The wicked son – what does he say? “What is this service to you?” “To you,” he says, not to him. When he sets himself apart from the community, he denies the very core of our beliefs. And you must set his teeth on edge and tell him, “Because of this the Lord acted for me when I came out of Egypt.” “For me,” and not for him; had he been there he would not have been redeemed. (Haggada)
The section of the Haggada that speaks of the “four sons” is a brilliant example of the subtlety and creativity of rabbinic interpretation. It is based on the fact that in four places in the Torah (three in Ex. 12–13, one in Deut. 6), reference is made to parents’ instructing their children on the meaning of Jewish practice by relating it to the Exodus. True to their conviction that no word in the Torah was superfluous, the sages did not see these passages as mere repetition. Each teaches something new. Passionate about education and ultra-sensitive to nuances in the biblical text, the rabbis sensed that the four verses were about different kinds of children. Three included questions, but were of varying levels of sophistication and therefore signaled children of different temperaments and abilities. The fourth, which made no reference to a question, must refer to the child who has not yet reached the stage of asking. The passage as it stands testifies to the centrality of education in Jewish life, and especially to the role of parents as teachers.
From the evidence of parallel passages in the rabbinic literature, it seems likely that the text as it appears in the Haggada was the result of several centuries of debate and a long process of editing. There exist, in writings from the mishnaic period and also from the Jerusalem Talmud, sources that read like early drafts on which the Haggada text was based. Of great interest, though, is the fact that in two sources we find reference not to the “four sons” but to the wicked son alone:
“And if your children should ask” [Ex. 12:26] – [This implies that] in the future, some may say, “What does this service mean to you?” One who says, “to you,” is a wicked person who sets himself apart from the community. [In reply] you too should set him apart from the community by saying, “Because of what God did for me” – meaning “He did this for me – not for you.” (Mekhilta deRabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai)
“And you shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me’” [Ex. 13:8] – Why does it say this [and not “because of what the Lord did for us”]? Because it says earlier, “What does this service mean to you?” This refers to a wicked son who sets himself apart from the community – and because he sets himself apart, so too should you set him apart [by saying], “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt” – “for me,” not “for you,” [implying] “had you been there you would not have been redeemed.” (Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael)
Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha and Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, from whose schools these teachings come, lived in the second century ce, through one of Judaism’s most turbulent and tragic eras. They witnessed the ferocity of Rome in suppressing Jewish life. They saw Jews defect from Judaism – some to ally themselves with Rome itself, others to join the new Christian sect. Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Shimon were different personality types, the former a rationalist, the latter a mystic, but they were both intensely loyal to Jewish identity and destiny and shared a sense of distress, verging on anger, at Jews who left the fold. We can now place their comments on the wicked son in a specific historical context. It was not Pesaḥ as such, nor were they speaking about young children. They were talking about Jews who, seeing the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of Rome, changed sides and allied themselves to forces that were in the ascendant. This was, for the rabbis, a kind of betrayal.
Another midrash gives us an idea of what defecting Jews argued. As always with rabbinic interpretation, we have to realize that when they spoke about their own time, they did so obliquely, by commenting on earlier times, in this case the Babylonian exile in the days of the prophet Ezekiel:
So you find that Israel sought to free itself from the yoke of its oath in the days of Ezekiel. Men from among the elders of Israel came “to seek the Lord” [Ezek. 20:1]. They said to him [Ezekiel], If a slave is purchased by a priest, may he eat teruma [food set aside for priests]? He replied, He may. Then they asked, If the priest sold him back again to an Israelite, has he left the priest’s domain? He said to them, He has. Then they said [to Ezekiel], So it is with us. We have left [God’s] domain and we shall become like the heathen nations. (Tanḥuma, Nitzavim 3)
The argument (it was restated by Spinoza in the seventeenth century when he abandoned Judaism) is that God’s covenant with the people of Israel was conditional on their independence. God was their sovereign, precisely because they were not ruled over by anyone else. Therefore, when they went into exile – in the time of the Babylonian conquest and again in the days of Rome – they lost their independence and became subjects of another king. God could have no further claim on them. He had sold or abandoned them to another power. The covenant was at an end.
