you can do, or you're so dense like you Yeah, I think
BENAY LAPPE: it's more that,
DAN LIBENSON: right, right. Like you, you can't figure out how to do anything so crazy enough to that the kids ask their own questions only then you sort of like give up and say, okay, let's turn to page, you know, 46.
BENAY LAPPE: Anything odd going on here? What, what's, what do you think? Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. So, you know, and, and by the way, like, just, so again, to reinforce this idea that it's not a prescriptive text right here, the questions are listed. Okay. We recognize some of them. Why is this night different from all other nights? Check all the nights we eat.
Leave and bread and matza. And this night only Matza. Yeah. We know that one. On all other nights we eat vegetables. On this night we eat bitter herbs. Uh, and uh, you know, and all the nights we eat roasted stew or cooked meats. But on this night the meat is only roasted. What? What? We didn't know that one. Uh, right.
And, and that was because of a certain point. They stopped eating roasted meat on Passover because of this concern that they didn't want people to get the wrong idea that we were still doing a version of the roasted pascal lamb. So it almost became forbidden to have. Like it used to be required to have roasted meat on Passover and it became functionally forbidden to have roasted meat on Passover or ish, I don't know if it's actually forbidden, but like, it was not, it was not at least meant to be emphasized because of this concern that people might think that we are still doing a sacrifice not at the temple, which is like one of the biggest no-nos of, of Judaism or at least a certain era of Judaism.
And, um, so we can't have that question anymore because we don't do that thing anymore. So they're like, okay, so we'll swap that one out for why do we recline? But you know, like that, that's kind of like if, if there was something that we, if we wanted to change things up again now, we would just change the four questions.
And anyway, the four questions aren't even meant to be read only by the stupidest of people, you know. So something has gone completely haywire.
BENAY LAPPE: Yes, yes. It's
DAN LIBENSON: time for, lemme just say, lemme just say this another way just to reinforce it. 'cause I think it's a, it's a really important point and I'm sorry if I'm like being a little insulting here.
But the way that we are conducting the Seder today is the, is the method of the Seder that was meant for the stupidest of people. We should be ashamed of ourselves. Like this is terrible. Like, because we're not the stupidest of people, we're actually the most educated, empowered Jews that have ever lived in the history of Judaism.
We have the most access to Jewish knowledge of any Jew that has ever been existed in Judaism. And I'm not talking about rabbis here. I'm talking about your average person with Google. So the idea that we're conducting the Seder in the style of the son who is not able to generate questions of his own is insanity
BENAY LAPPE: and
DAN LIBENSON: disappointing.
BENAY LAPPE: I hate to bag on rabbis, but I, I, I, I think we really need to ask the question why have our teachers, our rabbis not done a better job of helping us actually do this thing?
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: I think it's a good question.
DAN LIBENSON: A good question. Um,
BENAY LAPPE: it's a good question.
DAN LIBENSON: I just wanna, I just wanna go quickly back to the, uh, to the first text that we were doing, just to, just to show a little bit of the, the content of it.
'cause I, 'cause it does refer to this Spencer, we are not gonna have a lot of time to go into the, the details, but I think it's a little bit interesting, uh, a couple other elements here. So. So the real question is, Akha Barko said a blind person is exempt from telling the story. By the way, if it was really reciting the hagada, then we might say, oh, well, like a blind person exempt.
'cause they can't, you know, they didn't have braille in those days, and so they, how would they really read the book? That's not what it's about at all. Right? So it's saying that a blind person, there's a question of whether a blind person can basically be the person trusted to leave the story. And that's because they had all kinds of prejudices against blind people in those days.
Right?
BENAY LAPPE: Let's, let's name the ableism profound
DAN LIBENSON: total ableism, but it's, it's total ableism. Because they actually thought that there was, there was some, there, there was some sort of like deep seated concern that a blind person, it wasn't that they couldn't see or that they may not have read enough books. It was that there's something kind of, uh, less than, and it's terrible, you know?
But that's what's going on here. Uh, and um, they, and they, and they say that the, the reason why, um, we think that a blind person can't read the Hagar is because, uh. The, the, the, the, the, uh, line from Exodus that says that basically you should tell the story, it says, and you shall tell your son in that day saying, it is because of this, which the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt.
