The Mini-Maggid That Begins Hallel

Along side Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah I’m also going to be sending out eight Haggadah ideas in the run up to Pesaḥ

The mishnah, discussing the procedure of the third and fourth cups, stresses that after the third cup we are gomer ‘alav et ha-Hallel, “we complete Hallel” (mPes. 10:7). And the reason the mishnah stresses the completion of Hallel at this point is because we already started Hallel earlier in the Seder at Maggid.

And this is a strange quirk of Seder night. Because not only does the section of the Seder we call “Hallel” pick up two paragraphs in, but the Haggadah effectively takes the first two paragraphs of Hallel and declares them to be Maggid, instead.

Now there is a very simple answer for this. Because the second paragraph of Hallel begins be-tzeit Yisrael mi-Mitzrayim, “When Israel went forth from Egypt,” beit Yaakov me-‘am lo‘ez, “the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech” (Ps. 114:1). Given it’s a psalm referencing our Exodus, it makes sense to place it in the context of Maggid where we describe our Exodus.

And because you can’t just insert the second paragraph of Hallel awkwardly into Maggid – then you’d ruin the flow of Hallel – you need to also include the first paragraph at this point.

And, as simple an answer as this is, I wanted to find, not just a nicer explanation, but an explanation from within the first paragraph of Hallel itself that might augment the meaning of its place in Maggid.

And so, I turned to my go-to commentary for Sefer Tehillim, the excellent Da‘at Mikra commentary by Amos Ḥakham. And here, I came across a simple understanding that, for me, adds new depth to our inclusion of the first paragraph of Hallel into Maggid.

Amos Ḥakham makes two observations regarding the first paragraph of Hallel that I find fascinating. The first is that he argues that Ps. 113 was designed to be a communal prayer: its opening verses were written to be call-and-response – if not the entire thing.¹

Second, he notes that, not only is the entirety of the psalm devoted to praising God – being devoid of any request or entreaty – but it also only ever addresses God in the third person (it’s always things like “praise the Name of God” (v. 1) or “He raises the poor from the dust” (v. 7) and never things like “we praise You” or “You raise the poor from the dust.”)

And more than all of this, Amos Ḥakham argues that all the expressions of praise in the first paragraph of Hallel are references to other verses in other books of Tanakh.²

And I’d add to Amos Ḥakham’s observations one of my own. That the first paragraph of Hallel begins by referring to the Jewish people as ‘avdei Hashem, “servants of God.”

And combining all of these results in the realization that the first paragraph of Hallel is, in some sense, a mini-Maggid.

Having relived our Exodus from Egypt, we are no longer Pharaoh’s slaves but ‘avdei Hashem, the servants of God. We thus celebrate and praise God – never once inserting a request into the mix because Seder night is a night of appreciation for the miracles God wrought for us in Egypt – in a call-and-response format. Just like at many Sedarim, everyone goes around the table taking turns, Psalm 113 is designed to be done that same way.

Hallel thus begins in Maggid, not just because its second paragraph, Psalm 114, is obviously relevant, but because its first paragraph is Maggid in microcosm. It was written to serve the same purpose as our Maggid – and our recitation of it results in another mini-Maggid taking place at the Seder.

1. I’ve not read every comment of Amos Ḥakham to Tehillim – but he often argues that psalms served as the tefillot said by the Jewish people before the siddur existed.

2. In a lengthy footnote he lists them all (this footnote is thus a short footnote referencing a lengthy footnote).