PESACH THE QUESTIONS OF THE SON, THE QUESTIONS OF THE FATHER
Bar-Chamra, Shmuel
PESACH THE QUESTIONS OF THE SON, THE QUESTIONS OF THE FATHER Shmuel Bar-Chamra Passover fuses history with legend, individual memory with the larger tradition that informs it; Passover is an...
...They go their ways...
...A: Am I permitted to ask this question...
...Or one scholar can ask another...
...Passover is an occasion for telling a story and for sons to ask their fathers about bygone times...
...Pious Jews do not leave the seder table when the service is concluded...
...The irony of their condition soon struck them...
...Perhaps his father's shouts were enough to shake the boy from sleep...
...That is the duty of God's creatures and Our Father in Heaven is perhaps unimpressed...
...He was Reuben...
...The Shpolyer, we know, took the larger of the broken halves of the middle matzah and hid it...
...A: I question your answer...
...What he said at that moment has been remembered...
...Why, then, isn't the wicked son the last on the list...
...That doesn't mean that all questions are legitimate, that curiosity has no bounds, that all answers are immehim to look at the indicator on the measuring instrument...
...on the High Holidays last year, I wore the other...
...A young yeshiva student once wrote the Ragachover, posing to him a question which betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole topic...
...We are not told of what the Shpolyer spoke before and after eating the karpas or what he said upon breaking into uneven halves the middle of the three matzot on the plate before him...
...it was dawn and the time of repeating the credo — "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God...
...He told many stories, spoke in parables, handed over legends and secrets...
...He patted me on the shoulder when he was through, gave a half-smile, and wished me and my friend a happy holiday...
...The story of the next section of the service has also not come down to us in any detail...
...Like most of the Masters, the old man had turned the seder from a family celebration into one that included all the members of his own religious community...
...At the seder, one must ask and answer because the Exodus was so long ago, because one is apparently so familiar with it as an event of the past...
...or those who...
...I am willing to suffer...
...You are wrong...
...Know the "here," work at understanding why the questions are being asked, and then — perhaps — you can begin to answer your child...
...We know only that the Shpolyer talked, that he spoke with resentment about the exile, that he demanded with a peculiar boldness that it be ended...
...Although Rule X is apparently universal, can you give me an instance where . . ." I thought nothing peculiar of this stranger having stopped me in the street for 15 minutes, quizzing me as if I had applied to him for a job or the hand of his daughter...
...Then came the cat and ate the goat that Daddy bought for two coins, one little goat, one little goat...
...A: Can you answer a question with a question...
...Are you a psychiatrist...
...Even if you must feed questions to the asker, make sure that your answers remain unprepared...
...A Zen koan from the writings of D. T. Suzuki (quoted in Wittgenstein, language and philosophy): Monk: How may I enter the Way...
...The meal, having apparently started, suddenly ends with a bit of vegetable covered with a bit of salt water...
...Never mind that this was all sentiment and that I believed in nothing, not even myself...
...Some time had passed...
...I don't remember if my father ever put it exactly this way, but I was expected to pose a question and give an answer whose aptness would amuse him...
...I beg Him only to reassure me that my suffering is for purposes He would endorse...
...For those who remain, the hour has come to recite the Song of Songs, the rhapsody of love, human and divine...
...If you must discuss rocks at all, ask him what he thinks they will do with the stones and pebbles...
...The Tokelau Islander has nine words for the ripeness of coconut...
...I begin, however, with the tale of an old man who was impatient for the Messiah...
...A: Why are you here...
...When the Heavenly Father leaves the synagogue," he said...
...A: What is an answer...
...That stage direction is printed in the Haggadah just before the text of the Four Questions...
...Does the question chop at the ice that covers the cold waters...
...he leaves the position of slave only by talking about himself, his people, his enemies, and his God...
...I am sure only that little Isaac pulled himself back from the edges of sleep and, with sly alertness, noted carefully where his father had put the afikoman for safekeeping...
