Coming to the Seder excited, Rabbi Yossi Paltiel - 5786

dominated by Pesach prep. The most important thing in all of the Torah, I mean literally the most important thing, the entire all of the Torah hangs on this. This is historic because all the people involved in this story are no longer alive, is that we should say the Mah Nishtanah in Yiddish. No, perfect. That was more important. If we knew the Mah Nishtanah and we couldn't read siddur, it didn't matter. If we could deliver the Mah Nishtanah in Yiddish as a get clapped, that was what the yeshiva cared about. And the teachers got that message and they communicate that message. And we used to prepare for Pesach. It was a big deal. So, depending how old you were, you know, the very young ages, and again, I really didn't get to do this, but we made arts and crafts, you know, the kids come home. For years and years and years I had these two gigantic boxes full of old haggadahs from all of my kids, from my oldest daughter to my youngest son, for years. Anyway, one day one of my children said, "No more room." and they threw it all in the garbage. The only one who maybe misses it is me. The kids don't miss it. My wife for sure doesn't miss it. I wasn't even going to look at it, but the idea that I had this history, you know, pre-1A, kindergarten, pre-1A, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth. I don't know when they stopped making haggadahs, but it was pretty in by the time my kids were growing up, fifth grade, fourth grade. And then it stops. It stops. All of that energy that gets invested in haggadah when the kids are extremely little. And the kids come to the seder so excited. I mean, I know from my own children, I mean, my own grandchildren, I'm sure you know this from yourself, from your siblings, you know, the 5-year-old stays up all night and sits at the seder and doesn't hyper, doesn't freak out, doesn't become hysterical cuz he hasn't slept. He's focused. Why? Because in school they made it so real to him and so important to him. You know, and you see this a lot. And then the kids turn 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and the seder becomes a drag. Tie, you're taking too long. Can we get through it? I want to go to sleep. Let's get to the food. Let's get the nitzol. Let's cut it out. I think this is a universal truth. I think it's a universal truth. The question is, does it have to be? In other words, we all understand. And let's be direct. Little kids don't have the yetzer hara. Okay, now that you're big, you know little kids don't have yetzer hara. They make trouble. They maybe make they have more chutzpah than you are, but they don't really have a yetzer hara. You know how I define a yetzer hara? You know what a yetzer hara is? When you do something bad bad and you carry it with you. You do a bad thing and you think about it the next day. Kids do bad stuff, they don't even think about it. Now, you could say that that's worse cuz if they were decent, they would at least feel bad. Kids don't mean to be bad. They may do bad things. Kids really Kids don't do things to Kids are not bad. They do bad things. When we become older, we become we develop a yetzer hara. The reason we remember the bad things we did is not only because we did them, because we think we are them. That's how I define yetzer hara in psychology, in other words. When you reach the age where you do a bad thing and you carry it around, you got a yetzer hara. Because you're defining yourself by it. You're not just doing something wrong, you see yourself as wrong. And all of us have gone through that cycle. All of us were little and naive and beautiful and excited and if I may say the worst word in all, happy till some age. For some of us it ends earlier. If we're lucky and we're safer and we're healthier, it ends for us later, but sooner or later we quote unquote grow up. I mean, you guys are still young, but you're not 6 anymore. And when we were 6, we came to the seder so excited. Now, our excitement was a six-year-old excitement. It was little children experiencing this for the first time, for the second time, for the third time. It was all very new to them. Their imagination was such an important part of the Jewish people's time. I mean, they could almost see Moshe Rabbeinu walking into the seder. Eliyahu Hanavi, when you open the door for these little kids, it was real. It was real, and I credit our teachers, our early teachers, get a lot of the credit for it. But, the question is, why doesn't it continue? Why is it that a nine-year-old is less excited about the seder than a six-year-old? Why is it that a 12-year-old is bored by the seder? Why is it that a 15-year-old goes to the couch, I don't know, heylakhma'anya, baruch hamakom, he comes back, eats the meal, he plops back on the couch, takes