This is, it should be said, a powerful case, not to be dismissed lightly. It tells us how profound the crisis was when Jews came under foreign rule. The very survival of Jews and Judaism depended on rejecting this argument, but that took immense religious courage and determination. Writing in the fourth century from a Christian perspective, Augustine cannot restrain himself from a note of astonishment at the tenacity of Jewish faith: “It is in truth a surprising fact that the Jewish people never gave up its laws, either under the rule of pagan kings or under the dominion of Christians. In this respect it is different from other tribes and nations; no emperor or king who found them in his land was able to prevent Jews from being differentiated, by their observance of their Law, from the rest of the family of nations.” The persistence of Judaism depended on a leap of faith: that despite everything, the covenant was still in force. God had not abandoned His people and would one day redeem them. It should be added that Augustine was right: no other people in history demonstrated so tenacious a loyalty to its past and future. Virtually without exception, every other people that had been conquered adopted the culture of its conquerors.
The Roman era was not the first time, nor was it to be the last, when the very future of Judaism lay in the balance. It had happened before under Babylon, and again in the days of the Greeks. It happened again in fifteenth-century Spain, when Jews came under almost unbearable pressure to convert to Christianity. There is an astonishing admission by one of the outstanding figures of the Middle Ages, Don Isaac Abrabanel, as to the depth of despair he felt at the time of the Spanish expulsion. At one point, he writes, he felt like saying: “all the prophets who prophesied about my redemption and salvation are all false…Moses, may he rest in peace, was false in his utterances, Isaiah lied in his consolations, Jeremiah and Ezekiel lied in their prophecies” (Zevaḥ Pesaḥ). Nor was he alone. “Let the people remember,” he adds, “all the despairing things they used to say” in the days of 1492.
Yet Abrabanel, like Rabbis Yishmael and Shimon bar Yoḥai thirteen centuries earlier, was convinced that defection, conversion, or assimilation were wrong. Not only were they the ultimate betrayal of the covenant of Jewish identity; they would not even succeed in sparing Jews from anti-Semitism:
Many of our brethren have forsaken the religion of their forefathers as a result of persecution, and wished to be like the nations of the world, thinking that thereby they would remove from themselves the providence of God and the duty of keeping His Torah, and would prosper in their works just like other nations and would no longer belong to the body of their people. But [they are mistaken, because] though they and their descendants would do all in their power to assimilate, they would not succeed. They would still be called Jews against their own will, and would be accused of Judaizing in secret and be burnt at the stake for it.
Three hundred and seventy years later, in 1862, Moses Hess wrote in almost identical terms about the German Jews of his time: “Because of the Jew-hatred that surrounds him, the German Jew is only too eager to cast aside everything Jewish and deny his race” (Rome and Jerusalem). This too, says Hess, will fail: “Even baptism itself,” he writes, will “not save him from the nightmare of German Jew-hatred.” Tragically, history proved both Abrabanel and Hess right.
Behind the simple paragraph about the wicked son is a long and painful history of Jews who, faced with persecution on the one hand and the blandishments of the ruling power on the other, chose to abandon Judaism. Viewing this history it is hard not to feel the irony of the fact that ancient Greece and Rome, two civilizations that prided themselves on their tolerance, and medieval Christianity, which claimed to worship the God of love, showed surprisingly little tolerance and love when it came to Jews. Their principle often seemed to be that Jews were to be tolerated and loved, provided that they relinquished their Judaism. There can, however, equally be no doubt – it is reflected in the harshness of the reply to the wicked son – that Jews themselves felt betrayed by those of their number who, at times of crisis, went over to the other side, to the persecuting power.
That is the history behind the wicked son. Nowadays, however, the situation is somewhat different. Throughout the Diaspora, Jews are again assimilating and outmarrying. As in the days of Rome and Spain the Jewish people faces a crisis of continuity. This time, however, the cause is not persecution but something else: indifference, perhaps, or ignorance, or the sheer pressure of an age and culture in which long-term commitments are becoming rarer and harder to understand. Each age brings its own challenges, and because ours is new, I am inclined to offer a radical reinterpretation of the passage “The wicked son – what does he say?”
I do so for the following reasons. First: has any Jewish parent ever truly believed that his or her son is “wicked”? The Torah contains a law about “a stubborn and rebellious son” (Deut. 21:18), brought to court by his parents for punishment. The Talmud records the statement by one of Israel’s sages that “there never was nor ever will be a stubborn and rebellious son” (Sanhedrin 71a). To be a parent is to have compassion for one’s child. The Hebrew word for compassion, raḥamim, comes from the word reḥem, “womb.” No parent can write off a child as irretrievably wicked. That is why, when we plead for God’s forgiveness, we call Him Avinu, “our parent.”
