Passover And The Wicked Son

The seder involves a ritual in which children ask scripted questions that make them seem like dumbasses, and the adults reply with scripted answers that made them sound like sages. Truthfully, the children, who probably just finished a unit on Passover in Hebrew School, know the answers to the questions much better than the adults do. Having them ask the questions out loud is more about reinforcing the fact that they’re kids with no power over their own lives than anything else.

My favorite question was always the one that is asked by “the Wicked Son.” The Wicked Son asks about the observers of Passover in the second person, i.e. “Why are you eating matzoh? Why are you eating bitter herbs?”

The harsh remonstrance from the adult (reading aloud from a book, while everybody sits there hungry) is that the wicked son just doesn’t get it. In the version that my relatives used, the answer to the wicked son ended with “If you had been in Egypt, you would not have deserved to be brought out.”

Now, when I read about Passover, the slavery in Egypt always seems to be depicted as a metaphor for the Holocaust. But that’s not how I was raised. We were commemorating an actual journey out of an actual desert. There were the plagues, and the drops of wine carried from the glass to the plate by a butter knife.

image by anomalous4