The ‘four children’, a beloved section of the Haggadah, conveys an image of four different types of children, each of whom is sitting around the Seder table reacting differently to it. That picture is at best only half correct. The Haggadah’s source is the four times that Torah refers to the questions a child might pose. Yet a closer study of those sources suggests something far deeper than meets the eye in the Haggadah.
For one thing, these children are most certainly not asking about Seder night itself. The ‘wise child’, confronted by an external culture different to their own, starts to ask probing questions about what their parents see in Jewish observance in general. What prompts the ‘wise’ question is not Matzah, but everything Jewish: Shabbat, Kosher, giving 10% of our income to charity and so forth. Likewise the simple child’s question is prompted not by Seder night, but by observing the act of redemption of a first born boy. The ‘evil’ (or perhaps more fairly, the cynical) child’s question takes place a few hours before Seder night, whilst observing masses of Jews ascending to the Temple and slaughtering the sheep in preparation for the Pesach meal. Indeed the only child whose educational message is presented, in the Torah at least, as being on Seder night, is the one who does not know how to ask.
What relevance, then, do these four children have to Seder night? Once again the Torah texts provide the insight. The questions may not be about the Exodus, but the answers are. The Torah is telling us that no matter what a child asks, no Jewish question can be answered if it does not start with the Exodus. It is that central and that critical. Without it nothing else makes sense. Yet that is not enough.
The situation is far more confusing when it comes to the ‘evil’ child.
There the Torah’s answer and that provided for in the Haggadah simply do not match up. To the seemingly reasonable and not remotely evil question, ‘What is this service to you?’, the Torah offers us to “...tell your child: ‘this is a Pesach offering for Hashem because He passed over our houses when he brought a plague upon Egypt and saved our homes’.” Nothing in the Torah’s message quite prepares us for the Haggadah’s strike: ‘[the child] said “[what is this service] to you?” - note ‘you’ excluding himself. Thus he has denied something fundamental. Likewise you should ‘blunt his teeth’ and retort, ‘It is because of this that Hashem acted for me when He brought me out of Egypt’ - ‘me’ and not him. Had he been there [with that attitude] he would never have been redeemed!”
What prompts the Haggadah to ignore the Torah’s gentle response in favour of delivering a sharp shock to the system? And if theHaggadah is correct that this child needs something stronger, why did the Torah abstain?
But the problem only seems to worsen when we realise that the Haggadah has not merely inserted a substitute answer; it directly plagiarised it from a different child; the one who does not know how to ask. “For the one who does not know how to ask, you should initiate for them as it says, ‘tell your child on that day: Because of this Hashem acted for me when He brought me out of Egypt’.”
Several commentators offer a compelling approach. The ‘evil’ child is also a child who does not know how to ask questions. The Hebrew word for question (‘sho’el’) implies a personal need. We ask because we are seeking something. We are searching for depth, meaning, understanding and identity. Like the English word ‘quest’ that is at the root of ‘question’. But the word ‘sho’el’ is not present when the Torah describes the ‘evil’ child’s question. In fact, it isn’t a question at all: ‘When your child will utter to you: what is this service to you?’ It is a pseudo-question. A cynical attempt at a mocking statement, with a question mark thrown onto the end to disguise the statement’s true tone. But there is no real searching or seeking.
Still, there can be a certain discomfort at the Haggadah’s suggestion for handling the ‘evil’ child. Worse, the very notion of labelling a child ‘evil’ seems highly problematic. Indeed labelling any child seems far too dismissive for either contemporary sentiment or for Torah itself. Until we realise that the Torah never actually offers such labels. There is no such thing as a child who is purely wise, nor one who is purely evil, nor one who is just simple. And there is certainly no such thing as a child who does not know how to ask questions - at least not one capable of understanding the answer that the Torah and Haggadah provide.
From the context of Torah it is clear that any child could ask the ‘wise’ question. Under the right circumstances any child indeed might. And the same goes for each child. Indeed if a child represents the paradigm of the questioner, then the four children express elements of each one of us. All of us have aspects of wisdom - a desire to seek deeper understanding; all have aspects of cynicism; all have a simple side that just wants more information; and all of us have an aspect to us that has stopped seeking and searching.
Seder night is a night for children. But it is also much more. It is night that demands that each of us becomes a child. Each of us must become a questioner.
In a dictum which has sadly become all too real this year, our sages remark: ‘If there is no child present, an adult should ask the questions… and if there is only one adult they must ask themselves the questions…’
Armed with that insight, the whole first section of the Haggadah becomes clear. We do all we can to provoke questions but we do not answer the questions. Instead we tell the questioner that we needed questions because tonight there is an enormously important discussion. Effectively we tell the child ‘it was so you would ask, seek and search’. That is not a trivial question-baiting; rather it is a deadly serious attempt to shift our modality.
