Judaism's unscriptural "Passover" text: the Haggadah

We are being inundated in the media with pious tales of the supposed Biblical foundation of Judaism's "Passover" holy days, the yom tov of the People of the Book — but which book — the Pentateuch or the Talmud? The claim that Judaism commemorates the Passover of the Old Testament is as nonsensical as the one that asserts that Judaism's "Noahide Laws" are based on Noah, the Biblical patriarch who is mocked and degraded in Orthodox Judaism. Like the ersatz Talmudic Noah, the bogus rite in Judaism misnamed “Passover" is derived from the Talmud — using the Bible as a prop. Here below is information on Judaism's foundational Passover text. Surprise, surprise, it's not the Old Testament but rather the Haggadah, a thoroughly Talmudic work.

—Michael Hoffman, author of the 1100 page textbook, Judaism Discovered.

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Passed Over  

By Richard Poplak | Walrus magazine (funded by the government of Canada) | May 2011

..."Haggadah" means "telling." Reading it fulfills the scriptural commandment in Exodus to "tell your son" about the Israelites' liberation from slavery in Egypt, and its recitation kicks off the week-long festival of Passover. In the Diaspora, the Seder takes place on the first two nights of the festival, and the Haggadah serves as the manual...

The Haggadah doesn't tell the story of Exodus so much as it depicts five rabbinical sages exegetically parsing it via Deuteronomy. Rabbis Eliezer, Yehoshua, Elazar ben Azariah, Akiva, and Tarphon spice up the biblical tale of the flight from Egypt by arguing over the minutiae of the Passover rites, which were originally compiled in the Talmud, the Jewish book of religious laws.  We'll avoid the scholarly bickering about when this occurred (very roughly, 200 CE), but one thing remains certain: the Talmud, and the Haggadah along with it, was a response to a catastrophe so great it threatened to destroy a people.

In 66 CE, when the Roman general Vespasian swept into Jerusalem, Judaism was a cultic, oral religion, with Herod's massive temple as its lodestar. Everything happened in the temple complex. Four years later, Vespasian's son Titus razed it to the ground. "Where was God under the rubble?" wondered the Rabbis. "How to praise him now that the temple was gone?" The sages agreed: Jews would have to become a people of the book, or they would disappear.  

In a dazzling feat of spiritual and scholarly bravura, they compiled the Talmud, the text that has defined Jewish life for almost eighteen centuries.  It meticulously redacts generations of oral religious injunctions, explains them, justifies them... The Talmud's first compilers, the early rabbinical scholars (were) called the Tannaim...

The first extant version of the Haggadah was ... unearthed in a manuscript of a siddur (prayer book) compiled by Saadia Goan in the tenth century. Before this, the liturgy came to us from the Talmud.

...No doubt about it, the Haggadah is a problematic text. It tells Jews that they are exceptional, and it puts a premium on Jewish life over the lives of others...

(Emphasis supplied)

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Judaism’s Passover: Biblical or Talmudic?

Judaism’s Talmudic Passover

Research by Michael Hoffman ©2020

www.revisionisthistory.org

The goyim and crypto-rabbis such as the current and recent popes of Rome imagine or teach that “Passover"as observed in rabbinic Judaism is “Biblical." All kinds of statements about rabbinic Judaism’s Passover by these "well-wishers,” addressed to the rabbis in April, from the goyim of the worldly steeple-houses of Judeo-Churchianity, as well as pontiffs past and present, will be framed in Biblical references and terms. 

The truth is something else, however. Passover as observed in Judaism is Talmudic Passover, not the Passover of the Bible. Take for example the "Four Questions."

The Four Questions

What makes this night different from all other nights?

1. On all nights we need not dip even once, and on this night we dip twice!

2. On all nights we eat leavened bread or matzah, and on this night, only matzah!

3. On all nights we eat various vegetables, and on this night, bitter herbs!

4. On all nights we eat sitting upright or reclining, and on this night we all recline!

The Four Questions Talmudicized

We find many different versions of the Four Questions in the various manuscripts of the Talmud—not only in the order of the questions but in the number as well. Some versions, for example, omit the question about bitter herbs, others omit the question about the Paschal lamb even in Temple times.

The above would seem to indicate that initially there were various acceptable versions, or perhaps no fixed version at all. This was because according to Jewish law one need not ask all the questions.

As the Talmud relates, when Abbaye as a child saw the table being removed from before Rabbah, he exclaimed: “We haven’t eaten yet—and they come and remove the table from before us?!” Rabbah turned to the child and said: “You have exempted us from having to say the four questions”(Pesachim 115b, see Tosfot ad loc.).

At some point, however, the Sages of the Babylonian Talmud consolidated the various customs and instituted a universal practice of reciting all the questions so that all of Israel would follow the same custom.

Another example of this sort of development is the way we blow the shofar:

The requirement is to blow a wailing sound, called a teruah, preceded and followed by a simple blast, called a tekiah. According to Rav Hai Gaon (cited in Beit Yosef, Orach Chaim 59049), for many centuries the definition of the “wailing” teruah remained unfixed, with various communities performing it in their own way. Some Jewish communities performed it as heavy groans. For others, it was very short“cries,” and yet other communities performed it as a combination of both.

In Talmudic times, the Sages sought to unify all of Israel with a universal custom. They therefore instituted that all Jews blow the shofar in a manner that included all three customs. 

(Source: The Rebbe’s Haggadah).

The Order of the Questions

This order of the questions—(1) dipping, (2) matzah, (3) bitter herbs, (4) reclining—is the order found in the version of the Mishnah as it appears in the Jerusalem Talmud, Alfassi, and Rosh (though the last two questions do not appear there). This is also the order found in the Siddurim of Rav Amram Gaon and Rav Saadiah Gaon, Rambam, Tur, Avudraham (by implication, since his commentary addresses the question about dipping before the others), Abarbanel, Pri Etz Chaim, Siddur of the Arizal, Mishnat Chasidim, and others. It is also the order found in the first printed Haggadah (Soncino, 1485).

SOURCE: The Passover Haggadah: With Commentary from the Classic Commentators, Midrash, Kabbalah, the Hasidic Masters and the Haggadah of the Lubavitcher Rebbe (the late Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson).

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Michael Hoffman is the author of the 1100 page textbook, Judaism Discovered

For additional research, cf. Baruch M. Bosker, The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism

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