D’tzach, Adash, Bachav by Megan | Passover haggadah by JTL

Search Library

As I think to my family Seder, I can hear my grandfather's loud voice shouting out the 10 plagues followed by Rabbi Yehuda’s acronym: D’tzach, Adash, B’achav. All the while using his spoon to take a bit of wine out of his cup and carefully placing it on a small plate. Announcing the 10 plagues makes sense, it was a pivotal miracle in our people's history and in our freedom, but Rabbi Yehuda’s acronym does not really add anything special to the seder night, I mean we can all make up our own abbreviations if we want; if anything, it is just another thing keeping everyone waiting for dinner a little longer, and come on, every second counts. However, these three abbreviations do in fact have important significance in the seder and subsequently for us.

The first question to ask is why are the plagues split into threes, Rabbi Sacks explains that, with the exception of the last plague, they all occurred in a threefold pattern: the first was performed by Aharon, the second set of three by Moshe, and the third set by Moshe “stretching out his hand.” Moreover, within in group, the first plague was preceded by a warning in the morning, the second by a warning whose time was not specified, and the third came without a warning at all. Furthermore, Maasei Hashem explains that in each group of three plagues the first two were “somewhat removed from the people physically, while the last one actually touched their bodies.” For example, in the first set of plagues the blood was in the water, the frogs came very close to the people but did not actually affect their bodies, while the lice infected every person. The point of having the two plagues that do not cause physical harm and the last one that does was in order to set varying degrees of personal danger to Paroh. Hashem was playing with Paroh’s feelings, when he thought he would experience some slack from G-d, a plague would come which would destroy something else before his eyes, this inhibited Paroh from questioning G-d and his power.

Rivta explains that in each set of plagues, the third plague (i.e. the lice, 6th-boils, and 9th-darkness plagues) were all intertwined and when each of these plagues was brought by G-d, really all three would be incorporated in each one. This can be proved by writing out in one column the third plagues in each set (refer to picture above), If you read each plague horizontally (left to right) and then vertically (from bottom to top) it spells out those three plagues twice.

The reasoning for the Rabbi yehuda’s mnemonic in general can be explained by a few explanations. Rashi explains that the point of the mnemonic is to make clear that the way the plagues were recorded were the actually order that the plagues occurred. After all, the Torah does not have to go in chronological order, and many time it does not, however in this case, Rabbi Yehouda is telling us that this is the chronological sequence of the plagues. Shibbolei Haleket suggests that it is the letters themselves that are significant in the mnemonic. The total gematria for the 10 letters in the abbreviation is 501. This is the total number of plagues suffered by the Egyptians at the Red Sea according to Rabbi Yose (50), Rabbi Eliezer (200), and Rabbi Akiva (201) combined. Baruch She’amar takes a simpler approach, explaining that it is easier to remember torah concepts by grouping them together in categories and these abbreviations will help facilitate easier memorization of the names of the 10 plagues.

One last interesting question is why we take wine out of our cups while saying these three abbreviations, as well as when we read the makot and the three other lines. Rabbi Sacks offers the opinion of Abudraham who explains that while we are celebrated and overjoyed that we are finally free, we cannot forget about the Egyptians who drowned and suffered. We must shed a symbolic tear for them. This is also why the word “enjoy” is never used in context in the Torah with the holiday of Pesach. We cannot rejoice over our enemies demise even as we give thanks for our freedom for the very same people.

So while during seder night we might try to rush through different things so we can move on with the seder, I urge you to really thing about this acronym made by Rabbi Yehudah, and the many explanations with delve into the significance of the 10 plagues in general and the true impact they had in our freedom.

haggadah Section: -- Ten Plagues