This Shabbat is the Greatest Shabbat or Shabbat HaGadol. Why? Nobody really knows. Much ink has flowed in the attempt to answer that question. I’ll use up some bytes in that same cause.

The starting point for most scholars who look into the issue is a comment by Tosafot on this Talmudic statement: In the month of Nisan during which the Jewish people left Egypt, on the fourteenth day of the month, they slaughtered their Paschal lambs; on the fifteenth, they left Egypt; and in that evening (the fifteenth), the firstborn were stricken (Shabbat 87b).

If this is so, that they slaughtered their Pesach Offering on  Wednesday (the fourteenth), then the previous Shabbat was the Tenth of Nissan (‘on the tenth of this month each family shall take for itself a lamb’, Shmot 12:3). They, therefore, took their Paschal Lambs on that Shabbat. Therefore they called this Shabbat HaGadol, because a miracle happened upon it, as recorded in the Midrash (Shmot Raba): As they took their Paschal Lambs on that Shabbat a miracle occurred: The First Borns of the Gentiles gathered around the Israelites and asked them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They said to them, ‘This is the Paschal Offering. God will kill the First Born of Egypt.’ They went to their fathers and to Pharaoh to beg that the Jews be sent away. They didn’t want to. The First Borns fought and killed many of their countrymen. This is the verse, ‘Who struck down the First Borns of Egypt, For His CHESED is eternal (Tehillim 136:10).

If this is so, that they slaughtered their Pesach Offering on  Wednesday (the fourteenth), then the previous Shabbat was the Tenth of Nissan (‘on the tenth of this month each family shall take for........

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