When we sit here tonight at the seder dinner, right after we sing dayenu we introduce Rabbi Gamaliel saying that without doing pesach,matzah and maror it's as if you didn’t celebrate passover. In order to fulfill the obligation of passover according to Rabbi Gamaliel, we need to raise and point at the matzah and maror, but for pesach we just need to  to acknowledge that it's there. Since we don’t sacrifice anymore, we don’t want to point it out and remind us that we don’t have the second temple. .

Pesach is what we call the passover sacrifice. The first sacrifice the Israelites gave was in Egypt the night of last plague, Makat Bechorot. Hashem told Moshe to tell the Jews to get a lamb and put it on a rope to tie it on their bedposts. God commanded us three things: eat the lamb, put blood on the doorpost, and bake matzah. God then only passed over the houses with the red blood on the doorpost.  The reason the korban pesach (sacrifice) represents god passing over is because he wouldn’t pass over the house without seeing the blood of the lamb that we sacrificed.

The bone that we have now on our table tonight, represents the sacrifice that we used  to give (the whole lamb) during the time of the temple. Once the second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E.  we stopped giving a sacrifice because we aren't allowed to give sacrifices outside the temple.  Now we just have a lamb bone to remind us of the sacrifice we used to give. Although we are celebrating our freedom,receiving the torah and becoming a nation we still need to remember (by having the bone) how we are still in exile because of the second temple being destroyed.   

Another question frequently asked was, “why did they have to put the blood on their doorposts?” or “Wouldn’t Hashem know that he needs to save the Jewish nation?”. Moshe and Aaron did the other plagues and they had mercy on the Jews. God works on a very strict justice system and he therefore needed the Jews to deserve to be saved in order to save them during this plague. God told Aaron and Moshe to tell them to put blood on their doorposts. Because they were so impure, 49th level out of 50, that they needed to put blood on their doorposts to show their devotion to God so that they wouldn’t be unsaveable. This one act of devotion was their “golden ticket.”


haggadah Section: -- Cup #2 & Dayenu