him 45 minutes to get up to bench. He finishes the seder in 10 minutes. You know, when he turns 18 or 19, he either gets better at it or worse at it. I I understand that growing up is becoming your own person, and becoming your own person means stopping to do it for your parents and starting to do it for yourself, and that's a dangerous moment, you know? When you're being good for your parents, you're very good. When you're not being good for your parents, you're not good. Until you decide that, you know what? I'm an adult man, I'm an adult woman, and Yiddishkeit was not made for my parents and me to listen to them. God gave it to me. And when we figure that out, we sort of we adultify, we personalize our Yiddishkeit. But, the the way the schools prepare our children for the seder is one of the most acute illustrations of I don't want to say what's wrong with the chinuch system, but I but that's what I mean. When the kids reach the upper elementary grades and go into high school or mesivtin in the case of boys, and I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you exactly what it is. When children are little, the school is most concerned with how you practice Judaism. How do you do it? When you get to the fourth grade and the fifth grade and the sixth grade, the school shifts from being concerned with how you practice Yiddishkeit to making sure that you learn. Some of the topics that you learn Some of the topics that you learn are boring, are disinterested, and maybe at least to you irrelevant. You know, they don't see the point. You know, boys learn Gemara. You don't learn Gemara. Those who love it, love it. The rest of them, they don't know why they're bothering. Um a lot of the girls wish they could learn Gemara. Learning Gemara for 6 hours a day, if you're good at it, is the most exciting thing in the world. If you're not good at it, it's really it's disappointing to the point of pointlessness, and it's pretty depressing. That's what happens to school. You reach a certain age, and they need to teach you stuff. Cuz they need to develop your mind. And you know what? It's true. Kids have to learn. And learn means develop their mind. They have to learn how to read, they have to learn how to write, and probably the hardest thing of all is they have to learn how to think. And teachers are giving those skills to the students in little steps. A 9-year-old is not a big genius, but a 9-year-old can figure out a Rashi. A 9-year-old can solve a math problem. And the worst thing a teacher can do is help the child, because then you're crippling the child. You make it hard. So, learning develops what we call aptitude, developing the mind, dominates the upper elementary and high school years. But what happens is what's called Halacha Minig. You As they say in Yiddish, "Vee me feelt zich." "Vee me feelt zich." How Jews do things is relegated to second place. This happens Pesach, happens Tishrei, it happens Chanukah. Watch little kids at the Chanukah Menorah, and watch boys and girls, by the time they're in the fifth grade for sure, possibly the fourth grade, they're doing it. Okay? Now, they're whatever, they're going to go with time to rent cars at renting cars at going with time. I'm not sure which. Okay, but their own Hanukkah, their own menorah, and their own enjoying or celebrating the the story of Hanukkah, it dissipates, and it becomes almost a chore. Something that they need to do. Now, when they grow up, some people continue to feel that way. Other people mature, and they sort of embrace it. Now, I am not offering solutions. I am stating a truth. The truth is, every school in every grade has to prepare the students to come to the seder excited. And I mean the word excited, not just prepared, excited. Now, you can't prepare a 14-year-old to be excited at the seder the way you prepare a 4-year-old, cuz 4-year-olds are excited by a, you know, by a crown made out of colored paper. You know what I'm saying? Or whatever little book, you know? The kids get older, they the arts and crafts, I mean, I look at the arts and crafts, I the first question I ask myself is, how much of these arts and crafts did my children make, and how much arts and crafts did my my morah's assistant make? And of course, an arts and crafts made by a child is far more valuable, even if it's the little pieces of colored paper are pasted crooked, than if it's perfect as made by the morah. Because then the arts and crafts are not for the children, the arts and crafts are for the parents, which unfortunately is also part of the reality of it all. Okay? But a 14-year-old, if you want to get them excited about the seder at their level, I'll just to give you one example. What could teachers do to take kids in the sixth grade, to seventh grade, and eighth grade, and make the seder something