Rabbi Yechiel Krisch speaking at Mishmar Parshas Pekudei at Scheiner's Shul

I want to talk about pesak and uh the reason I want to talk about pesak is pesak is coming up it's coming up a lot faster than we think I don't think anybody wants to talk about pesak that is what nobody wants to do um I I I have not cleaned my car my house anything have you done anything to get ready for PES yet I mean maybe youve had made spiritual preparations that's not bad wow you hear this guy I have an apartment he's a head yeah we oh yeah I haven't even done that we're just using no um I am I am denal I am in denial there is no um but I want us to prepare for at least so I want to talk to you about I want to talk to you about the and uh last time we did daving I think the time before that we did something from sa that rings a bell right so uh we usually do things that are seasonal right now I get to talk to you before you have PES I'm want to give you some thoughts that you can use at the Seder so that's the idea give you some seder thoughts some ideas going into PES and uh in order to talk about the Seder in order to talk about the um I want to emphasize first of all the I want to emphasize just how old the ha is I I assume people know that this is a very very old book um and I know that's kind of a thing that we take for granted by yid all of our books are pretty old but this one's older than most of our other books besides tanak this is one of our oldest books this goes back to the most of the we've had since the an that means we've had most of the in its current form unaltered for 2,000 years it's kind of wild in around the year 900 of am got involved and started adding some stuff the that's the author ra put together a sitter go put together a sitter in like the year 940 or something in the common calendar the gisha calendar so like a thousand years ago he got involved and he put it all together the way that it happen by the an he added a couple fan favorites he added danu uh at least people think he added diu he appears to have added halak Mana that's also a very popular one so we added some fan favorites I will admit but at the same time the hagad is essentially unaltered for 2,000 years we don't have books that old certainly not lurgical books that old when it comes to things that we say and we DAV a lot of the stuff is pretty new tm's older that's for sure cuz from but uh the actual s putting things together in an order that people say the is really really old prior to the putting the ha together presumably people sat down and just said maged that they did this they did the Mitzvah and then they sort of freestyle a maged at least I assume they had different traditions in maged the author of magag deag got together and wrote the current mag that we have and then they did it again with the what do you mean no they wrote the ha the ha contains the mag before the ha people said mag I'm saying I think they sat down and like made their own maggot they kind of like a a father sat down at the table and told his children we were in we got out right like a freestyle mag yeah every table had their own mag I I assume there was some sort of standardization even before the an knowing the way this usually works in Jewish history there were different there a couple different standard forms the Ana redacted it into one like big thing anyway the point here is this has been unchanged for like 2,000 years and I really unchanged for a thousand years that's for sure since Ramon made his uh made his additions that we all use well God is pretty much the same thing for a thousand years and uh that's awesome to me that we that that you find this there is like word differences in AAS you ever noticed that in the different AAS there's like no differences do you have different agadas around your house I used to collect them when I was younger I have like 50 different Haas the Maxwell House besides Maxwell House everybody needs a Maxwell House in their collection F right so besides the Maxell house no there's many different versions of and and there are small differences in like word pronunciation in we say instead of you have word but you don't have really a difference in the and the goes pretty much the same every single time had a little different slight we're talking differences that are barely noticeable the hag is the ha and the hag was the hag until something like I don't know 60 years ago when people started getting creative about 60 years ago now it's already longer maybe it's more like 80 years ago but 80 years ago people started putting out creative hagadas I don't mean to knock the children's hagadas I think they're kind of cute my kids have a Lego haa that I'm quite fond of have you seen the Lego hag I just heard about it they just made the ha but there's pictures of Lego guys okay like it's Lego para it's cute um I'm not knocking the Lego Haas but about 80 years ago shortly after the Holocaust some people got together and decided it would be be a good idea to put together a holocaust ha and the theory of the Holocaust ha it's published to this day there a bunch of people put it together there were a bunch of different versions of it pretty much everybody in the Jewish World all at once decided that it was very difficult for y to relate to and it would make a lot more sense for y to relate to being slaves in the concentration camps and being liberated from the camps so a bunch of yiden all at once introduced hos to God as one of them made it into the uh interment camps I this is not the one I'm talking about but there there were literally you know the interment camps after the concentration camps what was that after the concentration camps they were these P camps that they that they were put in afterwards for a while the DP camps yeah so the DP camps not P the DP camps excuse me so uh they were there for a while and while they were there they did a PES SED I believe they modified it a little bit so in any event uh you have these newer Haas and uh they're excited they're having uh they're having an evening it's mishmar you know you seem offended no the problem is later on yeah later on we'll regret it later yeah what newer new newer H this oh very funny because it's the name of the bag hello how you doing I'm just getting started so I said newas started to come out and um one of the newer hagadas these Holocaust hagadas uh I think it was in the year I think it was the year 1973 I think it was the 1973 somebody put out a ha that was supposed to change the story of the hag not change of you know modify it to make it a hust themed ha and they sent a letter to the Reb asking for as they wanted the Reb to write an approbation in the front of this ha and the Reb was not interested in writing an approbation for this uh but the Reb's response I think is very telling um and uh the reason why I want to tell you about the Reb's response actually is because it ended up impacting me personally uh I was on schas years ago not that many years ago three and a half four years ago I was on schas I was a I was aabad on a a college that's right Kat on campus I guess I've told you guys stories about it before here's one I didn't tell you before col College that's right here's one I told here's what I didn't tell you you guys have better memories than even than uh than anybody fantastic um here's a story I didn't tell you last time uh we used to do a p seder and it was very popular kabad P