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The Wise Son Says: Haggadah Shel Pesach – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
It is a curious thing. Each year millions of Jews around the world sit down to make a Pesach Seder to commemorate an event that much of the world thinks never happened, including the majority of Jews. But we make one anyhow, including Jews who question the origin of this tradition.
We are not the only people to do this. Various religions and cultures also continue to celebrate questionable historic events, the spirits of which tend to be contradicted by present-day lifestyles. It’s the power of tradition that keeps alive what for many died long ago.
Hypocrisy? Sometimes. Perhaps this is what bothers the Rasha, the Evil Son and main antagonist in the Haggadah. He’s the one who has the gumption to ask, “What does this service mean to you?”
As the Bais HaLevi explains, it’s not that the Evil Son disagrees that the Pesach Offering once had meaning. A lamb back then was an Egyptian god and we had to break away from that to become worthy of redemption. “But who,” the Evil Son asks, “makes a god out of a lamb today?”
Though we “break his teeth” for asking his question and chastise him saying, “Had you been there, you would not have been redeemed!” the truth is, his question is a good one. In fact, it is one that the Haggadah each year asks all of us to answer by the end of the evening. The right answer is not only liberating, it is freedom itself.
Because the problem with the Evil Son is not his question, but his answer. For him, the question is the answer, because for him it is rhetorical: this service may have made sense back in the days of leaving Egypt, but today it is meaningless.
For that, we break his teeth and rap his knuckles. But how do we know for sure that the Evil Son would not have left Egypt had he been there? Would he not have had a different perspective then while actually going through redemption?
Not really. It is his approach to truth in general that reveals his Four-Fifths mentality. Had he been there, the Evil Son would have been part of the 12 million Jews who died during the Plague of Darkness for not wanting to leave Egypt. Despite what they witnessed, they chose to remain in Egypt because they did not get the message of the Pesach Offering.
Sure, we no longer worship Egyptian gods, and therefore no longer have to parade through the streets with a lamb, an Egyptian deity, to prove our loyalty to God. But that is not the entire reason for the Pesach Offering. The Pesach Offering is always relevant, even long after the Exodus is but a distant memory.
And before it as well. The Midrash says that Adam HaRishon told his two sons, Kayin and Hevel, to bring their offering on the fourteenth of Nissan, the destined night for the Pesach Offering by the future Jewish people. The Bais HaLevi says that our forefather Avraham was already eating matzah on the fifteenth of Nissan, hundreds of years before Egyptian exile even began.
If so, the question becomes: Do we eat matzah because there wasn’t enough time to bake bread when leaving Egypt? Or was there not enough time to bake bread so that we would eat matzah each year on Pesach? Was leaving in haste—b’chipazon—incidental or intentional?
Contrary to the Evil Son’s way of thinking, mitzvos are eternal. They are beyond everyday reality. They are not circumstantial, though specific circumstances may have led to their introduction, as in the case of the exodus from Egypt and the Pesach Offering. If anything, the mitzvos make the specific outcomes possible, such as the Exodus in Moshe’s time, as they will the leaving of exile in our time.
It is the Chacham—Wise Son—in each generation who understands this. He might be part of the evolving world, but he also lives above it. While the Evil Son thinks that the modern world is where it is at, and that the Torah world is antiquated, the Wise Son knows the opposite is true. From the Wise Son’s perspective, it is the modern world that is dated, and the Torah world that is eternal. Hence, the Haggadah’s response to his question: You, in turn, must teach him the laws of Pesach…
Wait, that’s it? That’s the Wise Son’s entire reward for being on the right side of the argument? Absolutely. Unlike the Evil Son, halachah (Jewish law) for the Wise Son is not just restrictions to keep a Jew in spiritual line. It is the path to true freedom, designed by God to help a person overcome instinctual behavior that overrides the will of the soul.
In fact, it is one of the greatest ironies of life how people think they are free when they are in fact slaves to their yetzer haras. Mitzvos, and the halachos for properly implementing them, are the only true defense a person has against their yetzer hara and the true freedom it stifles. Seeing that the Wise Son has bought into that truth, we further supply him with the means to achieve it.
So what’s it going to be, the Wise Son’s idea of freedom, or the Evil Son’s? That is the question the Haggadah poses to all of us each year we sit down to make a Seder. The rest of the evening is to decide for ourselves which path we want to follow, as the prophet said:
Who is wise and will understand these, discerning and will know them; for the ways of God are straight, and the righteous will walk in them, and the rebellious will stumble on them. (Hoshea 14:10)
In closing, it is more practical to read the commentary in advance of the Seder, and underline particular points to bring up during the Seder. The night is not timeless for everyone at the Seder, and patience varies from person to person.
