Every Jew you know is one of these four children.
The Passover story was never ancient history. October 7th proved it, once again.
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The Torah speaks of four sons — four children who sit at the Passover table, each with a question (or the absence of a question) about their place in the story of their people.
One is wise. One is wicked. One is simple. And one does not know how to ask.
For centuries, these four children have lived not only in our Haggadah (the ancient text we read each year on Passover), but around our real tables too. They are not just symbols. They are us.
Every Jewish family knows them. Every Jewish generation has seen them. Every Jewish heart, if we are honest, has carried all four within it at different times.
There is the child who learns. There is the child who rebels. There is the child who wonders. There is the child who forgets.
And never has this teaching felt more urgent, more alive, than in our world after October 7, 2023. After the slaughter of Jews in their homes, in their beds, at their Shabbat tables, in their bomb shelters and safe rooms, this is no longer just a story about ancient Egypt. This is our story now.
The four sons of the Haggadah are no longer distant characters we read about by candlelight. They are standing before us. We see them in our families, in our friends, in our communities, on our social media feeds, in the headlines, in the mirror.
Some of us are wise: steady, rooted, builders of Jewish life. Some of us are wicked: alienated, angry, rejecting the ties that bind us. Some of us are simple: newly awakened, asking: “What is happening to my people? What is happening to me?” And some of us do not even know how to ask: disconnected by distance, by assimilation, by silence — until tragedy forced them to remember.
Passover has always asked us to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. This year, after October 7th, we no longer have to imagine. We are leaving Egypt again, the Egypt of fear, of powerlessness, of exile, of disconnection.
The question is: Which child will each of us be? And how will we guide the others home?
The wise child asks: “What are the laws, the testimonies, and the statutes that God commanded you?”
Not why do we do this. Not do we have to do this. But how do we do this — and how do we do it well.
This is the Jew who understands the oldest truth of Jewish history: that survival is not the goal, it is the starting line. Memory is not the finish; it is the foundation. Being Jewish is not a trauma response or an ethnic nostalgia project; it is a living inheritance that demands stewardship, discipline, and love.
This generation fought wars. Built synagogues. Founded schools. Donated to Jewish federations and soup kitchens. Endowed scholarships. Planted trees. Built hospitals. Founded the State of Israel with their bare hands and, too often, with the blood of their children.
They understood something that many forgot: Judaism is not a weekend hobby or a spiritual side dish. It is a total way of life, a civilization that belongs not only to the synagogue, but to the kitchen table, the IDF outpost, the city council, the Torah class, and the Shabbat dinner.
This wise generation — whether they lived in Tel Aviv or Teaneck, in Jerusalem or Johannesburg — carried in their bones a hard-earned truth: that Jewish safety is never guaranteed. Not in exile. Not in America. And, as October 7th proved in the most horrifying way, not even in the sovereign Jewish homeland.
But look closely: Their response is not panic. It is not defeatism. It is not victimhood.
It is resolve.
It is teaching their grandchildren Hebrew songs that their own grandparents sang in the shtetl. It is showing up to shul with police outside and prayer books inside. It is calling their children to remind them to light Shabbat candles — especially now. It is donating to rebuild what was destroyed. It is digging their hands back into the soil of this tradition and proclaiming: “We are not going anywhere!”
For the wise child, Judaism is not worth fighting for because it is easy. Judaism is worth fighting for because it is ours. It belongs to the generations who came before. And it belongs, just as fiercely, to those who come next.
But only if we are wise enough to listen.
The wicked child asks: “What does this service mean to me?”
This is the child who cuts themselves off — who sees Judaism as foreign, outdated, tribal, irrelevant. This generation was born into freedom, but tried to shed their difference. They fled into “universalism” (even though, ironically, the Jews were among the first peoples to promote universalism) and into erasing the self in the name of fitting in.
In our modern world, you might know these Jews as the so-called “self-hating Jews” or the loud “pro-Palestinian Jews” who flood social media parroting the talking points of those who would see Israel erased from the map — and who, historically, would not have hesitated to erase Jews right alongside it.
But let’s be clear: Many of them were not born this way. Few Jews emerge from the womb despising their own people and instinctively siding with those who chant for their destruction.
This wicked child is often a product of pain. Of alienation. Of shallow education. Of being told their Jewishness is a source of embarrassment rather than pride. Of growing up in a culture that taught them to flatten their identity into something palatable for the world, until there was nothing left.
And yet, in rejecting their people, they only exile themselves further. Because when the mobs come, when the rockets fall, when the mobs paint swastikas or chant “death to the Jews” or when the Jewish Governor of Pennsylvania’s official residence was targeted in arson attack on the first night of Passover (as happened last night) — they will not stop to check voting records or Instagram captions.
The tragedy of the wicked child is that they believe disassociating from their people will save them. History says otherwise.
But the Haggadah teaches us not to give up on them. It tells us to answer them firmly — not to humiliate, but to awaken. To remind them that disconnection is a dead end. That there is a home waiting for them if they choose to return.
