The 21st-century child who does not know how to ask

I just started reading Simon Winchester’s, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. And while I’ve literally only read the first few pages, his motivation for writing the book struck me as raising a particularly profound – if very 21st-century – understanding of one of the Seder’s best-known passages.

Because, as Winchester explains, the transmission of knowledge for most of human history was the same – the only thing that technological advances did was speed up the possibility of transmission. It took longer to deliver the works printed in China in the ninth century than the works printed at the turn of the 20th-century – though even early printing presses were far quicker than the handwritten copies of text before that – but the way to acquire knowledge was still the same: you had to read books housed, more often than not, in libraries.

But in just a handful of years, that has all changed. Now, every single one of us carries with us at all times a device on which we can summon the answer to almost everything. “If all knowledge, if the sum of all thought,” Winchester asks, “is to be made available at the touch on a plate of glass, then what does that portend?”

And it’s this idea that drives me to reinterpret for the 21st-century the passage that discusses the She-Eino Yodea Lishol, the child who does not know how to ask a question. Because while we classically understand this child to be either disinterested in the Seder or disengaged – or, in more recent times, cognitively incapable of asking questions – I’d suggest that, nowadays, there is a new child who does not know how to ask: the one who is so used to instantly finding answers to things that they’ve lost their ability to be curious.

Because even though this person knows that they can’t use their phone at the Seder, they’ll make sure to print off an explanation they found online of everything going on beforehand. Perhaps they even did their research – and asked ChatGPT to provide them with a series of thought-provoking questions to pose at the Seder.

And while this would be a good thing at any other time of the year, at the Seder it’s a little bit of a problem. Because the whole purpose of the Seder is to spark curiosity: the things we do are supposed to strike us as odd – and we’re supposed to ask “why?” rather than know already.

But this person is incapable of asking a question because they have no curiosity. They’ve looked it all up beforehand. And, even if they haven’t, they know that if they Google it after Yom Tov they’ll have their answer then. The whole experience of the Seder is lost on them.

And this is where it becomes crucial for us to heed the solution of the Haggadah here. Because the answer we are supposed to give to such a person is the Biblical verse that motivates the entire obligation of the Seder: “And you will speak to your child on that day, saying, it is because of this that the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt” (Ex. 13:8).

As many commentators note, the Haggadah wants us to draw the attention of the one who doesn’t know how to ask to something, ba‘avor zeh, “because of this.” And given that the next paragraph in the Haggadah uses the same verse to teach us that the “this” of Ex. 13:8 means the matzah and maror, we understand the answer to the child who does not know how to ask to be one in which we must point to the objects of the Seder.

And for our times, in particular, this is a crucial message to internalize. Because our Seder isn’t just about knowledge it’s about experience: the taste of matzah – symbolizing slavery and freedom – the bitterness of maror. You can’t just Google what that feels like: you must experience it for yourself.

It’s the difference between going to a stadium or watching a game on TV. You might even get a better view at home, but you miss the experience. At the heart of the Seder is the realization that the experience of moving from slavery to freedom – the retelling of the story as though we ourselves were freed – is key. All the knowledge in the world doesn’t change that, as the Haggadah says itself: “And even if we were all sages, all discerning, all elders, all knowledgeable about the Torah, it would be a commandment upon us to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt.”

But nowadays, this refers to all of us with our phones in hand – because it’s taken from us the ability to ask questions. The Seder thus shows us another path that we must take: to emphasize the experience of Pesaḥ.