that they're looking forward to? I'm going to give you a very, very simple example. The shiurim. How much is a zayis? How much is a kazayis? How much is a kazayis mid'oraita? How much is a kazayis mid'rabbanan? It's it's really not It's not a big deal. But the teacher comes to class and the teacher cares. He says, "You know, you have to drink a cup of wine. Our minhag is that say that we drink wine and don't drink grape juice and I'm sure you're aware that Pesach we're careful to drink non-mevushal wine. Oh, mevushal wine non-mevushal wine is hard to have around the house cuz we all have Um unless you can open the bottle finish it each week. Um but Pesach we're very particular at least for the seder to have non-mevushal wine. You're supposed to drink it in one gulp and you want to stay up all night. You don't want to get headaches from the grape juice. You don't want to get sick from the wine. So, you use a small cup. I just bought a gift for a a dear friend of mine. I bought him two bechers. A becher for the seder and a becher for Pesach. Cuz the becher for the seder is just the right size. Just Halachically it's kosher. And the becher for Pesach is a decent size becher. Because by the seder so if a teacher came to school and he went over the shulchan aruch with his kids and maybe even he showed them physically a stickel matzah a stickel maror. What he's doing or what she's doing in focusing on that simple thing is making the kids and I don't want to call them children cuz they're not they're bigger think about the seder before the seder so that when they come to the seder they have a focus. I got to have to eat a shiur and you know, and of course a lot of times what happens at the seder is one seder is we're not eating enough and the other seder is or the four sodot maror we're eating far too much. I want you to know, when I was growing up we used to eat a half a matzah for the kazayis that I said and a third of a matzah for kazayis deoraisa it's so much. Rabbi Breuer zol zain gezunt un shtark writes in his book on Pesach that a kazayis deoraisa is a quarter of a matzah. 1/4 and a kazayis derabonon is a sixth of a matzah. That means for korech you need a third of a matzah for both pieces together. We're eating so much matzah and we're for sure eating so much maror. You know, cuz I said maror is one leaf. It really is. But we eat whatever, three or four. I don't know what the reason is, but we do. Um but that alone, if you come to school and you show this to the kids, they will come to the seder with focus because the teacher made it important to them. I think until people reach the age where they are Jewish for themselves, which is adulthood. When you're no longer coming to the seder and drinking four glasses to you know, because this is what we do or because to please my parents, but because I am a self-standing Jew and Jews do this. Your teachers, your school, your your supportive environment needs to bring you to the seder excited. And of course, in addition to that, you want to excite kids about the seder, you share with them interesting ideas. Um I I would argue that one of the best ways to get kids in high school um excited about the seder is let them come up with their own pirush on one paragraph of Haggadah. Imagine a school where they come to a class of let's say let's say I don't know, 50 girls. And they say, "You, you, and you, Halahma Anya." Come up with a pirush. It's original. You want to look up sources, that's your business, but don't tell me any sources. Your own pirush. Next three girls, you, you, and you, come up with a unique pirush on Mah Nishtanah. You, you, and you, come up with a new pirush on and you put it together in a book. And you give it to the kids to take home. Now, you see what you see what you see what I wrote? You see what I wrote? Yeah, you want to the other girl. And then what you see what I wrote? You see what I wrote? It's not so hard to do. It's about giving it importance. And to be very direct, this is what I want to talk about. This is my topic. Okay, this is not just to of Yom Tov, it's to of every day. When we when we send from kids to school, the number one reason we're sending from kids to from school is that they should come out of that school, finish the sentence. From. Not learned. Learned it is very important. It's very important because for so many reasons. If the kids go to school, they don't learn, then they're going to hate themselves. And it's very hard to be from if you hate yourself. But that's the goal. So it This is true upon you every day. Uh in my fantasy world, which exists only in my head, every single day every single day of the year, every single student in school from K through 12 learns a halakha. Not out of a book. Not out of a book. A teacher walks in and shows them what to