At the very end of Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet’s lecture, “The Eulogy for Joe DiMaggio,” he recounts an amazing story that happened over thirty years ago at Maimonides Day School in Brookline, Massachusetts. 

One evening, after Mincha, while waiting to start the Maariv service, the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rav, asked one of the members of the minyan for a special favor. “Moe,” the Rav said, “we have thirty minutes before we are going to daven Maariv. Can you do me a favor and teach me all the rules of baseball? I want to know how the game is played.”

Although shocked by this unusual request, Moe gave the Rav a thirty-minute crash course on the minutiae of baseball: three strikes you’re out, four balls and you walk to first, stealing a base, and other arcane particulars. At the end of the thirty-minute tutorial, Moe mustered enough courage to ask the Rav why he wanted to know how to play baseball. The Rav replied, “My grandchildren are visiting and I want to be able to talk to them about what interests them.”

One of the greatest Talmudic scholars of the 20th century knew what few teachers remember — always begin a class or lecture by first engaging your audience with that which interests them. Once you have gained their attention, you can continue teaching any lesson you wish.

If this is true in the classroom, how much more important it is at the Passover seder when we are Biblically commanded to be teachers, recalling and reenacting the story of Exodus. To assist us, our sages devised the Haggadah, a teacher’s manual and text, created to stimulate thought and discussion. A problem, however, arises with the very first ceremony right after Kiddush.

According to tradition, we wash our hands and dip a vegetable into salt water. If the purpose of the Haggadah is to arouse stimulating discussion, partaking of an hors d’oeuvre seems to fail the test. Could karpas, which can hardly fill the stomach, feed the mind? In a setting where all ceremonies are meant to challenge and intrigue us, why did the rabbis select such an innocuous ritual to engage their audience?

Perhaps we can find our answer in an explanation taught to me by the late Rabbi Isaac Bernstein of London. Rabbi Bernstein noted that a Talmudic passage at the end of Pesachim (65b) describes how the pascal lamb was carried home after it was slaughtered and sacrificed in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud states, “A Baraisa taught: Each and every one put his pascal lamb in its skin and swung it behind him. Rabbi Illish said like Arabian merchants.”

Why, however, would Jews carry their pascal lamb home to their Pesach seder looking like Arabian merchants? What could this possibly mean? In attempting to answer this question, the 19th century scholar, Rabbi Shlomo Kluger, in his commentary to the Haggadah, Yeriot Shlomo (printed in Rabbi Yaakov Emden’s Siddur Beit Yaakov), detects what appears to be a major deficiency in the Haggadah’s narrative of the Passover story.

True, Rabbi Kluger notes, we recount how Pharaoh persecuted our people and how God redeemed us from slavery with great miracles. But the beginning of the story is missing. Nowhere do we discuss what caused us to go to Egypt in the first place. Doesn’t the story really begin when his ten brothers sold Joseph to Arabian merchants? Therefore, when we take our pascal lamb home from the Temple, we act like Arabian merchants because Joseph’s sale led to the arrival of our ancestors in the land of Egypt.

If this is correct, where do we find this message at the seder? A great medieval scholar, Rav Manoach, in his commentary to Maimonides’ code, Hilchot Chametz U’Matzah 8:5, resolves our dilemma. Rav Manoach states, “And we have the custom of karpas as a remembrance of the coat of wool that Jacob made for Joseph which caused the entire episode of ‘and our forefathers went down to Egypt.’” According to Rav Manoach, we dip the karpas in salt water at the very start of the seder because it reminds us of how the brothers dipped Joseph’s coat of wool into blood and brought it back to Jacob. Karpas follows immediately after Kiddush, even before we break the matzot and begin reciting the Haggadah’s text, because it symbolizes the very first act that led to slavery and redemption.

And yet we must wonder why this act is called karpas. Rashi, the classical Biblical commentator, interprets the Hebrew word for Joseph’s coat, Pasim (Gen. 37:3), as a garment of fine wool, as it says in Megillat Esther (1.6) “karpas and techelet.”

Karpas therefore represents the story of Joseph’s coat. The Holocaust martyr, Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman z”l, once noted that throughout Jewish history, blood libels seemed to flare up around Pesach time. Perhaps, argued Rabbi Wasserman, it is no coincidence; rather it is payback for what we did to Joseph at the dawn of our people’s history.

Just as Rabbi Soloveitchik z”l, engaged the minds of his grandchildren as an educational device, so too our rabbis of old compiled the Haggadah with the engaging device of karpas. It connects us to the Haggadah by stimulating our minds and motivating our souls to learn the real lesson of Pesach right at the beginning of the seder, before we even begin reciting any text.