The wicked child is one of the most perplexing parts of the Haggadah, and perhaps one of the most troubling. Many have questioned whether or not the Haggadah’s harsh response to him is justified or just abusive. Is the wicked child really so wicked that he deserves to be hit in the teeth, or told that Hashem wouldn’t have saved him from slavery? Let’s take a closer look at the text to get some answers.
?רָשָׁע מָה הוּא אוֹמֵר
Rasha, ma hu omer?
The wicked child, what does he say?
For clarity, we typically translate rasha into English as ‘the wicked child,’ but that’s not what it literally means. Rasha is a noun, not an adjective. It means ‘villain’ or ‘criminal.’ This is even more troubling than calling the child “wicked,” because it implies they are incapable of change.
?מָה הָעֲבוֹדָה הַזאֹת לָכֶם
“Ma ha-avodah ha-zot lachem?”
“What is this worship to you?”
One of the reasons why Haggadah’s treatment of the wicked child feels so cruel and bizarre is that it doesn’t seem like he’s doing anything wrong. Simply by being present at the seder, he’s fulfilling a mitzvah, and better yet he is asking questions, engaging with the ritual. Why does the Haggadah condemn his curiosity?
One of the most important aspects of his question is his usage of the word avodah . In this context, it clearly means ‘worship’ or ‘service,’ in the religious sense of that word. But avodah also means ‘labor’ and it’s connected to the word for slavery. The wicked child’s question compares the ritual of the seder to the slavery we’re supposed to be celebrating our liberation from. On the surface this seems like a ridiculous comparison— how could a festive dinner filled with joyous singing, delicious food, and ample wine be oppressive?
What the wicked child is arguing is that our seder is a form of mental slavery if we are doing it merely out of religious obligation. He’s asking us to seriously ask ourselves why we’re performing these strange rituals. How can we call ourselves free if the answer is merely ‘because God said so’ or if we have no answer at all? He might quote the Good Book and ask how we can celebrate freedom if our liberator said, “B’ney Yisra’el are slaves to me, they are my slaves who I brought out of Mitzrayim.” (Leviticus 25:55) In other words, the wicked child asks us to prove that our avodah is not avodah zara, a Hebrew phrase meaning idolatry, literally ‘strange worship.’ If we are not being intentional with our prayers, our rituals, our traditions, how are they any different than the idol worship our ancestors were warned against? Whether or not what he’s arguing is true, his question is very important for us to answer honestly, which makes the Haggadah’s response to him all the more frustrating.
.לָכֶם – וְלֹא לוֹ
Lachem, ve-lo lo.
‘To you,’ and not to him.
The Haggadah does not comment on the wicked child’s use of the word avodah. It doesn’t even answer his question. Instead, it decries his usage of the second person in his question. What’s strange though is that the wise child asked their question in the second person too. “What are the rules that Hashem our God commanded you?” You, and not them. The typical explanation is that though the wise child doesn’t include themself in the moment the laws were given, by saying Eloheinu, our God, they include themself in law itself, i.e. they accept the responsibility of the mitzvot.
But why are they allowed to get away with the second person here? Why doesn’t the Haggadah berate them for failing to understand that the Torah doesn’t merely apply to them, it was written about them? If we are all obligated to see ourselves as if we personally left Mitzrayim, surely the wise child should believe that they were there when the laws of Pesach were given. The true difference between the wise and wicked children’s questions is that the wise child unquestioningly accepts that their parents have all the answers, while the wicked child doesn’t trust that they know what they’re doing any more than he does.
.וּלְפִי שֶׁהוֹצִיא אֶת עַצְמוֹ מִן הַכְּלָל כָּפַר בְּעִקָר
Oo-lefi she-hotzi’a et atzmo min ha-klal, kafar be-ikar.
Since he brought himself out of the collective, he denied his roots.
The language the Haggadah uses to describe what the wicked son is doing is very interesting. Why say that the wicked son “brought himself” out of the collective? Why not say he separated himself, or simply left the collective? The Haggadah is subtly mocking his ‘trust no one’ attitude by using the word hotzi'a to describe his leaving the collective, comparing it to how Hashem has hotzianu, brought us out of Mitzrayim. By questioning the value of the seder, he embarks on a grand Exodus of his own, leaving the table to go sit and sulk.