do. There's enough halakhas to keep kids busy through 12th grade. You have to be creative. In the 11th grade, you're not going to be talking about how you say "Oisa shalom" when you finish mincha. You're going to be talking about pas Yisrael and pas akum and bishul Yisrael and bishul akum. But these the the kids will be interested. Anytime you come into a class and talk to the kids about something practical, even the kids who never listen, their attendance go up cuz they see the point. And this is it's it's one of the things that's lost and you should know the the the fault is not the school's. The fault is the public school system. We came to America from Jews had chadorim always. Now, I I The honest truth is, I'm not going to lie to you. They never had chadorim for girls. They didn't. Girls learned at home. So the very bright girls would would sneak into the back of the cheder. They'd make a space for them in the cheder. The average girl learned from her mother. That was basically it. Their mothers had a lot of yiras shamayim. They were simple women. They were great balabustas, but they were not very learned and the girls learned from them. Today, it's a different world. It's a very very different world. The girls not only can learn, but they must learn. Okay? But we all in in when boys learned in cheder, the most important thing was how we did things. Whether the kids learned one more page Gemara or one less page Gemara was less important than the daily living as a Jew. You know, they're not talking in Davening, knowing where to stand, knowing where to sit. Knowing how to shake when you're doing Shalom, knowing how to kiss your tzitzis. I mean, I can go on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Um in America, there's a public school system. And the public school system is built on two things. They call it an eclectic education. You learn a little bit about a lot of stuff, which is really very stupid. Kids have in in a week in high school 20 teachers, 20 subjects. I mean, you have that. The boys don't have that. Um you have to learn a little bit about everything. And what happens to most of the students is they don't learn anything about anything. It's It doesn't work. I mean, I don't know why the system is built this way, but it is. And the second thing is you have to come out with certain skills. You have to know how to do certain things. Who you become doesn't matter to the public school. If you are a good person, a bad person, you have to graduate. And that's what it takes to graduate. You learn an eclectic Let's call it a liberal arts education. Learn a little bit about so many different subjects, and you have to know stuff well enough to graduate. That's not what a cheder was ever meant to be. A cheder is a place that teaches you how to be a Jew. First of all, teaches you Torah, second of all. So, we came to America, we built our schools, we built our schools in the American model. From schools, for the most part, conform to the American model. Kids go to school to pass or fail. To get good marks, to get bad marks. Now, I I believe me, I'm the biggest advocate for all of those things. But at the same time, there's another side to that. The other side is if a kid can't learn, but he's he's an aleph bet kid, and he goes to school, and he learns how to be a Jew, school is succeeding him. He may not be succeeding in school, but school is succeeding him. Me hader bet sayer, "Yeah, a Jew." Then he can have a kid who's brilliant and he learns Gemara very well, but when it comes to mitzvahs, when it comes to Yiddish vayam, he doesn't get it. He does it, but he doesn't have highest for it. So, when he grows up, he's likely to lose it. This school has failed him. And when it comes to Pesach every year, I it it becomes so acute to me. I watched it with myself. I really watched it with myself. I when I was a teenager, I had one teacher who spent a month us Haggadah. Now, I I learned by him 2 years. So, when I came home to the seder when I was 14 and 15 years old, I was on fire. I took made my house crazy, you know. I got rid of sugar. I got rid of I was the big radical in my house, you know. I was the meshuggener who only schmaltz and boiled sugar all the other meshugas. I brought them home. Why? Cuz my teacher spent a month learning Haggadah. Then I came to different yeshiva, never learned Haggadah, and I fell asleep at the seder. Very simple. Very simple. So, what I am saying is to you, you are seminary all of you girls, you're grown-ups. And right now, you are in the unique position of being an adult and for the most part being responsible only for yourself. In a few years, you're going to be an adult, but you have responsibility for many others. This is the golden opportunity for you to really enjoy the seder. I don't only mean the tasty wine