Halacha:
This year, I want to emphasize the Halachot surrounding the timing of the Seder. The Hagada itself concludes that this is a nighttime Mitzva. It says that the Mitzva of telling over the story has to come when Matza and Maror are sitting before us. That is in the nighttime, so one cannot begin with Kiddush -- the beginning of the four cups -- until it’s nighttime.
But what about finishing? We know the rabbis in the Hagada were talking until dawn. But when the Rambam codifies the implication of that story he says that to expand on the story is “Meshubach,” or praiseworthy. That tells us that it is not obligatory to go on that long. It would be silly to praise people for doing what they are supposed to do. Rather, they are praised for going beyond the obligation.
What is the obligation? The Shulchan Aruch says that the Afikomen needs to be eaten before midnight. That is not midnight as in 12 am. It is the midpoint of the night, which is 1:09 am this year. That approach seems to be connecting it with Pesach offering, which R’ Eliezer ben Azarya says in the Talmud should be eaten by midnight. Since the Afikomen is in place of the Pesach offering, it too should be eaten by the midpoint of the night.
The Rama adds that the deadline of midnight also applies to finishing Hallel. In other words, the whole Hagada (up until the singing of L’Shana Haba’a) should be finished by 1:09 am. His approach seems to be to connect the recitation of Hallel after the meal with the Afikomen. The Pesach offering came with singing Hallel, so the Rama says that the eating of the Afikomen should also connect to the saying of Hallel.
The Vilna Gaon writes that he understands the reasoning of the Rama, which seems to imply that he agrees with that approach. But we know from testimony that the Gaon was not careful to finish Hallel by midnight. Those who have longer Sedarim should try to pay attention to at least the goal of eating Afikomen by the midpoint of the night.
Derasha:
Many of you know Jose Escabar, who cleans the houses of many in this community. He cleans EB and he cleans Chabad as well. He learns a lot about Jewish customs and he compares different peoples’ approaches.
Over the years, he has made some trenchant observations. As a cleaner, he knows the difference between tidying up like what you do on a weekly basis, and the deep clean one does before a house is staged. A deep clean has to make it as though no one has ever lived there. That’s because you want the potential buyers to feel like they will be the first owners. That is a different cleaning altogether. Jose told my wife, “this Passover cleaning is a deep clean.” And he’s right. We are seeking to walk into a new house on Pesach. What I want to talk about goes beyond a deep-clean house, however. I want to talk about what deep-clean consciousness would mean.
For that, I want to invite you to join in some of the intellectual fun I’ve had for the last few months. It’s not just intellectual fun. I think a lot is at stake in some of these issues.
A while back, I mentioned a new book that came out called Strauss, Spinoza and Sinai. I recommend it. The basis of the book is straight-forward. About 60 years ago, Professor Leo Strauss, a prominent political philosopher of the 20th century, put out an English translation of the study of Spinoza he had written in German before the war. As a German Jew, he had fled Europe in 1932 and had adapted to new countries and new languages. When the study was translated into English, he attached an introduction to it in which he recalled his religious and political dilemmas back in the 1930s.
Those dilemmas came about because of a problem he discovered in Spinoza. Upon reflection, he saw that Spinoza’s famous and influential dismissal of the Bible is not based on argument, or even textual analysis. It’s based on mockery, a mockery which makes him unable to take the Torah’s stories seriously. This mockery continues to this day, especially by those who can’t read the text or its commentaries.
This bothered Professor Strauss because he was a very logical man. What, he asked, if the text is indeed serious? What if religious sensibilities, which Spinoza and the Enlightenment dismissed, are also serious? Well, then, Spinoza falls away and what is left? As his good friend Franz Rosensweig had also shown, some kind of encounter with Orthodoxy might be necessary. Parenthetically, I can say that this essay landed in my life with some force almost 40 years ago, as I was contemplating some kind of encounter with Orthodoxy.
