Pesach Publications - Part 11: The Rebbe's Haggada (5)

00:00 This is Behem Shech in continuation to the earlier installments regarding the Haggadah with the Rebbe's commentaries, which was published in the year Tov Shin Vav, 1946, and its various editions. We now continue with installment number 11, and we'll focus on one last additional insight of the Rebbe in his Haggadah. In the Haggadah, there is a quote from Chumash Mois, Parashas Mois, chapter 1, speaking about the slavery in Eretz Mitzrayim. And actually, it appears in two verses. One is, In English, The Mitzrayim enslaved Am Yisrael with crushing labor. And the next verse, They embittered their lives with hard labor, with mortar and with bricks, and with all kinds of labor in the fields. All the work that they made them do was crushing labor. Now, we continue with the article. In the Alterebe's Haggadah, both of these psukim verses are cited in full. In almost all the other Nuschois versions that the Rebbe checked, he did not find anyone who brings the second pasuk as well. A major point of focus of the Rebbe's Haggadah is to explain the Alterebe's version of the Haggadah. And there are some scholars who argue that this was, in fact, the Rebbe's only focus in writing it. The above is one significant example of this. The Rebbe's explaining how it is possible that for over a thousand years, a pasuk had been lost in all of the Haggadahs used throughout the Jewish world. The Rebbe's explanation is two-pronged. First, he explains that the pasuk is so crucial to the description

02:37 of Golus Mitzrayim that it is impossible that the Sifri and the author of the Haggadah did not include it. If you're trying to describe the back-breaking work that the Yidden were forced to endure in Mitzrayim, how can you omit the very pasuk that describes it in detail? But that still leaves a powerful question. If we cannot find a single Haggadah in history that included this pasuk, isn't that the biggest proof that it was never included? To answer this question, the Rebbe helps us picture how the Haggadah was transmitted through the generations. In the beginning, the Haggadah was written and copied by hand. When you copy things by hand, you often try to keep things as brief as possible. In order to keep this piece short, the copier of the text copied the first and last words of these two psukim. So this paragraph became one line which means the beginning of the first pasuk and concluding with the word befarech. But befarech is a conclusion of two separate verses. As we go on further, but there was only one problem. Look again, that same shorthand could also be used if you were copying the first pasuk on its own Some very early scribes indeed made this very mistake and believed that the abbreviation was referring only to the first pasuk. This mistake was then copied throughout all the later editions of the Haggadah, and it was more than a thousand years before the Alterebbe returned the pasuk back to its rightful place. And finally, in

05:14 summing up the Rebbe's commentaries on the Haggadah, we can say the following. People have tried to characterize or define the Rebbe's Haggadah, but in truth, that is an impossible endeavor. As one of the Rosh Yeshivas we interviewed commented, try to define Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud. You can't. The only way to have a taste of Gemara is by going ahead and learning it in depth. You cannot define the Rebbe's data. You can only know it by experiencing it, quote unquote. However, in order to provide a taste of the depth that can be discovered, we have collected, and this is the Chassidishe Dehar and the editors describing their research in the articles which were published in regards to the Haggadah, as we quoted in the last few installments, that we have collected a few short explanations from scholars who are experts on the Rebbe's Haggadah. It should be noted that these have been boiled down to their most fundamental points, and in some cases, we were only able to include references of the explanations themselves. To gain a real comprehension, they should be read in their original form. This is not a representative sample of the sugyas that were written on each passage of the Haggadah. It is a mostly random selection of a few pieces that we felt may interest our readers. We hope that this will provide some inspiration to learn the Rebbe's Haggadah, every individual on his own level, whether that means opening it up and studying it on its own, which in

07:16 itself is a fascinating learning experience, or on a deeper realm, by studying the sources and uncovering more and more insight.