Ritual in our Parasha
God spoke to Moses, saying:
This is to be the Instruction [regarding] the one-with-tzaraat, at the time of his being purified: he is to be brought to the priest.
The priest is to go outside the camp;
the priest is to look, and here, should the affliction of tzaraat have healed on the one-with-tzaraat,
The priest is to command that they take for the one-to-be-purified two birds, live, pure, and wood of cedar and scarlet of the worm and hyssop. Then the priest is to command that they slay the one bird in an earthen vessel, [held] above living water, and the live bird—he is to take it, and the cedar wood, the scarlet of the worm and the hyssop, and is to dip them and the live bird in the blood of the slaughtered bird, [held] above living water. Then he is to sprinkle [it] over the one-to-be-purified of tzaraat seven times, and declare-him-pure, and is to send-out the live bird into the open field.
The one-being-purified is to scrub his garments, shave his entire [head of] hair and wash in water, then he is pure; afterward he may enter the camp, and stay outside his tent for seven days. And it shall be on the seventh day: he is to shave all his hair—his head, his beard and his eyebrows, all his body-hair he is to shave— and scrub his garments and wash his flesh in water, then he is pure.
What is happening here?
What do the rituals outlined serve to enact?
Is there any significance to the details provided?
From tzaraat to the seder
Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering
"Now, I understand that you may hesitate to force your guests into a thirty-minute tunnel of silence or place gold foil on their lips. But there are many tiny ways you can create a threshold, a pause, before you and your guests cross the starting line together. And you don't need to be an award-winning theater producer to do it. The idea of helping people transition from one state to another is embedded in many rituals of traditional societies. It's the equivalent of a doctor taking off her jacket and putting on her white coat as she enters her office. It's the act of Muslims washing their hands and feet before prayer..." (167)
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2003)
The Seder
The word seder means “order,” and it is central to the Jewish concept of freedom. We become God’s “partners in the work of creation” when we create order in society – an order that honors all persons as the image of God. If God’s presence is to be found not just in rare moments of ecstasy, but in the daily transactions of society as a whole, then it must have a seder, a set of rules we all honor. Order turns individuals into a community and communities into a people. The seder night reflects the order that binds us to other Jews throughout the world and in previous generations.
At the same time, the seder leaves room for spontaneity. No two seder nights are the same. Ideally each family, each year, adds new insights as we reflect on our birth as a people and relate it to the present. “The more one tells…the more admirable it is.” Pesaḥ is a fine example of the Jewish counterpoint between structure and spontaneity. We all tell the same story in the same words, but we each add something uniquely ours. The rules are the same, but the commentaries and interpretations are always different. That is how an ancient story stays young.
"The Rabbis of Bnei Brak" Professor Deborah Barer, Pardes 2024 Passover Companion
One of the most striking pieces of the Haggadah is that we never actually recount the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Instead, we talk about other people telling the story: namely, the rabbis of B’nai Brak, who stay up all night telling this central narrative of our people’s redemption. However, by refusing to give us a script for retelling the Passover story, the Haggadah offers us instead a kind of gift... By recalling the rabbis in B’nai Brak, the Haggadah invites us to reflect on the experience of retelling the story, in addition to its content. After all, there are many ways to tell this particular tale. Should we, like the Israelites themselves, rejoice when the Egyptians drown in the sea, exulting in the fact that the wicked get what they deserve (cf. Exodus 15)? Or should we, like God in the midrashic tradition, grieve over this loss of life and potential (cf. Sanhedrin 39b)?
What does Rabbi Sacks see as the role of the seder?
How does the seder create ritual and allow fresh engagement?
The Ritual of Karpas
The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2003)
KARPAS
Dipping karpas in salt water or vinegar is one of the things we do on the seder night to arouse the curiosity of children so they will ask, “What makes this night unlike all other nights?” It is one of the two acts referred to in the question “every other night we do not dip [our food] at all, but tonight we will dip it twice.” The other, just before the meal, is the dipping of maror in ḥaroset.
There is symbolic significance in these two acts. The Exodus began and ended with acts of dipping. It began when Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. They dipped his robe in the blood of a slaughtered goat (Gen. 37:31) and brought it to Jacob to persuade him that Joseph had been attacked and killed by a wild animal. The sale of Joseph into slavery in Egypt was the beginning of the long process through which the entire family of Jacob traveled to Egypt and eventually became slaves.
The exile ended with the Israelites’ taking bunches of hyssop, dipping them in the blood of the Paschal offering, and daubing them on the door-frames of their houses (Ex. 12:22). God “passed over” these houses during the final plague, after which they went free.
The two dippings recall these events. The karpas, itself sweet, is dipped in salt and becomes sour. The maror, itself bitter, is dipped in the sweet ḥaroset and has some of the bitterness removed. These two acts remind us that freedom, which is sweet, becomes sour when we use it to mistreat others. Slavery, which is bitter, is sweetened when collective suffering becomes human solidarity and thus a prelude to freedom.
Maarechet Heidenheim is a commentary written by Rabbi Tevele Bondi and was published in 1898 in Frankfort der Mein, Germany.
(1) Karpas: One dips green vegetables in salt water to symbolize that like karpas, we must undergo an entire immersion of one's body for the purpose of a complete purification. One should not be like the person who immerses himself with an impure reptile in his hand, God forbid! This is an allusion to the fact that the Israelites were idolaters while they were in Egypt. When God took them out of Egypt in order sanctify them by giving them the Torah, it was necessary first to remove the impurity that was upon them and to have them perform complete repentance. One immerses the greens to symbolize the Baal Teshuvah (repentant) who is as humble as the plants in the field which are trampled underfoot.
The greens are called karpas, which comes from the word for trampled over; or it is related to the word refes, spelled with a shin instead of a samech, which is the word for mud or earth. (See Rashi in Proverbs, 6) Karpas is a reminder that the Israelites were humiliated by the Egyptians; they were like "mud and dirt."
The combination of the words rehatz and karpas also hint at the process of purification: first cleansing oneself, then immersion and finally 'sprinkling,' as we find in the law of the red heifer: the sprinkling of the ashes of the red heifer mixed in water was done with a bunch of hyssop. (See Nu.19:18) Here we dip a bunch of greens as an allusion to this ritual of purification. Similarly, the people were commanded in Egypt to dip some greens in the blood of the Passover lamb and to place the blood on the lintel and the doorposts of their homes, as it says, You shall take a bunch of hyssops.." (Ex. 12:22)