The last two words of this sentence are difficult to translate and to understand. Some might recognize that the word kafar contains the same root as kippur, the Hebrew word for atonement. The root essentially means to wipe something out. Kippur means to wipe away one’s sins; kafar means to wipe away something’s meaning, through denial. In its many forms as a verb, ikar means something similar: to uproot. But the root ikar itself means ‘root.’ By extension, the ikar mentioned in the Haggadah means something to the effect of ‘the principle.’ The word ikar can also mean ‘the main thing,’ which is what the wicked child is missing.
Through questioning the value of the seder itself, he misses the point. The strange rituals, the arcane texts, the contradictions of the Haggadah, the reversals of everyday life: all of these things are designed to confuse, to get us to ask questions we wouldn’t normally ask and come to conclusions we wouldn’t normally come to. The wicked child acts intellectually superior by assuming the seder is a dusty old ritual devoid of meaning for modern-day Jews and irrelevant to contemporary life. Instead of trying to make sense of the strange, ancient texts he throws them away, assuming they’re broken because they are old. His edgelord reddit mindset leaves him lonely and spiritually unsatisfied. He thinks he is clever because he doesn’t believe in miracles, but really he’s just too foolish to let them happen to him.
Finally, the Haggadah’s tirade against the wicked child starts to make a little more sense. His closed mind and hardened heart cut him off from the people who love him. By questioning the value of these traditions, passed down from generation to generation through millennia of violence and oppression, he is being ungrateful to the ones who came before him, who lived so he could survive.
But is that necessarily true? Is there a way one could show reverence for one’s ancestors and their traditions, and still ask questions about them? After all, isn’t questioning things a bona fide Jewish value, or at least a time-honored Jewish tradition in its own right? And on this night of all nights, this night of far more than four questions, shouldn’t his questions be received with welcome arms and open minds?
וְאַף אַתָּה הַקְהֵה אֶת שִׁנָיו
Ve-af ata hak’he et shinav
You shall blunt his teeth
Any credibility the Haggadah has made in its proof of the wicked child’s wickedness has just gone out the window. How are we supposed to react to this violence? What does blunting someone’s teeth even mean? Socking him in the jaw? Surely that’s no way to respond to the wicked child’s question, even if it is wicked. Advocating for this violence only goes to show that the wicked child is no more wicked than his father.
Except, as always, there’s a hidden meaning here. The translation of hak’he is notoriously tricky, but the basic consensus is that it doesn’t mean to hit, but to make something dull. Some say that the wicked child needs to be defanged, have his biting remarks softened somewhat. But this explanation is disappointing in its own right.
Hidden in every רשע, rasha, villain, there is a צדיק, tzaddik, righteous person. But how do we find the tzaddik in the rasha? To find the answer, we need to use gematria, traditional Jewish numerology. The numerical value of רשע is 570, the value of צדיק is 204. We need to remove 366 to find the tzaddik. It just so happens that the gematria of shinav, שניו, ‘his teeth’ is 366. By rearranging the letters of שניו, we get an additional insight into the situation: inside every one of us, no matter how wicked we seem, is the potential for שנוי, shinu’i, change. And another word that has the numerical value of 366? Kippurim, כיפורים, atonements, from the same root as kafar , to deny. Why ‘atonements,’ plural? Just as the wicked child needs to learn how to accept love, we too need to learn how to give it to those who test our patience. As it is written, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” (Leviticus 24:20)
.וֶאֱמוֹר לוֹ: בַּעֲבוּר זֶה עָשָׂה יי לִי בְּצֵאתִי מִמִצְרָיִם. לִי וְלֹא־לוֹ
Ve-emor lo, “Ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li be-tzeiti mi-Mitzrayim.” Li, ve-lo lo.
Say to him: “For the sake of this Hashem did what they did for me when I was brought out of Mitzrayim.” ‘Did for me, ’ and not for him.
This is the first of four times that the traditional Haggadah quotes this verse. The second time it is used, it’s said to the child who doesn’t know how to ask a question. Why should the same verse be used to denounce the wicked child, but to ‘open’ a conversation with the silent child?
The relationship between the wicked child and the child who does not know how to ask is interesting. It’s easy to think that the Haggadah is contrasting the wise and wicked children, but actually the simple child is intended to be juxtaposed with the wicked. In some early versions of the Haggadah, they’re called the ‘foolish’ child. So what’s the connection between the wicked and silent children? A popular interpretation of the wicked child’s question is that it’s a non-question. It’s rhetorical at best, mere mockery at worst. So neither of these children have asked a real question; maybe neither of them are able to.
The child who doesn’t know how to ask has traditionally been viewed as a toddler, or an infant. They don’t know how to ask because they are not yet able to put words together. Others see this child as a child who’s been silenced—whose questions are so dangerous that a repressive state or system has censored them. But what if this child really does know how to ask, and no one is stopping them, it’s just that they’d prefer to be quiet and listen? What if they want to learn not from questions and answers, but through stories and private meditation?
