Rabbi's Message

Rabbi Elyse Wechterman
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April 04/Nisan 5764

A time for questions, new meanings

Lately, Avi has taken to asking me big questions. "What if the Torah isn't true?" "What if there isn't any God?" "Why do we read the same things over and over again (the Torah, the Passover Haggadah, etc)? And of course, I answer, as best as I am able, until the conversation gets old and I'm tired.

To the last question, I respond that every year we learn new things from familiar stories. And in typical 8-and-a-half-year-old fashion he challenges me, "But what if we already know everything there is to know and have learned everything we could possibly learn? Would we still have to read the same stories?"

And then I tell him, "There is always more to learn and one never finishes uncovering meanings in even the most familiar of tales." To which he usually just disagrees and I sigh and say, "Just trust me on this one."

So as I sit here a week before our greatest holiday of retelling — Passover — I recount this very conversation between my son and myself and I am aware that I have just retold - to you my reader - a familiar story. This is the story of parents and children, of passing on tradition and cherished ideals and values; and the challenging of that tradition by children. And how difficult some parents sometimes find the task of teaching our children what we want them to know.

I am reminded of the story of the four children (sons) in the Passover Haggadah who all ask a different question to help their parents elucidate the meaning and symbols of Passover. We often see the four types of children as four types of learners reminding us to speak to the style and method of every child we encounter. We also talk about the four children as aspects of our inner-selves, operating on different levels at the same time as we encounter the world. But what if the four types of children are a metaphor for the types of questions we need to be asked in order to figure out what is most meaningful to us?

It is the "Rasha" - the wicked child that draws my attention this year. Not because I believe that child to really be wicked. For what does he/she do? He says to the parent, "What does this ritual mean to you?" In other words, "tell me why I should care." This is the child who responds to every answer with a "But, what if.." and "Well, why.." and the one that causes us to sometimes want to through up our hands and respond "Because I said so!" or "It just is." And "Just trust me on this one." (He must be eight and a half and blond with blue eyes and an impish smile!)
And we know that the real reason we can't give a better answer has nothing to do with the child's questions, but the fact that sometimes we haven't found one that satisfies our own doubts.

It's the Rasha's job to ask the questions that we have inside ourselves - "Give me a better reason to care about all this (Judaism, Passover, the Torah, being a good person, whatever the case maybe) than stock answers and heavy sighs," he seems to be saying. And in the best scenario our response would be, "I don't just do this because this is what I'm supposed to do - I do it because it has meaning. Let me now take some time to figure out what that meaning is."

May this Passover season be a time for questioning, delving and discovering new meaning for each of us and may we welcome every question that comes our way, especially the hard ones.

Have a Happy (Zesun!) Pesach!

B'Shalom
Rabbi Elyse

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