Don’t let your Pesaḥ be so kosher it’s not joyous
Few parts of the Seder are as iconic as Mah Nishtanah, intended for a young child to ask about four observations regarding the strangeness of the Seder:
Why are we specifically eating matzah rather than bread?
Why are we specifically eating maror rather than other vegetables?
Why are we making such an effort to dip karpas and maror, when we’re not usually such big dippers?*
Why are we so insistent on reclining?
(*There is what to say about our modern propensity for dipping everything in ketchup/sriracha/sweet chili, etc. – and thus the validity of the framing of this question nowadays. But that’s a topic for another time.)
But, among the many issues with Mah Nishtanah – more on them in this year’s Shabbat ha-Gadol derashah, including the very way I framed the opening to this idea – is the answer provided by the Haggadah, Avadim Hayyinu. We answer the child’s questions by recounting how we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, that God redeemed us, and that we must now all retell the story.
And here we have a simple problem: it just doesn’t really seem like an answer to the question. Or, even if you want to argue that it is an answer, it’s a very circuitous answer. Remember, this is supposed to be the answer to a young child’s observation!
To truly grasp the problem here, imagine a world in which the Seder isn’t scripted and a five-year-old spontaneously asks you: “Why are we eating matzah tonight?”
I can tell you a really bad way to answer: “Well, you see, thousands of years ago we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. … [30+ minutes of backstory and explanation.] … And that’s why we eat matzah!”
What are you doing?! It’s a small child! They don’t have the patience to sit through that! Look, I know that I am notoriously bad at giving concise answers to anything – often taking meandering digressions about adjacent topics (I really had to rein in my ketchup comment above) – and even I know not to give that kind of answer to a young child!
So, what on earth is the Haggadah thinking when it’s scripting our Seder? And it’s all the more striking given that the Haggadah is famed for displaying a tremendous sensitivity towards ensuring young children can participate. One of its core motivations, after all, is to mandate a bunch of strange practices so that we spark the curiosity of children (Pesaḥim 115b). And Ḥazal explicitly encourage the Seder to not be too taxing on young children so that they won’t fall asleep (Ibid. 109a).
Yet here we seem to be doing the opposite: dismissing a child’s question with a meandering non-answer. So, what’s going on?
I think an answer lies in one of my favorite quotes for this time of year, attributed to the Bostoner Rebbe: “Don’t let your Purim be so joyous that it’s not kosher, and your Pesaḥ so kosher that it’s not joyous!”
All the observations of Mah Nishtanah are, at the end of the day, about halakhic objects or acts: eating matzah and maror, dipping karpas and maror, and reclining – and thus all prompt the same series of halakhic questions: how much to eat, how much to dip, when to recline, the definition of reclining, whether a failure to recline results in a missed mitzvah, etc.
But this presents a possible pitfall for children. Because children have an intuitive grasp of legal pedanticism. (My favorite example of this was a few years ago when, after his bedtime, Yair knew he had to stay in his bedroom – and so he was lying outside of his room with just the tips of his toes across the threshold of his room so that he could technically be considered to still be in his room.)
And so, it’s natural that a child with a rough familiarity with how Judaism functions will be naturally drawn to the legal limits of the Seder: focusing on the mitzvah objects and acts – and thus their contours and limits. Mah Nishtanah is a child’s natural, intuitive reaction to the Seder.
Now, I should stress, these mitzvah objects and acts are crucial to the Seder: and it’s vital to our entire experience of the Seder that we get them right. But, as the Bostoner Rebbe grasped, we can become so consumed by them that we can miss the point of Pesaḥ. It’s important to eat the correct amount of matzah at the Seder, but if you spend so much time measuring out a football field’s worth of matzah (#kezayitmeanskezayit*) to eat within a two-minute time span, you might forget to focus on why you’re eating the matzah in the first place.
(*I just want everyone to appreciate how brilliant this joke is, so I’m going to ruin it by explaining it: I follow my rebbe’s view that a kezayit – the measurement used by halakhah to dictate how much we eat at the Seder – should be understood literally, “around the size of an olive.” Additionally, following the Brexit vote in the UK and the debates surrounding the government’s follow-through, a popular tagline has been #BrexitmeansBrexit. Hence #kezayitmeanskezayit. It’s a really funny joke and it’s your own fault if you didn’t get it.)
And that’s why we don’t answer Mah Nishtanah properly, and instead tell the child – and encourage them to relive – the story of our slavery to freedom. As important as the halakhic objects and acts are, we want them to focus on the bigger picture.
And done right – done as a proper reliving of our journey from slavery to freedom – the circuitous nature of the answer isn’t a burden for them, it’s an experience.
Avadim Hayyinu thus reframes our goals for the Seder and our focus. Because, as crucial as the mitzvah objects and acts are, we cannot let our obsession with the details result in forgetting the very purpose of our Seder.