Seder with the Wicked Son

Shabbat Chol HaMoed Pesach, 5784

So I have a confession: Rabbis steal sermons. It happens all the time. By steal, I don’t mean word for word, but rather the basic idea. For example, when I graduated Rabbinical school, my in-laws gave me a set of Rabbi Norman Lamm’s divrei Torah in case I ever had a lazy week and needed some inspiration. Sometimes I even steal sermons from myself–looking at what I wrote on a particular parsha before I moved to Savannah, and then updating it to fit the time and my own intellectual growth. However, never, so far, have I done the following: stolen a sermon from a rabbi in the same city, and one that I didn’t hear. However, there is a first time for everything. And so with apologies to Rabbi Slatus of Congregation Bnei Brith Jacob, I’m going to be giving a version of the dvar torah he gave on the first day of Passover, as related to me by my father-in-law. It’s probably changed substantially since Rabbi Slatus gave it: it has some of my own ideas. But the mussar, the moral core of the dvar torah, was something I needed to hear, and maybe you need to hear it too.

Like many of you, I’ve been watching what has been going on at college campuses around the country recently, first at Columbia, and then numerous other colleges. Like many of you, I’ve been upset and alarmed by what I’ve seen. I want to make one thing clear: before I go farther: I think that protest, justified or not, is an American tradition. We let Nazis march in Skokie Illinois, and I’m proud of America for doing so. God forbid because anyone should say I believe in their message, but because I am proud of our first amendment. If these college students got their way, and changed university policy to be anti-Israel, I would want the right to protest my college on behalf of Israel, put up an encampment, chant slogans, and so forth. And so I hope that colleges do not get the police and national guard involved, and that they let students protest, however much I disagree with their message.

But. Just because I believe in the right to protest, doesn’t mean I like it. And especially seeing the protests come to Princeton, my alma mater, has been difficult. I’m sure I’ve seen similar videos to those you have seen: protestors chanting “by any means necessary!” “Zionists have no place on campus!” “Go back to Poland!” and forming human chains to prevent Jewish (because they are Zionist?!) students from entering campus. These antisemitic actions frustrate me, to put it mildly. And, to be fair, the leaders of the protest claim to disavow them and claim to be worried about fighting antisemitism too. But for all those claims, it's still there. On top of that, the levels of ideological purity I’ve seen on display are astounding to me. If you will forgive me for a moment, I gave a controversial sermon just weeks ago calling for a ceasefire, knowing many people in this congregation would not like it, but y’all came to sit down and talk with me afterwards, and hear me out. These students would in all likelihood not even want to sit down and talk with me because I am a Zionist! Because I’ve failed a ridiculous purity test of wanting Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace because I also care about Israelis! I find it ludacris! How can I talk with these people who refuse to talk to me, who are so sure what they do is right!?

So it was some small balm for my soul, Tuesday morning, when my father-in-law came back from BBJ and gave me some mussar. I can’t vouch for how accurate a rendition this is, and I’ll give it my own spin. But I needed to hear this.

The Wicked Child at the Seder is infuriating. He truly is. מָה הָעֲבוֹדָה הַזּאֹת לָכֶם? What is this service to you? Just such a distancing, isolating question. He thinks he knows everything, he is not impressed with Passover. And on the surface of it, we give him a distancing answer right back “You exclude yourself from the group. If you had been there, you would not have been redeemed.”

Harsh, but seemingly fair. Yet is it accurate? To say that this child would not have been redeemed? After all, they are sitting at the Passover Seder! They are asking a, be it disrespectful, question about Passover! By definition they are redeemed: they are taking part in the Seder! And we don’t kick them out, we don’t say they are not redeemed now. We give them a harsh answer, but we keep them at the table.

And that, by itself, is the lesson of the Wicked Son. Not for Wicked children, but for us. Those who fall under the rubric of the Wicked child would not recognize the lesson anyway–they are convinced they are righteous. But for everyone else at the Seder, everyone else in the Jewish community, the lesson is how to respond to the Wicked child. Set their teeth on edge, sure, be angry, tell them they’ve got it wrong–but by no means eject them from the Seder. By no means eject them from the community. They are still part of Klal Yisrael. They are still part of us. They are still redeemed. And simply by being at the table, things may change. They may moderate their views. We may moderate our views. We may come to understand one another. But that can only happen if we are all members of the same community, if we all sit at the same Seder table.

One of the student heads of the Princeton Gaza camp is Jewish. I admit, I don’t understand it. There was a Hezbollah flag at the encampment! Also Jewish is one of the professors leading the encampment, who actually was one of my professors on Israel and Palestine, back when I was the only Zionist in his class. It could be a frustrating class at times, to put it mildly. At times I felt like I was bashing my head against the wall. Yet at the end of the class, when he asked us students what they were most grateful for in the class, multiple people said “that Sam stayed.” They felt the learned things by having me be there. And I also learned from them.

It is frustrating to see Jews, friends or family or neither, involved in these protests. I absolutely get that. And if you have friends or family who are college aged, chances are you probably know one or two people doing something stupid right now. It’s unbelievably frustrating. But my challenge for you is to remember the lesson of the Wicked Child for yourself. Do not turn them away. Do not cut them off. Do not imitate they are not Jewish, or they are no longer welcome, or they have forfeited their place in the community. If we do that, they may never return to us. They’ll never learn. But if we all sit at the same Seder, if we all continue to be a part of the same community, no matter how much we frustrate, confuse, and even hurt each other, we increase the chances that, one day, we will all learn from each other, and grow together.