The Striving Higher Haggadah

The Ben Ish Chai adds that the dipping of the karpas in saltwater symbolizes that the brothers dipped Yosef's tunic into goat's blood. In light of this, we now understand that karpas means fine wool, not vegetables, but we use the term to remind us of the sale of Yosef into slavery by his brothers. Why bring this up now? Because, as we ponder leaving Egypt, we must remember how and why we descended there in the first place. It is a question we don't enjoy discussing, because the shameful answer is that we descended there because of disunity and enmity among the holy tribes

Hashem sent Yaakov's children to Mitzrayim to show them that they are not the same. Our enemies will respect us, or they will hate us, but they won't allow us to be "just like them."

In this world, the outcomes of events are in the hands of Hashem. If the Divine plan is for something to occur, all one's efforts to the contrary will be futile. The opposite is true as well. Essentially, the only thing we have control over is our efforts and motives. That being the case, one of the most important questions we must answer for ourselves is "מה בקש"-for what do we truly seek, pine, and yearn? What are our motives? What is it that we desire to accomplish? What are our aspirations and hopes?

When the Torah refers to a chacham, it refers to one who possesses a deep desire for knowledge. The wise person is not satisfied just knowing the what, he also wants to know the how, the why, and the when. He seeks to learn lessons from everyone and everything that happens around him

In the Haggadah, we raise our cup of wine and proclaim "V'hi She'amdah-It is what has stood for our ancestors..." Perhaps the "it" that we refer to includes the cup of wine we are holding, which symbolizes the beauty of the Jewish People. So often, we are beaten and made to suffer. Yet, somehow, we always emerge with resilience and plunge onward in our unstoppable quest to be the beholders of Torah. The Torah states that the more the Egyptians afflicted our ancestors to impede their population explosion, the more our ancestors' numbers continued to multiply. Everything our enemies did to stop us only ended up fueling our unquenchable internal fire. The more they stepped on us, the more and the better the wine we produced. That unnatural process has preserved us as a nation. Perhaps, that's also why we commemorate the four expressions of redemption by drinking four cups of wine. Wine symbolizes process. You can't just squeeze a grape to get wine like you can squeeze other fruits to get their juice. It takes time, investment, and expertise to have all the ingredients and conditions necessary to produce the desired beverage. So too, redemption is a process. It doesn't just happen; it's something we actively have to embrace and in which we have to invest our part

Rav Chaim Kanievsky writes that Haman and Mordechai were both ninetyfive at the time of the Purim story