Passover’s Rupture and Reconstruction

Yosef Lindell

Lehrhaus, Apr. 3, 2025

“… we focus on the story on Seder night precisely because we are now in exile and telling about the miracles of the Exodus gives us hope for the future.” 

On Seder night, we tell our national story. The Haggadah voices the Jewish tale of deliverance—from slavery to freedom, from Egypt to the Promised Land. But Pesah night was not always this way. Long ago, the holiday focused not on a story, but on a sacrifice—the korban pesah. Although Jews in Temple times may have told the story of the Exodus too, it was far from the centerpiece of the evening. The Haggadah, a text which developed over a period of centuries, grew up in the absence of a Temple.

But there is some tension in telling our story of leaving Egypt when we are in exile. Relying in part on the work of the Israeli scholar Dr. David Henshke, I will examine rabbinic sources suggesting the possibility of an alternative Seder, one focused on Halakhah and the missing korban pesah. Although this version of the Seder was rejected, I will show that the Haggadah is more concerned with the absence of the Temple than it might seem at first. From a literary perspective, one can read the structure of the modern-day Haggadah—which bookends the story of the Exodus with calls for redemption in the paragraphs of Ha Lahma Anya and Hasal Siddur Pesah—as addressing the dissonance in celebrating a Pesah without the korban pesah.

The Rupture

Imagine a time when the Temple stood and pilgrims ascended to Jerusalem. Imagine the bustle and clamor of the markets where the travelers purchased sheep for the Passover sacrifice and formed small groups to consume its meat as prescribed. 

Josephus estimates that 3 million people participated in the sacrifice in 65 CE. The Talmud (Pesahim 64b), in a similar vein, calls one year the “Passover of the crowded” and suggests that there were “twice as many as who left Egypt” in Jerusalem. Then, imagine the sacrifice itself, or if you can stomach it, watch a video of the Samaritan rite still performed today. Sacrifice is ancient spirituality at its thickest—a ritual of fire pits and wood smoke all slippery with blood. …SOURCE