Daily Talk
In the middle of a book of law, the greatest codifier in Jewish history suddenly stops issuing rulings and simply writes out a story, word for word. Why would a legal code contain a script? And what does it mean that the one commandment of this night is not to do, but to tell?
The Code That Stops to Tell a Story
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About This Talk
The ninth chapter of the laws of leaven and matzah is unlike anything around it: the Rambam sets down the full text of the Haggadah, the four children, the movement from degradation to praise, and the charge that each person see himself as though he personally left Egypt. Beneath the liturgy is a claim about how a people carries itself through time, not by remembering, but by retelling.