The Four Children: Our Annual Seder Guests
We welcome them to our seder table every year. Our holiday would not be complete without them.
They are fascinating creations, with their roots in the Torah and their identities crafted by talmudic rabbis who were perceptive about human nature. They run the gamut: one is wise, one is rebellious or perhaps wicked, one is simple, one doesn’t even know how to ask. They have been portrayed in many different ways; you can see them wherever you look, across the history of Jewish art and interpretation.
They don’t talk to each other, but they definitely talk to us.
They demand our attention and inspire us to talk back to them with our own commentary and our own conclusions. They appear at our table and demand that we recognize them and identify with them.
And we do identify with them. Each year we ask ourselves: Which one of these am I? As so many commentaries have suggested, each of us really is composed of all four, rolled into one complex person. We have our moments of wisdom. We can be rebellious. We have a need to confront the world with basic simplicity. We often don’t even know where to begin to ask. Yes, that is what the commentaries say. But deep in our hearts, each year – depending on what has happened in our own lives or in the world at large – we identify more closely with one or the other.
These four children who are wise, rebellious, simple, and unable to ask represent us, and we know it.
But there is one thing about them that is not like us. Unlike us, they can never change. Each and every year, each asks or doesn’t ask the same question; and the question each asks or doesn’t ask is written in stone, taken directly from the Torah’s verses describing a father teaching his child about the Exodus.
I grew up in a home in which the four children were among the most important characters we met over the course of the year. My father, who led our seder, loved them and found them to be deeply meaningful and inspirational. Perhaps because of that, I took his fascination even further by teaching classes year after year about the intricacies of this section of the haggadah. I love to teach this text. And I always end it with the same lesson: Our kids, like us, are distinct people and go through different stages, and each must be answered differently, in a way appropriate for each.
I recently realized something troubling about the four children that I had never noticed before. It was so obvious but I had missed it all along.
I am troubled by the fact that we don’t let them change. Throughout history, they will always be wise or rebellious or simple or unquestioning. They are never allowed to be any different. How can we do this? How we can set them in stone the way we do? There is one simple reason. They don’t change because they each have been given a name: wise, rebellious, simple, unquestioning. And once someone has a name, that name becomes his or her identity.
The wise child will never rebel; she will always be wise. The rebellious child will never conform; he will always be the rasha. The simple child will never understand; he will never grow. The fourth will never speak; she will forever be silent.
The rabbis usually were so on target in their educational technique, but here they have misled us. How much wiser would it have been had they introduced these four children as the one who asked a wise question, the one who asked a rebellious question, the one who asked a simple question, the one who did not ask at all?
It would have been a subtle difference, but it would have been instructive. For instead of labeling them, it would have been their question that would have been labeled, and there would have been the possibility of change. We would have freed them from their reputations and focused on action instead of personality. The high holy day machzor teaches us the same lesson. In the Yom Kippur Selichot prayers, we first say anu k’shay oref, we are obstinate. But a few paragraphs later, in the Ashamnu, we read kishinu oref, we have acted obstinately. This is the thought with which we are left, and it is a subtle reminder that it is our actions, not our labels, that truly count.
When we label ourselves or attach a label to someone else, it is nearly impossible to shake it. How many children have suffered because they have been labeled? How many adults have found the road to desired teshuvah , repentence, blocked because society has labeled them as a burden that cannot be shed? How many of us struggle to escape the labels we have internalized and allowed to dominate our lives?
In so many ways, our actions are an extension of our personalities. But how often do we use that as an excuse? We say, I’m just an obstinate person, I’ll never change. How often does society expect nothing more from someone who has been labeled hopeless? How easy is it to miss the fact that a person we have classified has done something positive and praiseworthy? Instead, we treat people with suspicion and skepticism.
Of course, once we have acted in a certain way often enough, it does become difficult to break out of that pattern. Our rabbis taught, sichar mitzvah mitzvah sichar avayrah avayrah, the result of doing a mitzvah is doing another mitzvah, the result of sinning is sinning again. Our actions do become ingrained. But that is what teshuvah is meant to correct, breaking away from patterns. As difficult as it is, it is infinitely more difficult when our actions become identified with our very being.
Think back to those four guests at the seder table, and how horrible their lives have become because we’ve never let them be any different than they were at the one moment they opened up their mouths or sat silently. What a terrible injustice we have done to them and to so many of God’s children who came after them.
This Pesach, let us resolve to change.
Robert Dobrusin is the rabbi of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