I think that's the answer that's given to the wise child in the Seder that we have today. Uh, we're not gonna have time for that, but that's a whole nother thing. Like you don't have to read it, you know? Okay. Um, and it's written there in a different place in the Torah Deuteronomy, and this is, this is the Ura mo waver and rebellious son.
This son of ours is wavered and rebellious. He does not listen to our voice. He is a glutton and drunkard. This son of ours. So now they're doing what's called shava a. They're saying that the word this, uh, ze is in, um, is in these two places. And there's, we've, we've studied it. We looked at it in a different, the different issue, a different part of the wayward and rebellious sun where they used Shava.
And it's a method of interpretation where they say, because it says this word here in this verse, and it says the same word in another verse, we can draw a connection between those verses, even though they're in completely different subjects. So since we know in the sub and rebellious sun that we interpreted this son of ours, that that can't means that the parents can't be blind because they wouldn't be able to point to the sun.
We talked about that at length. That and that, and that's what it means. We know that's what it means. 'cause we had that whole series on the benzo mo. That means that we can do xera sha now and say, because this meant there that a blind person couldn't do it here. It also must mean that a blind person can't do it.
So, so in a way, and by, and we had this whole long conversation about what they were doing over there with the benzo mo. That they were doing all kinds of like winks and all kinds of like interpretive moves and everything because they were motivated to get rid of this Ben Air Mora concept. 'cause they didn't want parents s donning their children.
But, you know, oops. Like the butterfly effect or law of unintended consequences, all of that is now potentially making it so that a blind person can't, you know, tell the story at the Seder and they're like, oops. We didn't want that to, like, we were just trying to get rid of benzo. We weren't trying to like, do anything about the Seder.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So I, I've never learned this text. I'm learning it for the first time with you right now. Mm-hmm. So here's what's coming up for me. What if, since we. We know the rabbis wanted the reader to know exactly what they were doing. Uhhuh meaning they wanted the reader to know just how unfounded their claim was in the text.
What if what they're doing here in borrowing this, um, exclusion of a blind person over in Ura moat over here to the reciting the story is that there was some perception that a blind person couldn't or shouldn't uhhuh, and they were actually bringing out or trying to bring out just how unfounded uhhuh such a prejudice is Uhhuh by saying, yeah, that's just as forbidden as the parent who's blind is from stoning their child.
IE not I, I'm not sure.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. So that, so I like that. But so, so, um, but, so anyway, they, they, but what's interesting is that they do this ze, shava, uh, and they say, well, and, and that's why a blind person can't, uh, and, and they, and they kind of accept it. I mean, they kind of say, well, I mean it's, it's a, it's a move.
They, they could have undone it in different ways. There's all kinds of ways to, to undo azera, Shava that move. You can say it's not really from Sinai in all kinds of ways, but they don't really do that. And they say, is that so? But didn't Remar say, I asked the sages from the school of Saf who, who was blind Ravie was blind.
Who recited that ha got in or who told the story in the house of raaf? They said to him, RAAF recited it. So apparently a blind person can say it. 'cause RAAF did and he was blind. And Maray Mar said, and who, who told the story in the house of Raf Shehe, he was also blind. Uh, well, they say Raf Shehe, uh, told this story.
So they was like, proof. Well, look, we have this. They chavan you have to take that seriously. But on the other hand, we have these two great rabbis who, and we, and they recited the story in their own home. So I guess a blind person can, so how do we, how do we square this? And um, and what they end up doing is they say the gamara answers, uh, those sage, Ravi and s Shehe maintain that nowadays the.
Things that we call the hagada, which are really eating the eating the foods, the matza and the, and the bitter herb and the, uh, and I guess not no longer the meat, but the matza and the bitter herb that they only apply for, for, by rabbinic law. Um, because of the, um, you know, because so, so what they're sort of doing, as I understand what they're saying here is that the whole of Pesach as we observe it today, is a rabbinic invention because the whole of Pesach in the Torah has to do with the eating of the Pascal Lamb at the temple.