The first time the “for the sake of this” verse is used, it’s to exclude the wicked child from redemption. The second time, it’s used to pass on wisdom. We have to wonder what ‘this’ is—what was so important that Hashem chose to defy the laws of nature over and over to save a group of lowly humans from slavery? It was for the sake of ‘this’ telling, for the sake of this oral tradition handed down between generations that our ancestors were redeemed from Mitzrayim. Which means that both the wicked and the silent children are the reason why the Exodus happened, whether they realize it or not. Their willingness to listen, and their questions, no matter how sarcastic, are so precious to Hashem that mountains were moved just to bring them into existence.
.אִלוּ הָיָה שָׁם, לֹא הָיָה נִגְאָל
Eelu haya sham, lo haya nigal.
If he was there, he would not have been redeemed.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe reframed this sentence in an extraordinary way. If he had been there, he wouldn’t have been saved. But he is not there—he is here. Here, the wicked child would be saved. Why? What has changed between then and now? We have been given the Torah. We have been taught to pursue justice, taught to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We have been shown unconditional love, and challenged to show others that kind of love is possible. There, in Mitzrayim, we would have given up on him. But here, as we await for the next Exodus, for the arrival of the World to Come—of course the wicked child will be saved.
The real key to understanding the difference between the wicked child’s question and their siblings’ questions is frustratingly absent from the Haggadah. We have to look to the Torah for the original context in which these questions were asked. All three of them come directly from Hashem. The wise child’s question comes from the verse “ Ki yishalecha vincha machar, when your child asks you in the future, ‘What are the decrees, rules, and laws that Hashem our God has commanded you?” (Deuteronomy 6:20) The simple child’s question comes from the verse, “ Ki yishalecha vincha machar, when your child asks you in the future, ‘What is this?’” (Exodus 13:14) But the wicked child’s question is posed differently. Hashem says, “ Ki yomru aleichem beneichem, when your children say to you, ‘What is this worship to you?’” (Exodus 12:26) The writers of the Haggadah picked up on this difference and determined that his question is merely rhetorical, that his mockery doesn’t dignify an answer.
But is that really so? If that were true, why would Hashem give the wicked child a straightforward answer? Hashem tells us to say, “It is the Passover sacrifice for Hashem, who passed over B’ney Yisra’el’s houses in Mitzrayim when striking the Egyptians.” (Exodus 12:27) Does that mean the Haggadah is encouraging us to, chas ve-shalom, violate a mitzvah?
There are two other significant differences in the way Hashem frames the wicked child’s question compared to his siblings’ questions. The text tells us that the wise and simple questions will be asked of us machar, in the future. The text doesn’t specify when the wicked child’s question will come. The simple explanation for this has to do with when these mitzvot were given—Hashem told Moshe the wise and simple children’s questions after the Israelites had left Mitzrayim, but the wicked child’s question was given before the slaying of the firstborn. The other important difference between the questions is who will be asking them: your child will come to ask the wise and simple questions, but your children, or more specifically, y’all’s children, will ask the wicked child’s question. So who are beneichem, the children who are asking “What is this worship to you?” None other than B’ney Yisra’el, the Jewish people as a whole.
This teaches that the wise and simple children’s questions have been relegated to individuals in the future, but the wicked child’s question is one we must all collectively ask and answer, in every generation’s present. How do we know this? Because Hashem said about the wicked child’s question, “You shall keep this thing forever, you and your children.” (Exodus 12:24) That’s not to say that the other questions don’t have value. The wise child’s question comes from a love of learning, and teaches us to cultivate our curiosity. The simple child’s question comes from a desire to know what is, to sharpen our sense of observation. But the wicked child’s question is central to the Jewish experience: trying to understand what our elders’ and ancestors’ traditions meant to them, and deciding what those traditions will mean to us.
The Haggadah’s answer to the wicked child is just another one of its tricks, the red herrings it puts on the seder table just so we ask “what is this?” We are meant to question the text, we are meant to rail against it and call it cruel, because through doing so we learn something surprising: there are no wicked children, no bad people, only tzaddikim waiting to be found. The Talmud teaches that “there has never been a stubborn and rebellious son and there never will be.” So why talk about the wicked child at all? Because through doing so, we learn how to love our jaded, imperfect selves.
❉ What does this ritual mean to you? Do you find the seder as a whole meaningful? Why, or why not?
