#pessach

This 2,500-year-old potsherd (c. 475 BC) contains one of the earliest known references to the Jewish festival of Passover.

The Aramaic note from the Island of Elephantine, Egypt, reads: "To Hoshaya. Greetings! Take care of the children until Ahutab gets there. Don't trust anyone else with them! If the flour for your bread has been ground, make a small portion of dough to last until their mother gets there. Let me know when you will be celebrating Pascha (Passover). Tell me how the baby is doing!"

Happy Passover!

Baking Matzo before Passover, 1992, Tulchin, Ukraine

Is that not common practice?

That’s a very interesting question! I have not witnessed this habit before but my family is not the most observant so that might not mean much. Time to go down a research rabbit hole!

So from what I can gather from multiple sources, while this practice is not in the Haggadah, it is ancient. Like, almost two thousand years old. However, opinions seem to differ as to the reason for this act. Some regard it as a quasi-magical act (סגולה) that can deflect misfortune or inflict it on others (there is one account of a man who would run around the streets of Bagdad sprinkling wine on the houses of people who had wronged him); some consider that it signifies that when we recite the plagues they shouldn’t be applied to us; some say that it signifies the 16 bladed sword of HKB”H; and some follow the interpretation that you are familiar with. To elaborate, the idea seems to be that our joy shouldn’t be tainted by vengefulness or anger, or even that while it was necessary that our enemies be stricken down, we should not rejoice for it. This is different to the JVP Haggadah, which seems to imply that those who tried to destroy us shouldn’t have been harmed at all. That the soldiers of pharaoh should have been allowed to cross the Red Sea to share with us the land that lay beyond.

Which sounds very nice and lovely unless you know literally anything about the last 2000 plus years of Jewish history.