Finding The Ask

The Child Within

It’s the final countdown; no, not that one. The one that counts in days until we get to Passover. People’s anxieties are high. They’re going food shopping...again, searching for that seder plate from their great grandmother Ethel that they swear was in that one closet, and furiously remaking the seating chart to fit cousin Greg’s college roommate’s sister-in-law. And then this Shabbat preceding Passover comes, known as Shabbat HaGadol, the great Shabbat, and it asks us to pause and think about what we’re actually preparing for.

At the heart of the seder we’re commanded to tell the story of our liberation to the next generation, and the rabbis gave us a number of frameworks for that telling, one of them being the four children: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask. That last child, she’eino yodei’a lish’ol, tends to get short shrift. We gloss over them on our way to the more dramatic characters, the ones who have something to say. But I want to spend some time with that child this year, because I think that child is more universal than we might think.

The text says simply:

V’she’eino yodei’a lish’ol, at petach lo—And the one who doesn’t know how to ask, you open for them.

The Ma’aseh Nissim, Rabbi Yaakov Lorberbaum, an 18th-century commentary from Italy, offers a reading that stuck with me this year. He suggests that this child isn’t lacking intellectual heft. This child has been so silenced, so excluded from the conversation, that they’ve lost the ability to formulate questions. They lack the experience of having their curiosity welcomed. The Ma’aseh Nissim writes that this child represents those:

who have been so beaten down by their circumstances that they no longer believe their voice matters enough to be raised.

As a person who often struggles to find my voice in larger audiences, this resonated although my struggles are more internally created than externally, but I want to push it into more uncomfortable territory. What if this child doesn’t just represent people who’ve been externally silenced? What if they represent the part of us that’s been so thoroughly trained in certainty and so conditioned to have the answers that we’ve lost access to our own questions?

How many of us grew up in environments where questions were dismissed outright? How many of us learned early that the safest posture was to nod along, to perform certainty, to keep our confusion private? And what happens when you do that long enough is that you stop asking questions at all. Your muscles of questioning atrophy. You become the child who doesn’t know how to ask, not because you were born that way, but because you were trained into it.

Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, in his Michtav M’Eliyahu (Vol. II, pp. 17-18), gets at something essential here:

Everything that occurs to the Jewish people has an inner aspect to it. The exile in Egypt appears to a normal person as if it was a physical slavery. But a spiritually-oriented person sees that it was a slavery of the soul, and that this was the real cause for physical slavery.

In other words, slavery of the soul always precedes slavery of the body. The worst kind of bondage is the chain you’ve internalized so deeply that you forget you’re chained at all. You’ve become so inured to your constriction that expansion is beyond belief. That’s how the child who doesn’t know how to ask is created. They’ve been so shaped by limitation that the very capacity to question their limits has been crushed out of them.

I see this all the time in the world of contemporary Jewish life, but it goes way beyond religion. We’re living in an age of performed certainty. Everyone knows exactly what they think about everything. “I don’t know” feels like failure. So the world tells us that we should speak with conviction even when we’re confused, to be the wise or wicked child, when really, deep down, we’re the one who doesn’t know how to ask.

But we do ourselves a real disservice because the questions are where the life is. That’s where growth happens. That’s where divinity and awe show up, if we’re being traditionally theological about it. Or, if we’re not, that’s where you actually encounter the truest sense of yourself.

Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg writes:

Perhaps this child is the one who teaches us the most. They remind us that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is create conditions where questions can emerge, rather than provide answers.

So at the seder, we seat at the table wearing at least two hats. We’re both the child and the adult at the table. In turn this gives each of us the agency to be the ones that open up the path to questioning.

This is the work of Passover, and it’s harder than we admit. We talk about liberation like it’s this obvious good, this thing everyone naturally wants. But the truth is, liberation is terrifying. It means leaving behind the structures that have defined you, even if those structures were constricting. It means sitting with the discomfort of not knowing who you are when you’re not performing the role you’ve always played. It means asking questions you’ve been avoiding because the answers might require you to change your life.

The Israelites leave Egypt, and almost immediately they’re complaining that they want to go back because freedom is disorienting. Slavery, for all its horror, is familiar. Freedom asks you to figure out who you are without those reference points; that requires questions.

So as we head into Passover, here’s what I’m sitting with. What questions have I been avoiding? What parts of my life have I accepted as given when really they’re chosen? Where have I performed certainty because I was too scared to admit confusion? And most importantly: can I create an opening for myself, the way the Haggadah instructs us to open for the child who doesn’t know how to ask?

I don’t know the exact interventions to find the answers but maybe it’s enought to just sit with those questions. The child who doesn’t know how to ask isn’t someone else. It’s the part of you that’s been waiting for permission to not have it all figured out. Passover is the time to give ourselves that permission.

Shabbat Shalom, Happy Weekend, and sending early wishes for a liberating Pesach to all who are celebrating