avakesh

Matzos and fire

Remembering the Exodus

The first night of Passover is unique among Jewish festivals in that it is associated with a prescribed text, the Haggadah. This particular feature warrants a closer exploration.

We generally think of remembering Exodus as telling the story of what happened on that night. A number of sources, however, imply that Torah study is a primary component of this obligation or that it can substitute for the Haggadah.

Two scholars who know the laws of Pesach are still obligated to discuss the laws of Pesach on that night (Pesachim 116a). A person is required to be engaged in the study of the laws of Passover the entire night (Tosefta, Pesachim 10:5).

This focus on laws is not always fully appreciated.

If he is a wise son, what does he say: "What are these testimonies, statutes, and rules that G-d has commanded you? Also you reply to him according to the laws of Passover, "We do not eat after afikomen" (Haggada).

The Tur comments: " For a person is obligated to occupy himself the entire night with the laws of Passover and to recount the miracles and wonders...until sleep overtakes him (O'C 481). Tur posits two components of the obligation: "laws of Passover" and "to recount miracles and wonders".

One can pose a Chakira about the nature of the obligation of Seder night: Is it the laws or reciting a text, or both? Is our model at Seder the commandment to remember Amalek, wherein we read a specified story text, or is it the commandment to remember what Hashem did to Miriam -"that you shall study it (Ra'avad - the laws of tsaraas) with your mouth" (Sifra Bechukosai 2)?

We have in the past discussed the fact that remembering something may be done through simple awareness (not forgetting), review (study of laws), recall (performance of an associated action), and commemoration (a recitation of a text). In fact, Sifra in Bechukosia appears to list examples of 3 of these kinds of remembering:

1. Awareness - not forgetting one's learning
2. Review - remembering Miriam by studying the laws of tsaraas.
3. Commemoration - Reading the portion of Amalek.

What about the Seder - what kind of remembering is it?

Well, it seems that several kinds of remembering come together at the Seder table. We have recall by eating matza and korban pesach (see Rashi on Devarim 16:3). We have review - this is study of Passover laws. We finally have commemoration - the recitation of the Haggadah text during the Seder.

Is there also a component of awareness regarding in the mitzvah of remembering the Exodus?

The Yefeh To'ar to Brochos 12b appears to understand that the commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt is merely to remember it in our hearts and not to say it out loud. All other observances are Rabbinic enactments so as to ensure the performance of the basic Biblical obligation. If so, it would seem that Biblically there is merely the obligation to be aware and nothing more.[1]

This approach allows us to answer the well known question of why the Rambam does not count the obligation to remember Exodus on Pesach night as one of 613 mitvos; he only counts the every day obligation to remember the Exodus. It would seem that the obligation to inwardly to remember the Exodus can be triggered by any means of remembrance - recall, review or commemoration; however, the essence and nature of the obligation is the same on Pesach night as it is the rest of the year - simple awareness. Consequently once the obligation of being aware is counted once in Sefer Hamitzvos, it cannot be counted another time.

Lemba tribes have Jewish genes

DNA tests on the Lemba tribe of central Zimbabwe and northern South Africa show that they are of Jewish or Semitic origin, the BBC reported. The tribe's customs are similar to Jewish ones, including male circumcision, ritual animal slaughter, abstaining from eating pork and wearing skull caps. And their oral tradition claims they are descended from seven male Jews who left Israel 2,500 years ago and married African women, according to the BBC.

Avos 2:1, 2: The Path of the Individual and the Path of the Community

Rabbi Judah the Prince said: Which is the straight path that a man should choose for himself? That which is beauty to those who do it it and beauty for him from the man.

The straight path is the one that is right for the all people in other words, for anyone who does it, but it must also fit the man. Not only that it is right for (any) person who does it, the path must be one that springs from the very core of this particular individual, the beauty must come from within the man.

This reading is the opposite of how the mishna is usually read. A common transplation of this mishna for example, is: "path which is beauty for the one who does it and beauty for him from others". This interpretation suffers from several deficiencies. It does not explain the phrase "from the man", which refers to a specific man, not to men in general, and it does not well fit the words. "to him who does it". However, whichever way you read it, the mishna is saying that the straight path is the one that fits other people and is right to the one who chooses it as well.

This mishna sets up two criteria for a religious path:

1.It must be something that is right for others and not a unique, indivdual path that has not ever been trodden and tested by others or that no other person can successfully "do". One often sees individuals, especially newcomers to Judaism, who attempt to strike their own individual path. Newcomers to religion not infrequently feel threatened by absolute demands of their newly found way of life. Before, they were independent, valued men and women; now, they are novices, beginners, those who receive rather than those who give. The sense of self-worth and sometimes even the sense of the self is threatened. A convert or even a Jew who is new to observance often feels unappreciated and misunderstood by the men and women who are so comfortable, so facile with the minutiae of ritual and observance, who are so secure in their faith, whose mannerisms, tongue and perceptions are so…. well, foreign. To affirm the self, a convert’s is often tempted to resort to syncretism – to merge the past and the future, to import beliefs that have no place in Judaism and to blindly affirm that he or she brings something to this community that is valuable and unique, something that only he has and can offer. “If only it could be joined to the truths that I experience here”, he thinks. “I only I could teach these self-satisfied and smug people true values, my values!” When the locals are less than receptive, the convert withdraws. The result can be spiritual ruin and estrangement for arrogance and self exaltation not only interfere with learning but also ultimately lead to heresy.

