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 49 The Passover Haggadah

The wine cup is raised:

‘Therefore it is our duty to thank and praise, laud and glorify, extol and honor, exalt and adore him who performed all these miracles for our fathers and for us. He brought us out of slavery into freedom, out of grief into joy, out of mourning into festivity, out of darkness into great light, out of subjection into redemption. Let us recite a new song before him! Halleluyah, praise the Lord!

The wine cup is put down.

Psalm 113

Praise the Lord! Praise, you servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord henceforth and forever. From the rising of the sun to its setting, the Lord’s name is to be praised. High above all nations is the Lord; above the heavens is his glory. Who is like the Lord our God, enthroned on high, looking down upon heaven and earth? He the poor out of the dust, and lifts the needy out of the dunghill, to scat them with princes, with the princes of his people. He turns the barren housewife into a happy mother of children. Praise the Lord!

Psalm 114

When Israel went out of Egypt, Jacob's houschold from a people of strange speech, Judah became God’s sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea beheld and fled; the Jordan turned backward; the mountains skipped like rams, and the hills like lambs. What ails you, O sea, that thus you flee? Why, O Jordan, do you turn backward? You mountains, why do you skip like rams? You hills, why do you leap like lambs? Tremble, O earth, at the Lord’s pres- ence, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a flowing fountain.

According to Mishnah Pesahim (5:7; 10:6), the Hallel was chanted in Temple times during the sacrifice of the paschal lamb and in the course of the Passover meal.

Psalm 114, one of the finest Iyries in literature, alludes to the dividing of the Red Sea and the Jordan. The sea and the river are personified and represented as awe-struck by the presence of the Lord. typ" ayn is a poet- ieal description of the earthquake which accompanied the giving of the Torah. tp ox WA alludes to the miraculous supply of water in the wilderness (Exodus 17:6).

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