and the gossip. I mean the seder. Saying that I don't know what your situation is because Lubavitch is Baruch Hashem all over the world. Sitting with your family, whichever your family you're going to sit with, enjoying your family members, and you know, to say it in the cliche, going out of Mitzrayim. However you define going out of Mitzrayim as, this is your year or two or three, you know, if you were in 12th grade, I'd be making the same speech, um for you to really come to the seder, show up, you have two weeks now. The school is almost done, but you have two weeks. There's so many tools out there for you to spend just 1 hour a day learning about the Haggadah, learning about the seder. When you show up, it's not just that you have a divrei Torah to say at the table, which is nice, but you show up to the seder wanting to be at the seder. You show up to the seder not dreading the staying up all night and the matzah and the wine that's going to make you sick till the other Pesach. You show up to the seder with an excitement about this very special opportunity to sit with people that you love that are very close to you and spend a few hours singing and talking and eating and celebrating the exodus from Egypt. I put this to you as a challenge. You're not 6. I don't think there's any possibility in the world for anybody, certainly not for me. I'm not much of a manipulator, to put you in the state of excitement you were in when you were 6. You'll never get 6 back until you'll have a 6-year-old daughter or son and you'll celebrate it through them. But you are 18. And you are in a position to come to your seder and say, "I am not going to be bored. I am not going to resent this. I am not going to sleep through it. I'm going to enjoy it." And by the way, I really advise you, don't drink wine or strong wine for the first two cups, so you get through the seder. Every girl says, "I'm going to try the four cups." That's like, "You know what? Tonight Tonight I'm going to try grape juice." I drink a very low alcohol content wine with no sugar because I mean, Pesach you don't drink sugar, but that's a different story, because the sugar goes straight to my head. It makes me sick. When I drink low alcohol content wine with sugar, by the time I'm holding matzah, I have a headache. This It doesn't taste good, but I get through the seder no problem. And by By there's a custom in my house, it's sort of an unwritten rule. We basically do not eat shulchan orech. We look at the food, you know. Because if you eat shulchan orech halachically you're not you're eating the afikoman because you physically have no right to put food into your gullet. At that point you're plotting, you know. You don't have to eat a six-course meal for shulchan orech. You can eat, you know, look at the fish. You eat a little soup and you eat the kosher knaidl for Pesach. You should be able to eat the shiyurim. It's a lot of matzah, it's a lot of wine. You don't do it every day. And for me, at my age, and it's been this way for a while, if I overeat, I'm I'm sleeping in an instant. So, the trick is you eat less, you stay up. But I'm I'm I'm I'm really coming into this room to have a simple fabrengen with you. One message. Today is aleph. So, it's Pesach is Thursday. Am I correct? Thursday, Friday, Shabbos. Yeah. Yeah, same as Sunday, right? The 10th is aleph. You have 2 weeks. Your challenge. You're going home. A lot of you are going to have to help. You can help clean, you can help looking after little kids, you can help whatever help it is. A lot of time, when your brain still works early in the day, to prepare yourself for the seder this year. Maybe take out your old notebooks. Maybe you have notebooks, I don't know what you have this year. You probably have from every year of high school stuff. Freshen up your experience of being at the seder. So, when you show up to the seder this year, you're excited. Every mitzvah we do we're supposed to do with excitement. We're supposed to daven shacharis every day with excitement. I put on tefillin. We're supposed to be excited putting on film every day. We're supposed to be excited every time we do any mitzvah, even the ones we do every day, like say birkas hamazon. Now, it's hard, unless you're a rebbe to the masmid, unless you're some big tzaddik, to always be excited about every mitzvah. But it's not nearly as hard to be excited about mitzvah that comes once a year. Now, it's a physically very exhausting mitzvah. It's a It's late at night. It's full of the worst kind of food in the world. I I All of the problems with the seder that I get. That's my challenge to you. Show up to the seder and and take the most of it. Enjoy it. Be a part of it. Say something. Listen to people talk. Engage. But it requires preparation. You know, if you're not going to sleep