Chapter 1: What are common misconceptions about the Seder?
For today's 10-minute halacha shiur, we're going to discuss things that people get wrong at the Seder, that are misconceptions about the Seder night. This is not an exhaustive list, but it's all the things that I could think of this morning as I was trying to put a list together. So we're not going to spend much time on each of them.
I put together a list of 13 items that I think people make mistakes about at the Seder. First item, and this is not an order either. I forgot to arrange it chronologically in terms of the Seder. First item I have on the list is in terms of the ingredients for haroses. So everyone knows that you're supposed to put a tapuach in the charosis.
What a lot of people don't realize is that tapuach in biblical and Mishnei Hebrew does not mean apple. Tapuach actually means, probably means a citrus fruit. It means something like that. It may mean an apricot, an esrog, different suggestions. Apples did not grow in Eretz Yisrael. in the times of the Mishnah, nor in the times of Tanakh, so it's very unlikely that tepulach means an apple.
So really the ideal thing to use for charosis, to put it in the charosis, is some type of citrus fruit, maybe an orange, lemon, something like that, but probably not an apple. I believe Sephardim do not put apples in their charosis, I could be wrong about that, but I think there are those that have a miracle not to put apples in their charosis. So that is Number one.
Second item on the list, we're just going to be going down the list, we'll see if it takes us ten minutes. Second item on the list is a lot of people make a mistake about the sheer kezias, about how big a kezias actually is. Now, it's a little bit trite to say that I have a great chidish that a kezias is the size of an olive, because it's really not that simple.
There is a lot of discussion about how big an olive is, and it makes it onto the page of Shulchan Aruch, whether it's a shlish beitzah or a chazi beitzah, And it's not as straightforward as one might think. But what you do have, a lot of people do sometimes, is they have these gigantic shiurim of how much matzah they need to eat for a gazayis.
And they assume that they need to swallow it all within, they need to eat it all within two minutes.
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Chapter 2: What is the correct ingredient for charosis at the Seder?
Because that's a kedei achilos pras. Whether or not you need to actually eat it within a given time of kedei achilos pras, It certainly needs to be in with the Kedai Achilas Pras. How to define Kedai Achilas Pras is a major Machalokos Abosken. Min Chaschina holds that Kedai Achilas Pras is defined by each food.
So if a Pras equals six Kezaisen, and you need to eat one Kezais in the amount of time that it takes to eat a Pras of food, that a normal person would take to eat a Pras of that food, that means that if you hold a Kezais, let's say some gigantic shir, let's say you hold a Kezais that's three quarters of a hand Shmur HaMatzah,
then you have the amount of time, let's work with numbers that I could do the math easier on. Let's say Yuval de Gazayas is a half of a hand shmura matzah, you have the amount of time that it would take a normal person to eat, eating normally,
three full hand Shmura Matzah. So as long as you just eat normally, you don't have to be stuffing it in your face and just, you know, going at it and pounding away. As long as you eat normally, according to the Menchas Chinuch, granted this is against the Mishaburu, but according to the Menchas Chinuch, that would be enough for Kezias, B'Klech, Yispras, Rav Shechter, Oltes, Weh, L'maysa.
In addition to that, it's not so posh at all that there's such a giant shir for a Kezias. Rav Shachar, when we asked him how big a kazayis is, he said roughly like this big. He made it size like three by three inches or so. It's the size of a kazayis if you have that much matzah. They say the stapler used to measure a kazayis by the palm of his hand.
The size of the palm of his hand was what he considered to be a kazayis. Rav Shachar said that his father-in-law spent time by the seder of Rav Shimon Shkup. and Rav Shimon, he lived with Rav Shimon Shkaab for a couple of years when he was writing the Shari Yosef, and Rav Shimon used to take a matzah and divide up the matzah to all the people at the Seder, to have a kazayis from the one matzah.
Five or six different kazayis from the one matzah. And he wasn't a Hasidic Shereba, who was a Baal Meifes, whose matzah was growing. He was just giving the matzah. There was that one-fifth, one-sixth of the matzah equals a kazayis of matzah. So it is kidai, the truth is, to be a little more machmir on how much a kazayis is,
for the first kezais midoraisa on the first night, but not necessarily for the other kezais. And as the Mishpura says, we should be machmir for a chatzibetzah on the first kezais, on the first night, and then afterwards, a shlishbetzah would be good enough, a third of a kebetzah would be good enough. Again, not going into all of the details of Shiurim, it would take a lot longer to do that.
Another Seder misconception is that a lot of people think that if you do this, if you just lean into the air, that that's called Haseba. Hasebo is actually a luxurious type of sitting. They used to sit on these fancy couches at their table. And it's really more like a lying down kind of thing. But certainly at the very least you have to be leaning on something.
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Chapter 3: How should the size of a kezayis be understood?
That's not a good thing, because they are also chayiv in, they're also lo yatsi yidei chavasov. If they don't say Pesach, Matzoh and Maror, women are chayiv in that part of the Seder as well. Another Seder misconception is that very often you'll have two options for Maror at the Seder. So the way people will say it is, do you want the real Maror or do you want like the lettuce?
So in fact, the real Maror is the lettuce. The Mishnah of Masech HaSubsachim lists off five vegetables that are kosher to use for Maror. Lettuce is number one on the list. We are confident we know what the number one thing is. That is lettuce, and that is chassah.
In fact, we just said in Shira last week, the Sefer HaChinuch writes that it's a hider mitzvah to use lettuce for Maruk because it's called chassah. And chassah reminds us that So in the shame of the vegetable, there's a hider.
It's a very interesting Kiddush that you not only have hider in a chavtah shal mitzvah, not only a hider in a maisel mitzvah, you actually have a hider in a kavana in the mitzvah, that it's a hider mitzvah. To use lettuce, that is the ideal thing to use from art.
Now it should be noted there are many posts that held that if lettuce doesn't taste bitter, that you shouldn't use it and you should use something that actually tastes bitter. There are other posts that had reservations about lettuce because of the bug. issues and problems. But pashut pshad, just pashut reading of the Mishnah, lettuce is the real morar.
You then have to figure out if there's enough evidence to say that maybe you can be Yotze with horseradish as well. Some suggest horseradish is also on the list of the Mishnah. Others say that horseradish is not one of the vegetables on the list of the Mishnah. It's just the only thing we had. We didn't have any of the vegetables on the list of the Mishnah.
Okay, so you've got to figure that out also. But real morar is the lettuce. Another misconception. There is no mitzvah in the Torah, avigadta la'avicha. There is a mitzvah in the Torah, avigadta la'bilcha. The father is supposed to tell his children the story.
There is no mitzvah in the Torah for a child to sit there zogging gematrias all night to his father so that the father will know what he's paying his tuition for. The children are supposed to ask questions. They should be encouraged to ask questions. They should be encouraged to think, to use their brains to ask questions. You should do unusual things to make them ask questions.
And the answer shouldn't always be so that you can ask. The answer should involve something about the actual story of Yetzias Mitzrayim. So when you do something unusual, to make one of your nephews or something ask a question, make sure that you're ready with an answer that somehow will relate to Yetzias Mitzrayim.
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