sers DM are very popular people like kabad seders um on college campuses if your choice is Hill kabad for a you go to kabad the food's better and uh and there's more there's generally more people I mean if you some you've probably seen some of these very famous ones we have one in I forget where where's the really do anybody know where the giant kabad seder is it's somewhere in Thailand they have a they have a Seder there that's got like a thousand people so SED is one of the things we do really well people tend to come to it we had a PES SED and hundreds of students came to the PES seder and someone some students went to the hill we had a hill on our campus and uh you guys probably know that there are Hill and there the H Hill is the other campus organization to help with their yish non-orthodox dka that's what I'm about to tell you it's really a laa it depends on where uh it depends on where you go so I've been told for years that University of Maryland they have a hill out there that uh that that puts that puts other to shame and I mean it's like a black hat hillow so that absolutely they have they have Hills that are that are straight up like like from hills hillow where they'd be comfortable mayum at that hill and uh then you have other kinds of Hills you have other kinds of Hills you have other kinds of Hills where where uh where I don't know the ovest and Theos would blush if they heard of such a hillo so you have a you have really runs the gam we at itha College had the other kind of hillo we had one of the hillow that was not particularly observant um our hillo I I had to call them up one time to complain because they were holding a bagel brunch on pesak so give idea of my hillo so we we had a special hillo the hillo we had at Etha College was special they wanted to have Bagels on pesak and uh for seder they wanted to do one of these real Progressive sedars their Progressive seder was that they added extra things to the Seder plate that's right the you know about the orange do you know about the artichoke no the two big ones right now are the orange and the artichoke I am here what it represent I'll tell you don't worry listen I'm coming from I I'm coming from Behind Enemy Lines uh God forbid Enemy Lines all Jews are friends but I'm here to tell you what you can't find out at a from here's what you'll find at a at a at a at a I don't know Progressive s I'll turn to Progressive Sader nowadays so you'll definitely find the orange and the artist joke this is mandatory the Orange is for members of the LGBT community who also are Hees don't give me this come on it's on every it's on every seder plate I didn't do it why you mad at me be mad at the hill oh wait it gets it gets much worse because actually that's not the worst thing on the Seder plate by comparison the Orange is actually not so bad the idea behind the orange which I'm going to oppose in a moment but the idea behind the Orange is that there's a historically margined group of people let's include them in our Sader artichoke will drive you absolutely up the wall the artichoke is to encourage inter marriage now that right that that one you got a problem so so compared to the orange actually the it's bazilian right compared to the orange the arch choke is actually the AR choke is actually so much worse the orange doesn't seem that bad anymore right the orange right so actually if you have to ask me the Orange versus artichoke I'll keep the orange anyway I had students who came to me concerned students and uh terrible I had you got to understand that things really have changed in the past couple years but when I was there 5 years a 5 years ago we were having this conversation my students I'm sorry I've upset you I didn't do it I promise wasn't me so 5 years ago this was even more Wild on college campuses it was a moment for this stuff and uh I had students who cared a lot about yides kite who were growing in their fite coming closer to shabas closer to closer to kasus who were going to be keeping PES for the first time we're very excited about the kabad Seder and wanted to do things a traditional way but at the same time they'd been hearing that any seder plate that doesn't have an orange and an a choke on it hates people so they came to me and they said can we please have a non-hateful Seder an inclusive Sader a Sader that welcomes everybody to the table and I said first of all what the heck is the so I had to be educated why would I put an arti is the orange like carpus like bad carpus I don't what is it does anybody know from R tis there's a Min RTI is a weird Min by carpus you know it my yeah bananas banana I love it I love it the rits banana Min so I'm like is this like a banana thing no it's not it's an orange is separate arti chokes what's the what's the banana um what the banana banana salt water TI says you can use and by the way he's not wrong of course it's it's an Adama it uh it go it tastes good in salt water you can slice it nice and thin so you don't have enough to make a parin for Kaz sure you can have a banana for carpa people it was it was to show people that didn't have to be green no that that bananas were D oh to teach people that banan a d I love it as a teachable moment I I think it's a really cute thing to bring up at the S you show up the banana you teach everybody in the room it's a dama teach them it doesn't have to be green although you can even you can buy green bananas if it makes you happy anyway I thought maybe it was that they explained to me that the orang is for the they explain to me that the oranges for historically margin marginalized communities and the the arch choke is to invite intermarried people into our seder and uh and my reaction was to vomit a little in my mouth but after I was done no there's a culture shock here but at the same time these are students these people who are asking me this are not people who are coming to attack Yiddish those are the people who came up with it in the first place the students who came to me were saying we want to be FR we want to be involved in yish we want to have a f Sader we don't want hate we just want don't want to hate so would you be willing to we want to have our Sader with you we want to keep P properly want to have mat we want to do it right would you mind in honor of marginalized communities and people who don't always feel welcome at the Seder adding these two things to your seder plate and of course the answer was no but the question was how do you say no in a way that also recognizes what they're feeling but explains to them why they're wrong that's the thing is that the the trick of a lot of schas is explaining why somebody's incorrect while also not denying what they're feeling you're feeling what you're feeling and you're still wrong is kind of the rally and cry ofab laich you're feeling what you're feeling but you're wrong is what we do right I'll give you an example there's a CL here's the biggest example somebody comes to me and says that they uh they have a they have a non-jewish boyfriend or girlfriend they want to marry them they're madly in love I believe you're madly in love but don't do it right you still can't so acknowledging the people feel what they feel but telling them don't is kind of ouro yes no it's just they came to you they said they want to be for they want to do it the right way that's right but yet you want to add these two things that are literally a bastardization