in the afternoon of Pesach, you're going to be too tired. Um if you're not going to mentally prepare, you it's it's it's not going to work. So, I am giving out a challenge to all the girls in seminary of base sifka to um to come to their sedarim prepared enough to be excited. Now, for some of you, it's pirush of the haggadah. For some of you, it's the halachas. Just the technical halachas. It's not very difficult to learn through the halachas of the seder. The halachas of Pesach is books. But the halachas of the seder and even the halachas of the haggadah, it's not that much. But if you take out a kitzur shulchan aruch, which is available in English, they're both available in English, you can do it in half an hour. Know the halachas, you know, know about karpas, know about making a bracha. What happens if you make a bracha? You don't make a bracha, right? You're not supposed to make a bracha on karpas. What other thing is unique about karpas? Does anybody remember what else is unique about karpas besides the fact that you're not supposed to make a bracha? If you have more than a kazayis, then you have to make It's a You're supposed to eat less than a kazayis. Right? So, if you eat onion, it's not a problem cuz you can't stand onion. But if you eat potato, you want to have a nachas shikel, especially if you're hungry. You're supposed to eat less than a kazayis cuz if you eat a shikul, there may be a shulchan aruch that you want to make for many reasons, including the fact that the beracha adama of karpas is supposed to be used for the maror. Now, if you ate a shiur of karpas and you made a beracha you're not going to make a beracha adama anyway. Why? Because you washed. But it's not part of the seder. So, these are little tiny little details of which there are a a by the seder that if you put this if you research those things, you're not just going to have a little information. You are going to bring yourself to the Seder in a state of of readiness and preparedness and and enthusiasm and meaning and so on and so forth. Um and then of course I'm sure again I don't know anything. I'm sure there's the customs of your home. You know, you grow up in a house, you have parents. You have I don't again maybe you've been by uncles and aunts, by grandparents. There's the way you sing the Seder, the way people sit together. When you become a teenager, you hate all those things because the only thing teen teenagers want to do is be around other teenagers and adults are are slow moving vehicles and children are obnoxious. Um but there is those traditions. You want to embrace those All the things you hate about your parents, you you want to do them. I'm telling you cuz they're good. They're boring. When you're 18 years old, they're boring. When you're 16 years old, they're for sure boring, but they're also beautiful. You want to embrace those things. And if you tell yourself that, if you come with that mindset and you allow yourself to embrace those things, well, you'll be doing yourself a good favor, a big favor, not just for this year, but for always, but specifically and particularly for this year. Okay? This is my speech to you. Now, I got another 10 minutes and I have material. I'm not going to run out of things to say. If anybody wants to comment on the diatribe I just gave you, I'd like to listen. If nobody has any comments, I'm going to talk a little bit about the Seder. Just going to mention a few little points. Go ahead. Um I remember my siblings like when I was 14, they're like eighth, seventh and eighth grade, and I put together their own like Haggadah. They were all excited about making their like it was like a grown-up version. My brother like still uses it. Because in school he didn't get it. No, because he decided just he he he and my sister and they decide after school they're bored and they want to have something cool and exciting for Pesach. But but you realize that your brother's the exception. In other words, your brother created excitement cuz his school didn't provide it. And he's just a special kid and you probably come from a special home. There's a reason why he did it. Now that he could have collected baseball cards. You really he could have found There's a lot of other ways for kids to keep themselves busy after school. He chose to make a brother that was mature. It was important to him. In doing that, he was doing a lot of things including making Pesach as exciting to an adult as it was to a child. Which is which is which is really interesting. A little kids enjoy stuff because they're little. Big kids enjoy stuff because they're big. Not because they're still little. So there's a whole shift in how we appreciate the Seder. The Rebbe was a very holy man and extremely learned. He enjoyed the Seder. He enjoyed He He did it so many times. He