Some won’t. That is their choice.
But some will look around — after October 7th, after seeing who stands with them in crisis and who celebrates their pain — and they will begin to wonder if perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps the greatest kindness we can offer is to keep the door open. To say: You may have forgotten us, but we have not forgotten you.
The simple child asks: “What is this?”
It’s not a cynical question. It’s not a rebellious question. It’s an honest question.
This is the generation that grew up without baggage, but also without roots. Their grandparents built. Their parents rebelled. And they were left floating in between — disconnected from the traumas of exile, but also detached from the traditions that sustained us through it.
Judaism was a line on a college application. A Star of David necklace. A bagel brunch on a Sunday morning. Enough to know they were Jewish, but not enough to know why it mattered.
Then came October 7th and everything changed.
This generation — who maybe never set foot in a synagogue, who maybe never visited Israel, who maybe didn’t know what a mezuzah was or what Am Yisrael Chai meant — looked up and realized they were being dragged into a 3,000-year-old story.
Not because they chose it, but because it chose them.
And now they are asking sometimes clumsily, sometimes beautifully: “What is this? What is happening? What does it mean to be a Jew today?”
They are showing up to rallies holding Israeli flags they never thought they would wave. They are lighting Shabbat candles for the first time in their lives, sometimes with shaky hands, sometimes with tears in their eyes. They are posting the names and faces of hostages they’ve never met, and crying over a land they’ve never seen.
Because something deep in their soul has awakened, something ancient that no pogrom, no Holocaust, no massacre has ever been able to kill.
But they are vulnerable. This simple generation can just as easily be lost to confusion and despair if nobody answers their question.
They don’t need lectures. They don’t need condescension. They don’t need guilt. They need teachers. They need guides. They need patient love. They need us — their family, their people — to sit beside them at the table and say: “With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God took us out of Egypt.” Out of exile. Out of darkness. Out of despair.
And we — all of us — will get through this too.
Because this is their story now. And the future of the Jewish People depends on whether we help them write the next chapter.
Lastly, there is the child who does not know how to ask. This is the generation we fear the most. Not because they are wicked. Not because they reject us. Not because they rebel. But because they do not even know there is a question to ask.
This is the Jew whose link to their people has not been severed in anger, but dissolved in silence. Not cut by hatred, but eroded by time, by distance, by forgetfulness. They did not leave us. They were never told they belonged.
They grew up far from the rhythms of Jewish life, far from Hebrew lullabies, far from the Passover table, far from the stories of Egypt, of Sinai, of Jerusalem rebuilt from ashes.
They do not know the Exodus because no one ever told them they were part of it. They do not know about pogroms because nobody whispered to them the names of the towns their ancestors fled. They do not know about Israel (not in the real way), not as a family story, a birthright, a beating heart of a people that never stopped dreaming of home.
These are the Jews whose great-grandparents lit Shabbat candles in secret, and whose grandchildren don’t know what Shabbat is at all. And yet, even here, even now, something stirs. Because October 7th was a shockwave that traveled to the most distant shores of Jewish memory.
Maybe it was a headline about a massacre. Maybe it was the sudden surge of antisemitism in their city. Maybe it was a swastika scrawled in a university bathroom. Maybe it was a non-Jewish friend asking: “Are you okay? What’s happening to your people?”
And for the first time, they pause. For the first time, they wonder: “What am I? Where do I belong? Why does this feel personal, even when I was never taught it was mine?”
This moment is fragile. Holy. A spark waiting to catch. So we must go to them, not to shame them, not to scold them for what they do not know, but to tell them gently, fiercely, joyfully:
“You belong to the oldest family in the world.”
“You are part of a story that began before Pharaoh, that endured Rome, that survived Inquisition and Holocaust and war.”
“Your name, even if you don’t know it, is written in the book of Jewish survival.”
“You are not the end of the story. You are the next chapter waiting to be written.”
And the task falls to us, those who remember, to reach out our hands. Because that is what the Exodus was always about. “And you shall tell your child on that day...” (Exodus 13:8-10). Tell them who they are. Tell them where they come from. Tell them that no matter how long they have been gone — the door is always open.
The table is already set, and the story is still theirs to claim.
In truth, all of us sit in each seat at different moments in our lives.
We are wise — when we take responsibility. We are wicked — when we turn away. We are simple — when we are confused. We are lost — when we forget to ask.
After October 7th, the Passover story is not a relic of ancient history. It is now.
We were slaves in Egypt. We were powerless in exile. We were slaughtered at Auschwitz. We were second-class citizens in Arabia. We were massacred at the Nova music festival.
And still, we are here.
Because the story does not end with pain. It ends with redemption. And every generation, every child, every Jew, must see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.
This year more than ever.
Beautifully written. Chag Sameach.
This was one of your best writing ever Joshua. And yes, we are all a little like the 4 children, especially living in the diaspora of America. Always trying to fit in.