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Questions about the Questions
Contributed by Joseph Zitt

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Actually, the four questions aren't grammatically speaking, four questions. They're one question in four parts: What makes this night so different that we do each of these odd things? And we're not actually doing each of the four things -- most of us aren't reclining, and we are eating vegetables other than the marror.

But still, the question remains: what is so special about this night that Jews around the world (and, often, their friends and non-Jewish members of the family) get together to eat and tell this story?

The tale of the Exodus -- whether or not it actually happened quite as told in the Bible -- is the basic origin story of the Jewish people. When Jacob and his sons first went down from what is now Israel to Egypt, they were not much more than a large family. Once in Egypt, they were set up in a company town. The people in charge there (mostly under commands from their brother Joseph) got them trapped in a cycle of debt from which they couldn't escape, and they eventually became slaves. As we'll discuss in more detail later, after four hundred years they broke free. They were now a large group of many thousands of people in many tribes. Gathered in the desert for another forty years, they unified into a people and returned to the land from which their ancestors had come.

The scholar James Kugel studied the history of those times, and, in his book How to Read the Bible, writes of how he learned that the Biblical story doesn't quite line up with what archaeologists have found. When asked how he can continue to be a devout Jew after learning about this, he said this: Whether the story exactly happened doesn't really matter. What matters is that we have gathered and told each other these stories for thousands of years to bring out their meaning and what they suggest of how we should live our lives.
haggadah Section: Maggid - Beginning
Source: Original

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