wasn't bored. It's a mitzvah. It's a mitzvah. There was a Hasidic Rebbe whose name was Rabbi Chaim Halberstam of Sanz. I mean you guys are you know BBB born brainwashed and closed-minded. Uh I guess that's BBC. Um So you don't know anything outside of Lubavitch, but Sanz is one of the largest Hasidus in the world. Sanz is Hungarian Hasidus. Uh Klausenberg is Sanz. Bobov is Sanz. Even Satmar is really Sanz. Rabbi Yoel Satmar his last name is Teitelbaum, but his wife was a Halberstam. The Halberstam mishpacha is one of the most powerful Hungarian Hasidic Rebbe mishpachas. Rabbi Chaim Sanz lived a very long life. He lived into his 80s. And he had many many children. He was a He was a great tzaddik and a great gaon and a very successful Rebbe. He passed away right after Pesach. In tough race London time. Okay, that's would be 1877, I think. He knew he was dying. He was ill. And he came to the seder and he drank the wine which Dr. Rabbi told him not to do and the matzah and the whole business. And after the seder he he patted his belly. A tzaddik, a 86-year-old tzaddik patted his belly and said frame my together we full mix with them and by far on and all the holy going inside and says, "Rejoice my kishkes, my stomach. How many mitzvahs are you holding now?" That's Today he was a he was a he was a big tzaddik and he was a a Khabad is everything is very controlled and precise. It was a more warm, expressive Hasidic. Rejoice. He knew it was his last Pesach. And he was rejoicing in the karpas and the charoses and the chazeret and the maror and the matzah and the wine. This is for adults. It's It has to be mature. Which means you have to see the holiness and the depth and the the grown-upness of a seder. And that's on us. You know, we're supposed to kids in school are supposed to get it from their teachers. But it's you know, teachers are whatever. Teachers are Teachers give a lot more than they can, but whatever they give is not enough. Um And part of what they have to give is this enthusiasm. If your teacher doesn't give it to you, you give it to yourself. You come to your seder and create your own excitement. Does anybody else wish to share? And it should be a progression both physically and Of spiritually. Yeah, of course. Of course. Think Don't think of a 6-year-old. Think of the Rebbe. The Rebbe was not bored by the seder. He did it with his own neshama. And he was a smart guy. So what was he excited about? He was doing a mitzvah. He was serving Hashem. We're doing mitzvahs. We are serving Hashem. We should be this enthusiastic. We I mean, we are little people. We We're little people in every way, but we're still people. And we should create that enthusiasm for ourselves. Um I'm going to say one thing about the Haggadah. Um there's a lot of themes to the Haggadah, right? One of the themes of the Haggadah is derech eretz. One of the themes we do everything very rich. One of the most unusual halachas is that Pesach by the Seder you're supposed to put on the table all of your gold and silver. Now, nobody does this. But halachically you're supposed to take all your chometz stick of achers and your chometz stick of lechter and your chometz stick of dishes of silver, polish them, and put them on the Seder. Don't use them. Clean them and put them on the Seder because you're supposed to feel rich. Now, don't do it. I'm not doing it. Nobody does it, but that's the halacha. You want to have beautiful silver, whatever you can afford. Everybody is in a different financial bracket. Make things rich. You lean by the Seder. You drink a cup of wine without pausing, which you're not supposed to normally do. You gulp down a whole cup. That's being done to show that you're a rich person rather than a person who's calculated. That's one side of the Seder. The other side of the Seder is that we're we are experiencing aveilus. We're experiencing sadness and mourning and slavery. The most basic expression of the sense of aveilus by the Seder is the broken matzah. Everybody knows that Shabbos and Yom Tov you have to have lechem mishneh. Right? Right. Okay, just let me finish my thought and then your question, okay? I want to quote the Vilna Gaon, the Gra. Nobody does it. Today more people doing it, yeah. The Vilna Gaon held we don't do it, but the idea we agree with. The Vilna Gaon held that by Seder you should not have three matzos, you should have only two. Now, three matzos are brought in halacha. Everybody has three matzos. K'ilu they eat salt. Everybody knows K'ilu they eat salt. Come on, K'ilu they eat salt. Why did the Vilna Gaon say to have two matzos? Now, I I one of the reasons, at least, is cuz the Vilna Gaon wanted that we should show by Pesach that a broken matzo is as is good as a whole matzo. The reason we have three matzos is because we break one. And you need to