A View From the Bima

Now that Purim is over and the last of the hamentaschen have been eaten, it is time for me to turn to Passover and some of the lessons that its observance can teach us.  The words  may not change in the Haggadah from one year to the next, but  the illustrations and commentaries provide us with new things to talk about as we gather with our families around the Seder table.  While in Israel, Lynn bought me a signed edition of the Abecassis Haggadah, whose pictures of whimsical characters dressed in colorful garb fill each page with such animation.  I never knew that that three of the children who bring their questions to the table had such heavy beards!  According to this popular Israeli artist from Morocco, there is much to be understood about the story of the Exodus from a Sefardic perspective.

I have been studying the commentaries associated with the four children for several years.  I am never surprised by the variety of insights into the meanings of this one section of the Haggadah as people struggle with their message.  As we prepare for the holiday of Passover, cleansing our spiritual homes as well as our physical abodes, I offer this insight from the Holistic Haggadah, commentary written by Michael Kagan.

He claims that the four children are to be understood in the opposite order in which they are presented to us, representing the four stages of human development.  The last child who does not know how to ask a question represents human beings when they are young and do not quite understand the world in which we live.  The simple child represents the naiveté of the child who is capable of asking only innocent questions.  The rebellious child is the one who enters the stage when they cannot see beyond themselves and their own personal needs as a teenager.  Only after they have aged a few years more do they arrive to a stage of wisdom or at least intellectual maturity.

However, we all know that wisdom does not mark the end of the journey.  After we have developed an ability to reason and understand, we begin to cultivate our ability to reach in and to reach out beyond ourselves to a force greater than ourselves, otherwise known as spirituality.  According to Michael Kagan, we start out our spiritual lives by believing what we are told, in the same way that the wise child accepts as truth all the laws and dictates taught to him following his question on what this night is all about.  At some point in our spiritual development, a rebelliousness occurs, and we question the dogma that we were taught earlier regarding the laws and customs and traditions.  It is not that at this stage we separate ourselves from the community by our asking.  In asking for the truth even when we are skeptical of the answers we receive, there is an element of growth in our ability to reason and to seek a greater meaning, even when it is not to be found in the conventional places.

A higher stage of spiritual development can be found in the innocent child, when our questions are revisited and a truth is to be found or re-discovered.  Our search for answers leads us on a path that aims for the heart of the matter.

The highest stage of spiritual development is accomplished when no more questions are necessary.  Those who have achieved such a level of comfort with themselves and the world in which they live, being able to be at one with themselves and with God, there is a profound wisdom to be discovered in the silence of the moment when a person meditates, and the only answer necessary is “because.”

Michael Kagan concludes his commentary on this section of the Haggadah with the following observation:  “The types of questions that our children ask are a direct reflection of the kind of relationships that we have built with them.”

In other words, the parent who relates to their child on an intellectual level will produce a child who is limited in his ability to respond to the world on an emotional and experiential basis as well as through the mind.  In doing so, we limit their potential to grow.  Pushing our children to succeed in their studies as the only means to get ahead in life is crippling our children with wisdom.

Those parents who feel alienated by their own world, and withdraw from the experiences of their parents and grandparents, choosing to disconnect themselves from their roots, end up teaching their own kids from their example that the world is a scary place.  People and events are not to be trusted.  It is no wonder that the wicked child sees himself or herself as separate, looking down on others for their naïve beliefs and observances that they hold most dear!

What is, perhaps, an even greater problem is those of us who dismiss our children much too quickly.  I put myself in this category as having not taken enough time to listen to my children’s questions. If I had taken more time to listen at an earlier stage of my own life I would have recognized the innocence of their inquiries and how much wisdom their questions would have revealed about them and their insights into the world we ive in.

Even worse than not taking our children seriously is the parent who spends so much time at work, doing other things, that they miss out on the questions that were attempted to be asked by their children.  When we have been around, how often have we uttered the words that “children ought to be seen, but not heard”?

The section of the four children reminds us each year to think about the way we have been parenting our children, developing not only their intellect, but even more significantly how we are nourishing their spiritual lives.  It is also an opportunity for us to review what we have done for ourselves in this same regard.  Michael Kagan concludes his commentary on the four children with these words, which have a profound influence on me in my preparations for Pesach and what it means to liberate myself from old habits that have enslaved me and my heart:

“By listening to our children, maybe we can learn something about ourselves.  By listening to our inner child, maybe we can learn to heal ourselves.  Open the child’s mouth, and help give expression to the suppressed voices.”

May this holiday be one in which all voices find the seder table to be a safe haven for expressing what is trapped in our hearts and in our minds.  Let no question be suppressed.  Let no voice be afraid to speak.  Let us learn from one another what it means to be open and receptive to everyone’s insights!