So once the temple is destroyed, in the same way that we no longer bring the Shavuot offering, you know, the, the first fruits offering on Shavuot, we no longer do the, the Pascal Lamb at the temple because the temple is gone. Therefore, Passover as we knew it is functionally over. So now any things that we do today, like we used to do back then, which are eating matza and bitter herbs.
That's just, it's not the same Passover. It's a new, it's a new invention. It's like, it's like that Passover, you know, it's a, it's a 2.0, but, but don't, but, but, but therefore, don't worry about anything in the Torah that would suggest that a blind person can't do the ritual. It's not the same ritual. So, so in other words, I, I understand them to be saying.
Yeah, it's true that back in the day of the temple, which is, you know, in parentheses never really coming back so we don't have to worry about it. Yeah. It was true that back then a blind person couldn't be the one to tell the story. We know that from this ze shava, but don't worry about it because, um, that this is not the same ritual.
So what I'm saying is I think what they're doing is even more radical than the thing that you were saying, right? Because like the, because one thing is that they're saying, oh, just like we didn't really mean it back about Ben. We don't really mean it here. So wink, wink, wink, wink, wink, you know? But here they're actually doing something, even a step more radical, which is they're saying, we accept the wink and the other wink.
So yeah, it actually is the case that a blind person can't do this. But this is not that, and it's actually more like this. The other text that we studied about the, the, the divorce, the conditional divorce, right? Where they're saying anybody who gets married now is getting married rabbinically, right under our o so we can overturn the Torahs rules about, uh, onus, right?
And so here anyone who's observing Passover is observing the Rabbinic Passover. So we don't have to follow any of the Torahs rules about Passover, which I think is extremely radical.
BENAY LAPPE: I love that. I love the whole framing of this. Isn't that, and because this isn't that, you don't have to be bound by what that was bound by.
Just that framing, I think ought to be part of what we bring to every question of how we should be doing Jewish. This isn't that anymore. Yeah. There are a hundred different ways why this isn't that and why this shouldn't be that and why that was problematic and okay, what should this be without the, the constraint of it has to be that
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: For it to be real or authentic or even Jewish.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And, and, um, and so really, you know, again, if we go back to this, are we, where are we in another period of, after the temple is destroyed, are we in a new, and if we are, then what they're teaching us here is how to, how to do the 3.0 on their own thing. So if we wanna do.
If there, if we find problematics in the rabbinic structure of Passover, uh, and we feel the need to change those for various reasons, we can, and we actually should take as many of the components as we can from the Rabbinic Passover. Just as they took the Matza and the Maro from the Pascal Lamb ceremony of the temple.
We should kind of rescue as many components as they're still relevant and we can, and then we put them in a, in a new way, but we should also acknowledge that it is a new way and that we're not necessarily bound by things like the ableism that they, uh, may have portrayed here. Uh, or maybe they were saying that it really is the biblical people that were ableist or whatever, you know, but like.
But the point is, is if we find problematic things like ableism or I think we talked about maybe, maybe we didn't talk about it. I, I, I think that a really problematic aspect of how people observe Passover now is that they cover their whole kitchen with like aluminum foil, which is bad for the earth. If we wanna say, well, that means that we have to understand the mates in a different way, the left, you know, then we, we can, because it's actually not the same Passover anymore, you know?
Right. For, for various reasons. So we can do moves like that.
BENAY LAPPE: And, and the, the, the aluminum and the, the mir, the, the strict ification is, is, is also not what they did.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: It, it's, it's very clear. I mean, one of my favorite parts of Pesach is actually making matza. And that was the mitzvah. The mitzvah wasn't only eating the mitzvah.
The mitzvah was making your matzah. And not to feel like, oh my God, I could never get it right. I'm gonna mess it up so I better buy this matzah that has a half, you know, and certification. It was, it's very clear, and Rumba makes it very clear. You make your matzah, you know, you do your best. You recite the magic for, and by the way, you do it in the hours right before the Seder.
This is after your house is completely clean of hums, and now you drag out the flower, you make your matza, and then you say the magic formula. That means whatever hameds is here, right? Uh, it's as if it's not here. You actually don't need to have it not be there. You just need to do your best and then say it's not here.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, I know we're over time. I, it's okay. Like, I just, I wanna, I, there's an amazing Israeli podcast called Em. It's about the bible. It's about kind of modern, you know, biblical credit, biblical scholarship for, for the rest of us kind of thing. And this morning they had an episode on Passover that blew my mind.
