Pesachim 114

[rhu]

So I hope those of you who were interested kept going even when I forgot to post reminder links. :-) Seriously, the translations through 106 are on dafcast.net, and if you were doing a page a day you would have run out by now. And the next bunch of pages remain on the tangent of kiddush and havdalah --- an important tangent, but the point here is to enrich our sedarim.

So I have jumped ahead and just posted daf 114. And I learned something (or, since I did this a few years ago, I'll assume that I re-learned something that I had forgotten) about the answer to the third of the four questions.

On all other nights, we don't dip our food even once. On this night, why do we dip twice?

Reish Lakish said: This Mishna of ours says i.e., establishes that mitzvot require kavannah. Because it is not his intention to fulfill the obligation of maror when he eats it the lettuce – what we now know as karpas, he eats it with the blessing “… Who has created the fruits of the ground.” And perhaps he does not have the intent of fulfilling maror at that point, later he must dip it in the charoset to designate it as maror.

In other words, by this view (and others are expressed), the reason we dip the karpas in saltwater and the maror in charoset is that if one uses romaine lettuce for both, there is no physical distinction between the two. By dipping them in different substances, we make them distinct items, and we express physically our intent that the one dipped in charoset should be the one with which we intend to fulfill our obligation to eat maror

May we know the sweetness of the charoset and not the bitterness of the maror, and may the ultimate redemption come speedily. Süssen Pesach!

[Dedicated to the memory of my Opa, Louis Bissinger, z"l, whose yahrzeit is tonight/tomorrow]