Questions, even the most irreverent, seed the freedom that we celebrate tonight.

When God, taking Abraham into his confidence, announced the intended destruction of those sinful cities of the plain, S'dom and Gomorrah, the man responded with rebellion. "Heaven forbid for you to do a thing like this, to deal death to the innocent along with the guilty. Heaven forbid for you! The judge of all the earth--will he not do what is just?"

The irreverence displayed here takes the breath away. But even more breathtaking is the divine response. God doesn't consume his inquisitor in a pillar of fire. Instead the proverbial Grounding of Moral Truth submits himself to Abraham's questioning. And had he not, had he instead flamed up in his aggrieved purity, then the story we tell tonight could never have been written, not a word of it.

Abraham's passion for questions has been bequeathed to many of his seed, including the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was banished from his community for asking the wrong questions. He changed his name from the Hebrew Baruch to the Latin Benedictus, and went out into the world and made so great a difference in freeing minds from superstition that the world itself changed for the better, and the people who had disowned him have lived to flourish thanks to those changes.

There is a son who sits at the table, harboring an irreverent question, one that challenges the assumptions that have brought this family to this table for many generations. If the struggles with his question lead him away from the answers of his father, what then? Must lineage dictate the son's interpretation of the world? This, fundamentally, is this child's question, and the answer to it is by no means self-evident. Can a tradition that presents a God who suffered himself to be morally interrogated find no better answer than the label of wicked, either silencing the questioners into submission or banishing them forever from their seats at the table?


haggadah Section: -- Four Children