have two shleimas. You have two shleimas but a broken one. The Gaon held that Pesach the broken is whole. We agree with him in philosophy, we just don't do it in fact. The whole Seder is said on the broken matzo. You start off the Seder by you break the matzo, it's not whole. Oni d'arka b'frusa, a poor person cannot afford a whole loaf, he has a broken piece. You start the Seder by breaking the matzo, not eating it. You put away half, and the other half you leave out. Most of the Seder the matzo is supposed to be exposed, except when you pick up the becha by hay lachma anya. By v'hi she'amda, and then at the end of the Haggadah, the matzo is sticking. You're saying the Haggadah on the broken piece of matzo to connote poverty. That's why we eat maror, and of course that's why we use salt water. There's minhagim of the Seder that speak to the cheirus aspect, and there's minhagim of the Seder that speak to the um aniyus aspect, to the avdus aspect. Go ahead, talk to me, go ahead. My question was what you were saying about putting on golden clothes to celebrate the Seder. The Rebbe The Rebbe b'klal was Mr. Uh what's the word? There's a great word in English that's not coming to me. Mr. Underwhelming. Everything that the Rebbe did personally was very tzniustic. What he wanted us to do was to make a lot of noise. It's so ironic. In the Rebbe's private life, everything was understated. In the Rebbe's Rebbe's ship, everything was overstated because the Rebbe understood America. How you reconcile that? That's a different question, but that's I just want to say one more point. The third ingredient to the Seder, which should I say first, is that the Seder revolves around the children. Kishaf four kids this four in Torah. Four different where the telling you know Maror this this four in the Torah which become the four sons. The Seder revolves around the children and keeping the children awake. And of course, one of the components to this child centricity of the Haggadah is that you do things to make the children curious. You do all children do things to make the children ask questions. And the simplest example of that is you start the Seder like any meal. You make Kiddush. What do you do after you eat Kiddush? You wash. But you don't eat bread. You eat a vegetable. After you eat the vegetable, you break the bread. So it's Okay, so you threw in a vegetable. Big deal. But now you're going to break the bread. But you don't eat it. You put it away and you fill the second glass. Now the child knows that the second glass of wine is usually spilled for benching. The first cup of wine is Kiddush. The second cup of wine is Hamotzi. He says, "Wait a minute. We didn't eat." So he says Mah Nishtanah. This is the choreography, you know. The kids know better than the adults. This is to make them curious, but that's the concept. In the times of the Shas, after you know what they did? They took the table out of the room. The table with the food was carried out. They made they brought a big table full of food including the and everything else, and they made Kiddush. They washed, no brocha, course, Karpas, yachatz, and then they took the table away. And they put the second cup down. Because we didn't eat. So, the child is being encouraged to ask Mah Nishtanah. It's the parent's job to answer the child. You know the same story with the Rebbe. That the Rebbe came to the seder in Bais Chana many, many years ago and he asked, "Who's going to ask the four questions?" And the answer was Mendy Feller. Who's Mendy Feller? He's my age. I'm probably 57 or 58, but then he was a boy before Bar Mitzvah. His father, Rabbi Moshe Feller, was the language of the Shulchan Aruch and so on and so forth, was leading the seder in Bais Chana. So, the Rebbe asked, "Who's going to ask the four questions?" Mendy Feller. So, the Rebbe turned to his father and said, "But does the father know the answers?" And everybody laughed, like it was a joke. The next day, the first day Pesach happens to be Rabbi Feller's birthday, the Rebbe called him into his room. And he wished him happy birthday, which is very special. And then the Rebbe said to him, "I wasn't joking last night. When I asked if you know the answers, I really meant, do you know the answer?" And then he said to Rabbi Feller, "Do you understand my question?" And Rabbi Feller said, "Maybe the Rebbe means that the child knows the answers cuz he went to school. The child knows the answers cuz he did the seder last year and two years ago and three years ago. And the child's question is, why are we doing it again?" And the Rebbe said, "That's exactly what I meant. And can you tell your child the answer to that question?" And this is a question that would be nice if we can answer for ourselves. Anyway, a chag a Pesach kasher v'sameach. Okay, be good. Thank you.