A guy I know in Passaic also found this essay when he was in his 20s. He also found it fascinating. But he had a different response. After all, Professor Strauss never became Orthodox in practice and, though he knew a great deal about medieval Jewish philosophy, he was not a Talmid Chacham. This guy I know wondered how Orthodox scholars would respond to this. Eventually there were three editors and they put together a book with about 15 responses. It’s intense but it’s also pretty interesting.
All of this discussion took me back to a book from 20 years ago that collected almost everything Professor Strauss had written or said about Judaism. It ends up that there were many other occasions in which Professor Strauss ruminated on religious choices. Some of them were delivered in talks he gave at the Hillel at the University of Chicago, where he taught for two decades.
In one of his talks, he took on the subject of Why We Remain Jews. Speaking to an audience of mostly non-observant students, he took on a few angles. One of them was an issue we no longer pay much attention to but which was relevant in the 50s, namely, how does one deal with discimination against Jews? These were the days when law firms were ethnic clubs too; there were Jewish firms and WASPy firms. These were the days when many schools had quotas on the number of Jews who could attend. Professor Strauss tells a story about a Church on the West Coast where many Jews converted in order to escape discrimination. After a while, the heads of the church suggested that the Jewish converts make their own group within the church. Sometimes, you can’t even escape by escaping.
Professor Strauss, in this talk, pressed many issues. He often said that he believed one had to be honest in matters of importance. Sometimes, he said, people hold up Tanach or the Talmud as representing the collective wisdom of the Jewish people. They offer loyalty to being Jewish as a sort of pledge allegiance to that collective wisdom. An honest answer to this, he said, would be to point out two things: 1) that it is false, for it’s not how these texts understand themselves, and 2) this point of view is quite less profound than what the tradition actually says. I have nothing against Israeli folk dancing and the speaking of Hebrew, he said. But it is not what has kept us going, or steeled us for sacrifice, or what gave us the Moreh Nevuchim.
This is also a good description of the difference between being part of the Jewish people or being part of Klal Yisrael. In the Seder, we are not telling the story of the Jewish people as if it is a history. We are telling the story of the collective called Klal Yisrael. Sometimes people get these two things -- the Jewish people as a national ethnic group and Klal Yisrael -- mixed up. Klal Yisrael is a quasi-mystical entity. It is the entity that begins with Avraham, Yitzchok and Yaakov and the covenant with Hashem. That entity was forged in servitude in Egypt, hurtled into freedom, and then was crowned with the Torah at Har Sinai. And it is still on that journey, still escaping from Egypt on its way to Eretz Yisrael. This entity still relates to Avraham, Yitzchok and Yaakov as though they are walking through the door.
Another relevant Pesach point came at the end of the talk about remaining Jewish. There had been push back from the crowd, so he had to try a few times to make his point clear. Obviously, much is at stake in the question of belief but “are we really sure who believes and who does not?” The interest in Jewish topics, in Jewish doing, tells us that this question is not simple at all, he said.
I would add that all of this passion about doing Jewish sometimes comes from a belief in tradition that people feel vividly but cannot express. You might ask, “well, if they believe, why does it not just lead to observance?” This is a great question, and it has everything to do with Pesach. The reason belief sometimes does not simply lead to observance is that the belief is often mixed up with a bunch of other things a person cares about. The natural thing to do in many situations is to try to Shlep one’s beliefs into other aspects of one’s world. This comes from hesitation for one reason or another to leave one’s world, so the belief becomes part of a murky mix of beliefs and allegiances.
As we go into Pesach, however, a deep clean means teasing out these different strains in one’s life. Pesach is about essentials. It is about getting down to the essence of things and encountering it without any admixtures. Matza comes from the language of Mitz, which means the essence one uses to make juice. It is essential bread, just flour and water. It is a call for us to center belief first, and then to work the rest of one’s allegiances into the picture.
When one walks into one’s house on Pesach night, one wants to walk into something new. The cleaning of consciousness centers the Hagada story, and makes everything else work its way around that. It’s not a home in which everything is mixed up together. But a home into which our encounter with Hashem is pure and unadulterated, like the Matza. That’s what the Pesach offering meant so many centuries ago. And that’s what one should be thinking about with the Afikomen, the last taste of the final Matza.