Second: is the dismissive response – “set his teeth on edge” – the best way of dealing with a rebellious child? The biblical Jacob did not rebuke his children Reuben, Simeon, and Levi until he was on his deathbed. According to tradition, he reasoned, “If I rebuke them during my lifetime, they will leave me and go to my brother, Esau.” When, in the early twentieth century, a distressed father wrote to Rav Kook about how he should treat his son who had abandoned Judaism, Rav Kook replied, “If you loved him before, love him even more now.”
Third (a rabbinic objection, this): how old is the wicked son? Either he is older than Bar Mitzva age (thirteen) or younger. If he is younger, then his question is correct, not dismissive: “What is this service to you?” which might well mean, “I, who have not yet reached the age of commandedness, do not know what it means to be commanded. You, however, do. Please, therefore, explain it to me.” If, however, he has reached the age of thirteen, then Jewish law states, “One who chastises his adult son is to be excommunicated, for he has transgressed the prohibition of ‘placing a stumbling block before the blind’ [Lev. 19:14]” (Rambam, Hilkhot Mamrim 6:9). Among the proscriptions included in the rule of the “stumbling block” is provoking someone to sin. A child over the age of thirteen who strikes his parent is guilty of a major offense. Therefore a parent is forbidden to provoke such a child by acting in a way that may give rise to retaliation.
Fourth: why does the Haggada use the strange phrase “set his teeth on edge”? Classical Hebrew contains many words meaning instruction, chastisement, correction, remonstration, and reproof. The Haggada is a rabbinic document, and the rabbis tended to prefer plain speaking to circumlocutory metaphors. Why, therefore, “set his teeth on edge” instead of the plain “rebuke”?
The last question provides the clue. The phrase “set his teeth on edge” is in fact a biblical allusion. It is cited by two prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as a well-known proverb: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Jer. 31:28). By using this unusual locution the sages were hinting at something profound. Children do not always rebel of their own accord. The parent of a rebellious child should ask himself or herself: did I do something to cause it? Was it my “sour grapes” that set my child’s “teeth on edge”? Taking this as a key to the whole passage, I suggest the following reinterpretation:
What is the child whom others see as wicked – the adolescent, the rebel, the breakaway – really signaling by his conduct? We know what he says. But what is the question beneath the words, the inarticulate cry? “Father, Mother, what does Judaism mean to you? You sent me to Hebrew school. You gave me a Bar Mitzva. You hired teachers for me. I know what Judaism is supposed to mean. I listened to the lessons. I read the books. But all the time I was growing up, you sent me mixed messages. When I neglected my secular education, you were angry, but when I missed Hebrew lessons, you never seemed to mind. I learned about the laws of Jewish life, but you did not seem to observe them, or if you did, you did so selectively. You said Judaism mattered, but what you did seemed to show that it did not matter very much. At my Bar Mitzva, you were more concerned about the catering than about how much I understood of the words I said in synagogue. As I grew older, you seemed more interested in which college I went to and which career I pursued than whether I was continuing to study and practice Judaism. You wanted me to marry a Jewish girl, but you never gave me a real reason why. I know what Judaism is supposed to mean to me – but you are my parents. I am Jewish only because you are. So I ask you from the depth of my soul: what does Judaism mean to you?”
This is a deep question and it brooks no evasion. The only answer one can give – the existential response that alone is capable of reaching from soul to soul – is to say what Judaism means to me – not to him. We must own Judaism before we can pass it on. We must live it if we are to inspire those who will live on after us. The Torah says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might…. Teach them repeatedly to your children” (Deut. 6:5). Rabbi Moses Alshekh, explaining the connection, said simply: we can teach our children only what we ourselves love.
What prompts such honesty? The knowledge that without it, “Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.” No parent can leave a child unredeemed. Therefore to be a parent is to be willing to take one’s child and walk, hand in hand, partway on the Jewish journey, showing that we are prepared to live by the faith we want him or her to continue. On this reading, the “wicked son” is not wicked, merely confused, and it is we, his parents, who have confused him. To end his confusion we must first end ours by asking, in the depths of self-knowledge, what Judaism means to us.