Question of the Week:
Whoever wrote the Haggadah seems to have made a major mistake. The name of Moses does not appear in the entire Haggadah! How could the main man of the Exodus who confronted Pharaoh, brought down the plagues, and led his people out of slavery be completely left out of the story? It would be like doing Macbeth without Macbeth, or Star Wars without Luke Skywalker. I have a conspiracy theory: This was no mistake. The Haggadah was written by an anti-Moses faction who tried to write him out of history. That way they would take over the priesthood and control the Temple. Like it?
Answer:
That's a fantastic conspiracy theory. Really fantastic.
But the question is a good one. Moses' absence from the Haggadah is indeed a mystery. To solve it we need to examine the evidence and figure out who wrote the Haggadah. There is one prime suspect.
Here are the clues:
1. There is a biblical command to tell your children the story of the exodus every year on the night of Pesach
2. The Haggadah was written as a basis to tell the story
3. The first time a Haggadah would have been needed was the year after the exodus
4. One year after the exodus, the children themselves didn't need to hear the story, as they were there!
5. There was only one family whose children were not present at the exodus, and so needed to hear the story
6. It would seem that the first Haggadah would have been made by this family
So whose family was it? Who was the only Israelite who himself experienced the exodus, but his children did not?
It was none other than Moses himself.
Moses' wife and children were not in Egypt and did not experience the exodus first hand. Moses married Tzipora and had two sons in her homeland of Midyan. When Moses returned to Egypt to free his people, his family remained in Midyan, and only joined the Israelites in the desert after the exodus.
So the only person who needed a Haggadah that first year to tell his kids the exodus story was Moses. He wrote the first ever Haggadah. And being the most humble man on the face of the earth, Moses left himself out of the story. He understood that he was no more than an instrument of G-d. He took no credit for the exodus.
This is one of the reasons Moses always carried a stick. He was saying, just like the stick has no power of its own other than what the holder bestows upon it, so too I am just a tool in G-d's hands. It is not I that brought the miracles, it is not I that took you out of Egypt, it is G-d Almighty.
There's no conspiracy here. Just a powerful lesson. We learn from Moses what humility really means. You can be a leader who changes the course of history and still be humble. When you don't take credit for yourself, when you don't need your name mentioned, you have the infinite power of G-d behind you. Humility does not contradict greatness. It is its secret.
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Moss
Source:
R' Yissachar Dov of Belz
Notes:
- In fact, Moses is mentioned once in the Haggadah. But not as part of the story, just in passing in a verse: "The people believed in G-d and in Moses His servant."
- The Haggadah we have today has many later additions from the talmudic sages. The suggestion is that the kernel of the Haggadah was first composed by Moses, and all later additions left Moses out, as he himself did, to convey the message that it was G-d alone who took us out of Egypt.
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Good morning everyone,
Excavation is now complete!
Time to move on to preparation for footings.
Speak next week again
Shabbat shalom
Brent |
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