It talked about how Passover is the time of the barley harvest. The wheat harvest comes after Passover. So at Passover time, the wheat is not yet edible. The, it's actually edible is like freaky. It's like the little, it's edible, but not, it made it, you can't make it into bread. It's not ready yet. So, so, so people would have some wheat leftover from last year maybe.
And really that they didn't have like yeast in those days. The way that they would, um, make bread was like with what we call like a sourdough starter, that kind of thing. And so they would have that sort of stored up. But Passover is the time the barley harvest. And that they would actually make, when they wrote ma, let's talk about matzo matza, they probably meant barley bread and that you were actually forbidden to make bread from wheat and any kind of bread.
The whole idea was that you would throw away your sourdough starter from the year before. You would wait a few weeks until the wheat was, or a week I guess, until the wheat was ready, and you would actually then have to start a new sourdough starter. And that, you know, is coming from like natural yeasts that are, that grow on wheat.
And so it'd actually be a little bit of a miracle that you're se that the fermentation started again. And the whole point of the holiday was to trust the miracle. We're gonna throw away our sourdough from last year. Wow. And we're gonna trust that the miracle's gonna happen again, and we'll be able to get a sourdough for next year.
In the meantime, we don't, we can't make bread in the, in that interim period. So we have to make barley cakes from the, from the, the grain that's actually growing. That's the point. And I say all that because first of all, it's amazing and you should sort of, I mean anyone who listens can listen to Hebrew, should listen to this whole thing.
But we should try to find a way to bring it into English. 'cause it totally makes all the sense in the world. But the other part of it is that the whole idea of matza as we know it, meaning in un risen wheat, is not only like, not what it meant in the Torah, it's actually would've been forbidden. It would've been absolutely forbidden in the time, in the biblical time to eat anything made of weed in any way, shape or form.
And so what every single Jew who thinks they're so Mir, you know, thinks they're so doing the law to its 10th degree is doing, is actually a violation of the concept of matza from the Torah. And that that's just sort of mind blowing. And also says that, of course we, of course we can change it all in the next iteration because the rabbis.
Or even before the rabbis did it for other practical reasons that had been lost to history, but that they were actually doing something that was absolutely forbidden and they turned it into the thing that was most required. And that's how it goes.
BENAY LAPPE: Amazing. Amazing.
DAN LIBENSON: So, uh, so well, so hopefully this is a good, uh, helpful, fun version of, uh, the Oral Talmud and, uh, and next, and we, we wanna wish everybody a happy Passover.
And next, next week we'll come back with, well, it's still gonna be Passover, so maybe, we'll, maybe we, we'll even continue this discussion or we'll, uh, just go back to regular text. But we'll look forward to doing,
BENAY LAPPE: and I've got a, I've got a bunch of new stories to add to the story.
DAN LIBENSON: Yep.
BENAY LAPPE: That we
DAN LIBENSON: tell. Yep. I hope everybody does.
All right. Talk to you next week. Bye.
BENAY LAPPE: Bye.
DAN LIBENSON: Thanks so much for joining our chevruta today! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning with us… and with the Talmud. You can find links to the source sheets for all episodes in the show notes and on our website at oraltalmud.com. Your support helps keep Oral Talmud going. You can find a link on the website to contribute. We’d also love to hear from you! Email us with any questions, comments, or thoughts at hello@oraltalmud.com. Please, share your Oral Talmud with us – we’re so excited to learn from you. The Oral Talmud is a joint project of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva and Judaism Unbound, two organizations that are dedicated to making Jewish texts and ideas more accessible for everyone. We are especially grateful to Sefaria for an incredible platform that makes the Talmud available to everyone. It’s free at sefaria.org. And we are grateful to SVARA-nik Ezra Furman for composing and performing The Oral Talmud’s musical theme. The Oral Talmud is produced by Joey Taylor, with help from Olivia Devorah Tucker, and with financial support from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. Thanks so much for listening–and with that, this has been the Oral Talmud. See ya next time.
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