Latest / In the Beis at Yeshivat Orayta / Rav Judah - Maror, Korech, Shulchan Orech [Getting Ready for the Seder]

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Rav Judah - Maror, Korech, Shulchan Orech [Getting Ready for the Seder] · In the Beis at Yeshivat Orayta

• 0:00
  Rav Judah Dardik: Hi. Rudah here sharing a thought on Maror Korech and Shulchan Orech. So these three steps, are bonafide parts of the Seder, they even make it into the Seder song, are a little bit easier to overlook than some of the other parts. We've already spent a while on Magid. We've eaten matzah.
• 0:15
  These are highlight moments. And then you get to Maror. So Maror, some people eat horseradish, which is particularly sharp and a difficult experience. Others are more inclined to, the sorts of Maror that are described more in the Mishnah and the Gemara, more like something less sharp and more bitter. There is a concern among post skim that if people only use horseradish or fresh horseradish, that they won't actually eat a kazayet of it.
• 0:39
  They won't actually eat the requisite amount because it's very, very sharp and really difficult to eat. But that originally, Maror was meant to be something that got more bitter with time. If you think about it, people buy baby romains because baby romaine is a little bit sweeter, a little bit less bitter, the same way that the slavery in Egypt started out as something that was not quite as bitter at the front end as it was by the back end, but over time got worse. So too, we tend towards Maror halakhically and the Mishnah, Gemara, endives, romaine lettuce, etcetera. Various kinds of things that qualify and are listed as being things that got more bitter with time.
• 1:16
  And so some have a preference for that. Either way, we're eating something bitter to remember the bitterness and the difficulty of slavery as it were, you know, in some sort of symbolic way. Then we have Korech. Korech is that Hillel teaches us that just like they used to take the Pesach and the Matzah and the Maror and put them all together, Sotul will make a sandwich out of it. And nowadays, we don't currently have a Gobem Pesach, but we can still put Matzah and Maror together much like they were doing then.
• 1:40
  And then we have a meal, Shulchan Orech. Why? Because because it's Yomtok, because it's a holiday, and we have a meal on a holiday. Okay. But I think there's something more.
• 1:47
  Like like, why is this all here in this manner? So there are many ways in which we express our our memory or our recall, our reliving of what happened in Egypt. Throughout Maghid, we have various different mechanisms that we use, different ways of telling the story. We tell the story of the physical slave, or we tell the story about our people. We tell the story of spiritual redemption.
• 2:11
  There are all different threads that run through Maghid. But one that we really can't do in a verbal form, it's a really a different form of Maghid, is what we do here, and that is experiencing the, the story of the exodus. Now we can't really experience it in terms of going out as slaves from Egypt. That's an event that took place at one point in history, and we can talk about it. We could try to imagine it.
• 2:34
  We can discuss it. We can tell stories and make plays and sing songs. But there's something else to be said for experiential learning. And to the extent possible, we want to include that here. And so we don't simply talk about the bitterness.
• 2:47
  We actually want to eat something bitter. Is this is a idea within education that some people learn best when they're actually doing their bodily kinesthetic learners. So here, we're going to do that by actually eating something bitter and putting ourselves into just a mild bitter experience. Obviously, we wouldn't go and, you know, try to reenact anything that happened. It was awful.
• 3:08
  But we can go and eat something and in that moment say, I'm just I'm experiencing a little bit, and I'm gonna do it in a symbolic way that it's something that gets more bitter with time. And then we go to Korech. Rather than just say, hey. There was the bitterness of slavery. There was the sweetness of redemption and freedom, but they're all mixed together.
• 3:27
  Think about it. If you were a Jew experiencing the exodus from Egypt, in that moment, you had tremendous joy. You also had tremendous pain and bitterness. And these are families that watch their own loved ones, you know, beaten and tortured and and dying at the hands of the Egyptians, and yet they're going free now. And there's a bittersweetness in the sense that it's it all comes together.
• 3:48
  We look at this thousands of years later and say, that wasn't my experience. I just know that we are free now. That's great. But taking the matzah and the marah and the pest cycle and putting them all together into into Korech is also an experience of saying, I recognize that the the varied feelings the Jews felt as they were leaving were were mixed up together. They weren't independent.
• 4:08
  They didn't come in stages. They were all part of one huge mush and mix up of experiences. We say that, you know, famously the the mission, the Gemara, and the Rambam brings the language of this. We say the a person should see himself as if they left Egypt. But then there are those texts that say, you should show yourself.
• 4:29
  We're trying to relive that through the experience of what it is to have all these things together. The Pesach, which represents the freedom and liberation, and it's exciting, and it's amazing, and it's forward looking. The matzah that is combined. It's partially the bread of freedom, but it's also the bread of a slate of affliction. We're going out quickly, but this is what we ate when we were slaves.
• 4:49
  And the Maror, the bitterness, it's all mixed together and we're having that experience together. And then we sit to a meal. We're sitting to a meal both, yes, because it is Yom Tov, but also because we are now free people who can sit to a meal. Slaves don't do that. But we've now gone through the Maror, and we're going to sit like free people.
• 5:07
  We're going to lean, and we're going to get to eat something. And what we're doing is we're really telling the story of leaving Egypt in a different way than we had till now. Most of what we did till now was verbal in some sort of another. Stories, songs, text, discussion. Here, we're actually trying to experience it just a little bit to be Jews who are timeless, to be Jews who are all at once right then and there.
• 5:29
  We are, you know, front not in front seat of the exodus, but actually experiencing and going out ourselves and bringing it into our lives of tonight.