To re-enact the Exodus is to offer us an experience to climb to heights of unimaginable scale. It is an opportunity to open up worlds that we thought were unreachable, and to achieve a freedom we thought impossible. The Haggadah will serve as our guide. But the journey is not one of information. It is one of wonder. And that requires us to be children. All of us
The ‘four children’, a beloved section of the Haggadah, conveys an image of four different types of children, each of whom is sitting around the Seder table reacting differently to it. That picture is at best only half correct. The Haggadah’s source is the four times that Torah refers to the questions a child might pose. Yet a closer study of those sources suggests something far deeper than meets the eye in the Haggadah.
For one thing, these children are most certainly not asking about Seder night itself. The ‘wise child’, confronted by an external culture different to their own, starts to ask probing questions about what their parents see in Jewish observance in general. What prompts the ‘wise’ question is not Matzah, but everything Jewish: Shabbat, Kosher, giving 10% of our income to charity and so forth. Likewise the simple child’s question is prompted not by Seder night, but by observing the act of redemption of a first born boy. The ‘evil’ (or perhaps more fairly, the cynical) child’s question takes place a few hours before Seder night, whilst observing masses of Jews ascending to the Temple and slaughtering the sheep in preparation for the Pesach meal. Indeed the only child whose educational message is presented, in the Torah at least, as being on Seder night, is the one who does not know how to ask.
What relevance, then, do these four children have to Seder night? Once again the Torah texts provide the insight. The questions may not be about the Exodus, but the answers are. The Torah is telling us that no matter what a child asks, no Jewish question can be answered if it does not start with the Exodus. It is that central and that critical. Without it nothing else makes sense. Yet that is not enough.
The situation is far more confusing when it comes to the ‘evil’ child.
There the Torah’s answer and that provided for in the Haggadah simply do not match up. To the seemingly reasonable and not remotely evil question, ‘What is this service to you?’, the Torah offers us to “...tell your child: ‘this is a Pesach offering for Hashem because He passed over our houses when he brought a plague upon Egypt and saved our homes’.” Nothing in the Torah’s message quite prepares us for the Haggadah’s strike: ‘[the child] said “[what is this service] to you?” - note ‘you’ excluding himself. Thus he has denied something fundamental. Likewise you should ‘blunt his teeth’ and retort, ‘It is because of this that Hashem acted for me when He brought me out of Egypt’ - ‘me’ and not him. Had he been there [with that attitude] he would never have been redeemed!”
What prompts the Haggadah to ignore the Torah’s gentle response in favour of delivering a sharp shock to the system? And if theHaggadah is correct that this child needs something stronger, why did the Torah abstain?
But the problem only seems to worsen when we realise that the Haggadah has not merely inserted a substitute answer; it directly plagiarised it from a different child; the one who does not know how to ask. “For the one who does not know how to ask, you should initiate for them as it says, ‘tell your child on that day: Because of this Hashem acted for me when He brought me out of Egypt’.”
Several commentators offer a compelling approach. The ‘evil’ child is also a child who does not know how to ask questions. The Hebrew word for question (‘sho’el’) implies a personal need. We ask because we are seeking something. We are searching for depth, meaning, understanding and identity. Like the English word ‘quest’ that is at the root of ‘question’. But the word ‘sho’el’ is not present when the Torah describes the ‘evil’ child’s question. In fact, it isn’t a question at all: ‘When your child will utter to you: what is this service to you?’ It is a pseudo-question. A cynical attempt at a mocking statement, with a question mark thrown onto the end to disguise the statement’s true tone. But there is no real searching or seeking.
Still, there can be a certain discomfort at the Haggadah’s suggestion for handling the ‘evil’ child. Worse, the very notion of labelling a child ‘evil’ seems highly problematic. Indeed labelling any child seems far too dismissive for either contemporary sentiment or for Torah itself. Until we realise that the Torah never actually offers such labels. There is no such thing as a child who is purely wise, nor one who is purely evil, nor one who is just simple. And there is certainly no such thing as a child who does not know how to ask questions - at least not one capable of understanding the answer that the Torah and Haggadah provide.
From the context of Torah it is clear that any child could ask the ‘wise’ question. Under the right circumstances any child indeed might. And the same goes for each child. Indeed if a child represents the paradigm of the questioner, then the four children express elements of each one of us. All of us have aspects of wisdom - a desire to seek deeper understanding; all have aspects of cynicism; all have a simple side that just wants more information; and all of us have an aspect to us that has stopped seeking and searching.
Seder night is a night for children. But it is also much more. It is night that demands that each of us becomes a child. Each of us must become a questioner.
In a dictum which has sadly become all too real this year, our sages remark: ‘If there is no child present, an adult should ask the questions… and if there is only one adult they must ask themselves the questions…’
Armed with that insight, the whole first section of the Haggadah becomes clear. We do all we can to provoke questions but we do not answer the questions. Instead we tell the questioner that we needed questions because tonight there is an enormously important discussion. Effectively we tell the child ‘it was so you would ask, seek and search’. That is not a trivial question-baiting; rather it is a deadly serious attempt to shift our modality.
To re-enact the Exodus is to offer us an experience to climb to heights of unimaginable scale. It is an opportunity to open up worlds that we thought were unreachable, and to achieve a freedom we thought impossible. The Haggadah will serve as our guide. But the journey is not one of information. It is one of wonder. And that requires us to be children. All of us.
