Haggadah: Karpas Four: The Ishbitzer Continued
Transcribed and prepared by Anna Beller: The Ishbitzer says this is why you do Karpas with the vegetables. First of all you recreate what God did to the Jews, He gives you the light that you haven’t acquired on your own that you will make your won but has to be given to you first. The idea of sitting at the pesach table is that you’re striving but the only way you can reach the next stage is something that something isn’t your own yet, you don’t have it at all and what you earned from God is that He gives you what isn’t your own so that over the process of the seder you can make it your own.
You hear a nice thought on something you need to put it in your mindset so you can use it in the seder. So what are you doing with Karpas, you’re at vegetables because your striving for something that isn’t yours yet, you want more than what you have reached on your own. I want you to give it to me the same way a vegetable can only get it because You give it to them. I want You to give me something just as they did when they left Egypt. When You gave them the first mitzvah of matzah and Pesach. I am giving you influence of freedom now take it and use it, give the Karban Pesach. That freedom is that I have the capacity what Hashem has given me and make it my own. So now you have two thought from the Ishpitzer, they’re very practical.
The two cups of wine, to dream what freedom will be, you know you’re not free but you dream of what it will be like. A lot of people who already people who have it don’t enjoy it as much as those who have it. It’s the difference between a baal-teshuvah and a tzadik, he had or never had. A baal-tshuvah has lost or never had it. And by dreaming about it he can reach for it. Which is why it says what a Baal-teshuvah says is greater than what a Tzadik says. So when I’m drinking the first 2 cups of wine I understand I’m not a tzadick yet, I want to be a baal teshuvah, reach something and dream what I could be like and use my potential, fantasize about my possibilities. Imagine what it’d be like to be everything I’d like to be. And now that I don’t have it, it could be so much more. Part of the seder is to sense your vulnerability, as long as your in exile your vulnerable to other influences and to lose your desire to live in Israel. There are more Jews visiting Europe or Florida than visit Israel. More Israelis coming to the US than these making aliyah. So we are vulnerable. Part of what your doing in the seder is experiencing your vulnerability so we can dream about what it would be like to be free, free not of exile but external influences which are destructive. So it’s worth while to think before the seder what’s happening to me that are not things I want that are results of this.