The Four Adults | Passover haggadah by Paul Browde

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THE FOUR ADULTS
It is a tradition at the Seder to include a section entitled “the
Four Children.” We have turned it upside down, to remind us
that as adults we have a lot to learn from youth. From the U.S. to
South Africa to Palestine, young people have been, and are, at the forefront of
most of the social justice movements on this planet. If there is a mix of ages of
people at your seder, perhaps some of the older people would like to practice
asking questions, and the younger folks would like to respond:
The Angry Adult – Violent and oppressive things are happening to me, the
people I love and people I don’t even know. Why can’t we make the people in
power hurt the way we are all hurting?
Hatred and violence can never overcome hatred and violence. Only love and
compassion can transform our world.
Cambodian Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda, whose family was killed by the
Khmer Rouge, has written:
It is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred, and revenge only continue the
cycle and never stop it. Reconciliation does not mean that we surrender rights
and conditions, but means rather that we use love in all our negotiations. It
means that we see ourselves in the opponent -- for what is the opponent but a
being in ignorance, and we ourselves are also ignorant of many things.
Therefore, only loving kindness and right-mindfulness can free us.
The Ashamed Adult – I’m so ashamed of what my people are doing that I
have no way of dealing with it?!?
We must acknowledge our feelings of guilt, shame and disappointment, while
ultimately using the fire of injustice to fuel us in working for change. We must
also remember the amazing people in all cultures, who are working to
dismantle oppression together everyday.
Marianne Williamson said:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we
are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most
frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and
fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of G-d. Your playing
small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so
that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make
manifest the glory of G-d that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in
everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our
presence automatically liberates others.”

The Fearful Adult – Why should I care about ‘those people’ when they don’t
care about me? If I share what I have, there won’t be enough and I will end up
suffering.

We must challenge the sense of scarcity that we have learned from capitalism
and our histories of oppression. If we change the way food, housing,
education, and resources are distributed, we could all have enough.

Martin Luther King said:
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live
together because of the interrelated structure of reality.
The Compassionate Adult – How can I struggle for justice with an open
heart? How can we live in a way that builds the world we want to live in,
without losing hope?
This is the question that we answer with our lives.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel wrote:
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to
the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital
question is: how to be and how not to be…to pray is to recollect passionately
the perpetual urgency of this vital question.

Anne Frank wrote:
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all of my ideals, because they seem
so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of
everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build
up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see
the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching
thunder, which will destroy us too; I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet,
if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty
too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I
must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to
carry them out.

Each of us bears in our own belly the angry one, the ashamed one, the
frightened one, the compassionate one. Which of these children shall we bring
to birth? Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we truthfully answer
the fourth question. Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we bring
to birth a child, a people that is truly wise.