Seder

Around the Seder table with scholars.

We invited our authors and friends to share practices, ideas, experiences, and analyses from their own seders that enhance their seder-night experience.

The Talmud requires having two unspecified cooked dishes to be eaten as part of the Passover meal. How did this requirement develop into the custom of placing two particular symbolic foods, the shankbone and the egg, on the seder plate?

The popular Jewish custom to remove drops of wine while listing the plagues goes back to the Middle Ages, but the ubiquitous explanation that we do this out of sadness for what happened to the Egyptians does not. When did this explanation develop and how did it become so dominant?

Three philosophical approaches to the historicity of the Exodus.

The Cow That Laid an Egg (!)

The Seder as a Night of Hermeneutic Freedom: Introducing the Four Readers of the Haggadah‍

Doing history one better

...יָכוֹל מֵראשׁ חֹדֶשׁ? תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא