Well, There’s Always Sparklypoo

When presented with a neat set of categories, characters, or individuals that seem to parcel the world into four, it’s difficult not to want to place oneself in one: my element is Earth, I’m melancholic, I’d get Sorted into Hufflepuff, I’m Bea Arthur, I’m Miranda, I’m Ben Grimm, I’m Agravain, I’m Edmund, I’m Ringo… you get the idea. As we mature, we often come to realize that no such division exists, that each of us is both the party dude and cool but rude, and all of us sometimes lead and sometimes do machines, and that’s the way life is. It’s still fun to take a side when the stakes don’t matter — for instance, Raphael is obviously the best ninja turtle — but in real life, we generally accept that “types” are heuristics, occasionally useful ways to think that don’t accurately reflect reality.

Despite all that, the part of the Passover seder liturgy that intrigues me the most is still the one that follows this form: the paragraphs describing the four children.

I’ve mentioned this section before, but here’s the quick and dirty version: one of the commandments fulfilled in the observation of Passover is the divine order to re-tell the story of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt from each generation to the next. This commandment is repeated four times in the Torah, each slightly different from the others. From these four repetitions, the sages infer four types of questioning children and the prescribed response for each.

In the Jewish prayerbook for the Passover seder, the Haggadah, these four types are given as the wise* child, the contrary child, the simple child, and the child who doesn’t know how to ask.

When I was a kid in elementary school, I identified with the wise child — after all, she’s the one who asks about all the customs, statutes, and laws of Passover, who wants to know every last detail of the story there is to know. At school, I always wanted to know why. Like the wise child, I had a mind for nitpicks and trivia. And the rules mattered a great deal to me — I had no concept of the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law, and staying within the prescribed boundaries was something I considered important.

My identification was a smug one. Of the four children on offer, the wise child ought to be the best from the adult’s perspective, a teacher’s pet who makes the tell-the-story commandment practically fulfill itself. And I accepted this understanding of who I was, when I was nine. And after all, my Hebrew school grades were pretty good, weren’t they? I did well on our Torah and Mishnah tests, and the teachers wrote nice things on my report card. Q. E. D.

By the time I hit high school, I was an atheist. Not only that, but a bored atheist: I knew this seder backwards and forwards, so why are we repeating the same annoying paragraphs about Rabbi Whatshisface and how ten plagues actually means fifty because of ridiculous arithmetic, and… etc.

Clearly, I hadn’t abandoned the smugness that led me at first to identify with the wise child, only now I could feel even smugger about realizing what a crock that “wisdom” was. Obviously, I was the contrary child, asking, “What does all this ceremony mean to you?” To my parents, my relatives, and our Jewish friends, not to me. Obviously, it didn’t mean anything to me. Gawd, seriously, sheeple.

Luckily for me, my parents did not do as the Haggadah prescribes and “set my teeth on edge”. We’re told to take the contrary child at her word: if she does not consider herself part of the community, then allow her to leave it — exclude her from it with the explanation of the miracle God performed for you, not her, during the Exodus from Egypt. Instead, Mom, Dad, and the adults essentially informed the cocky little sh*t I was that there were appropriate and inappropriate ways to behave at a seder. Their instructions and reprimands boiled down amounted to this: even if I could not find meaning in the service, I was still part of this family and ought to act as such.

I still identify to some extent with the contrary child, although less because I see myself as the clear-eyed rebel who’s obviously too sharp for all this. Even though I still don’t believe in God, or even necessarily in the historical truth of the Exodus as written in the Torah, I value more strongly than ever the Jewish community and many of the ideas developed among its traditions. So it’s with deep misgivings that I sometimes see myself as contrary now — I’ve grown up enough to realize that being contrary isn’t about my ideals or those of Judaism but about accepting or rejecting being part of a group. Sometimes I feel contrary, like I don’t belong among people whose faith, in God or in tradition, is fervent enough that they keep kosher or diligently attend synagogue, but I believe now that such feelings are to my detriment, not theirs.

So these days, I find myself hankering to identify with the third child, the simple one. No one likes to be called simple, but there’s something to envy about someone whose only question is, “What’s this?” and who can be satisfied with the quick and dirty answer. Life was lots easier when there weren’t all these angles to consider, when I could believe whatever I heard with the same willing suspension of disbelief I had when I believed stories I read or shows I watched on TV — when God lived in the same mental plane as Sharon, Lois, and Bram or the Sneetches.

But the child in whom I find my interest growing most of all is the one I used to dismiss as an afterthought, the one I always figured was meant to represent the very young: the child who doesn’t know how to ask.

The Haggadah tells us to start the dialogue for this child, not to wait for her to prompt it with a question. This is a precept that works for me sometimes and not other times: I don’t like the idea that you always have an obligation to take charge of the moral dialogue, bombarding other people with your own ideas perhaps before they have a choice of others to listen to. Contrariwise, I do like the idea that if you want certain themes, concepts, morals etc. to be out there, it’s your own responsibility to start the conversation. But none of that’s my point here.

The more I know and learn and grow, the more I feel like the child who doesn’t know how to ask. It’s not that I lack curiosity, that I can’t express myself through speech or writing, or that I don’t understand enough of what’s going on to know it’s strange, all motives I used to attribute to this child. Instead, I just… don’t know how to ask. How these ideas and things I feel come together to make a question. Or many questions. I don’t even know what questions I want to ask — how can I know how to say them?

So maybe I’ve finally come to the point where I can take that cohesive view of these four children: each of them, to some extent, is who I am. Each of them, I’m sure, I can see in others if I try. And though the initial appeal of them to me was being able to separate the world into four easy-to-classify categories, it seems like I’ve come back to the way they were intended: as representations of different aspects of the same people.

Chag sameach.

* Yes, I know that the English terms often don’t capture the sense of the Hebrew, so I’m picking the ones I’ve seen that I like the best.