The three stages of estrangement are described in the following midrash, that explains Boaz' words to Ruth at their first meeting as religious advice. ‘Do not go to collect in the field of another – as it says, “Thou shall have no other gods with Me”. And also do not pass from this, as it says, “This is my God and I will dwell in Him”. “And so abide you with my maidens – this are the righteous, as it says, “Will You delight in it like a bird and join it to Your maidens” (Ruth Rabba 4:11).

Instead the newcomer should consider joining a community that appeals to his very soul, but a community and its established path nevertheless.

2.It's beauty must, however, "arise out of the man", and not be an imitation of something that others do but one to which the individual does not deeply relate deeply. One should not walk in a path that is right for others but feels inauthentic for himself. There is, of course, much thought and counsel that must go into this quest. Sometimes what feels foreign becomes less so after habituation and years of study and no path should be abandoned on frivolous grounds.

In practice what this says is that an individual must find a path that is resonates with his inner being but one that is well-trodden by others and found by their experience to be fitting and appropriate. Unlike Christianity which, at least in tis Protestant manifestations, crowns the individual with all the choices and unlike mainstream Islam to which there is (beyond Koran) no source of authority but sunna and umma, Judaism as is often the case in "big" religious truths, is in the middle between them. It is integrative and it heeds both the inner voice of the individual and the accumulated wisdom and experience of the nation.

Dark thoughts...

 
The rise and fall I so detest, the flutter and the fall

Sometimes to loft above all things

and other times to stall

*

Men weren't made to dwell above

but some pine for the plight

Sometimes they flutter thereof

and then retreat in fright

*

Some are elected to dwell high

And others think they can

And spend lives pining for the sky

And never learn its span

*

Sometime I think I'm one of them

Sometimes I rather not

So bright the vision of the Realm

So painful is the flight

veritas

 

Rochel and Chaim are getting married and you are invited

YIchud: A play

Avos 2:1 - The Path of the Individual

 Rabbi Judah the Prince said: Which is the straight path that a man should choose for himself? That which is beauty to him and beauty for him from the other person.

The second chapter of Avos continues the strand of familial leadership that started with Hillel's descendents in the role of the Nasi. It continues until mishna four, which starts again with Hillel and now lists the non-familial chain of transmission from Hillel through R. Yochanan ben Zakkai and onward.

Another important development in this chapter is the preoccupation with the "path" of the individual in Divine Service. Whereas the fist chapter was focused on the political and societal role of Torah adherents in a larger, and after Shimon Hatsaddik, a corrupt and essentially areligious society, this chapter gives that quest up, or perhaps completes it, in a quest for the proper "path" for an individual. The question of :what is the right path" recurrs three times in this chapter ( I include the first mishna of the next chapter), once as an actual question. In mishna 10 and 11, R. Yochanan ben Zakkai asks his students:  אמר להם, צאו וראו איזו היא דרך טובה שידבק בה האדם

"Go and see which is the good way to which a person should cling?... What is the bad way from which a person should distance?"

Another signifcance change is the introduction of the terminology of going, entering, exiting and transitioning. One finds expression such as, "come into sin", "exit from the world", "floating on the water", "go out and see". It is as if the model of religious life as a journey begins to resonate and dominate in this chapter; the static and communal outlook gives way to a personal and unsettled travel through life as the predominant religious metaphor. The reasons for it are not hard to understand. As we discussed, the end of the Second Temple period saw the abandonment of the idea of the Jewish Polity based on the three pillars of Torah, Avodah and Sacrifical Service, an idea that the Rabbis struggled throughout this time and throughout this chapter to preserve in some way or fashion, for a religious group at least, if not for the entire state.

R. Yehuda Hanassi as a transitional figure was well suited for putting forth this teaching of individual's responsibility and a personal path. He was seventh generation to Hillel (Shabbos 56a). He is one the few Tannaim who had a dual identity, as R. Yehudah the Prince and simply as Rebbi (Shabbos 32b but see at the end of Ch.1 of Peah where we find R. Yehuda Hanassi and Rebbi in a disagreement). In this sense he was a way-station between a communal, familial model of religious leadership and life and the path of the individual that was now coming to the fore. Seder Hadoros on p.171 says that Rebbi was both a Tanna and an Amora; we find therefore an expression, "Rebbi tanna hu upalig" in Taanis 14b; in several places we find that he was treated as an Amora. This was because once the Mishna was completed, the era of Amoraim started, still while Rebbi was alive. After Rebbi, the model shifted from learning at the feet of the Sages as a group to studying from a particular individual Sage, though yeshivos still functioned as the places in which Torah was reviewed and the text of statements was fixed and elucidations were publicly offered (see Sanhedrin 17b). Until his time, you do not find that a Tanna was an exclusively student of a Sage who preceded him but you do increasingly find it after Rebbi's time.