...I know 'two.' Two tablets of the Covenant, One is our God . . ." or the final song: "One little goat, one little goat that Daddy bought for two coins, one little goat, one little goat...
...The Ragachover accepted letters from everywhere, asking only that the writer enclose a self-addressed postal card and payment for return postage...
...Sitting at the seder, playing at being free men under the eyes of the Romans, they spoke of the Exodus...
...I was sure that he didn't know what I was saying...
...His name, as I recall, was Neil...
...There is certainly a time for silence in the Presence of the Word...
...And they hoped again...
...We were so unlike one another, in fact, that I was probably some princeling kidnapped in infancy and sold by gypsies into a family of bigots, fatheads, and ingrates who didn't apIn the name of Rabbi Naphtali of Ropshitz (if my father had heard this one, I was sure he had forgotten it): Notice the sequence — first the wise and good son, then the evil one, then the fool, then the one who can't even ask questions...
...At the point in the seder where the little son of the Grandfather of Shpoly had fallen asleep, the first codifiers of the Oral Law had written, "Here the son asks...
...Can you really answer all three of my questions...
...He died just before World War II, a rabbinic genius whose encyclopedic knowledge of classical Jewish texts rivaled that of the famous Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, a century and a half before him...
...The man looked at me, not at my friend...
...It was Passover...
...Then he looked up and asked, "Which cat...
...If the "here" is unique, how can one prepare answers...
...He spoke for many minutes, he told stories...
...B: You tell me...
...What is demanded is that there be questions, even if the questions must be codified in advance for the sake of those with no natural curiosity...
...Not Lithuanians, not Russians...
...Matzah is lechem oni — poor man's bread, baked cheaply and hastily...
...The little boy was clutching nuts and small toys in his other hand — for we are told by the Talmud that children are to be encouraged to amuse themselves so as to keep them awake for the seder...
...Questions and replies are the grappling hooks for time...
...When I look back on it, I am surprised that I took it so casually — that I understood without having been told that I was everyone's student, that each of my elders could have me repeat my lessons and examine me on them...
...You delude Yourself...
...They had the right even to demand good questions of us...
...A: What are you really asking...
...Let us say that Reuben's ox gores the cow of Simon under circumstances which...
...He glanced over me, up and down, and then said quickly in Yiddish, "Young fellow, what are you studying now...
...I hear my father, smiling at, exasperated with my questions: "The reason is...
...Master: Your everyday mind...
...You look puzzled...
...You may risk a question about the seder, but it is the wicked son who asks...
...Sometimes they were his but his questions were more brief and more familiar: "What did my father say about that passage...
...It is wicked not because it is unintelligent or because such fundamental problems can't ever be discussed...
...Perhaps the metaphor is wrong...
...You or me...
...the man exclaimed...
...We either share a common domain of curiosity and of freedom of observation or we cannot speak reasonably to one another...
...Yes," said the mullah...
...Look, it's very urgent that I see a psychiatrist...
...He was curious and interested in the seder...
...Tantalizingly, the hors d'oeuvre has been retained in its original place...
...One kid, one kid, that Daddy bought for two coins, one kid, one kid...
...When I was 10 or 11, the family next door had a boy who must have been around six...
...It is late...
...Over the course of the next hours, the Shpolyer angrily told them on at least two different occasions to leave the boy alone — that he would rouse himself, that the Shpolyer would brook no replacements, that his child would awake before midnight, must awake before that time...
...Come on...
...It was not too long before the student discovered that the Ragachover had cited every place in the Babylonian Talmud that treats of the definition and legal standing of idiots...
...My father was an outraged, outrageous Jehovah...
...It was already far past his bedtime, but it was Passover and there were Questions to be asked...
...My father had two kittels...
...I or you...
...or pinch him...
...it merely forces from me a tribute to his capacity for torment...
...He cannot rouse himself...
...or after, my son...
...I swear to You, Father, by my beard and sidelocks (the Shpolyer grasped them) —by those characteristics that mark me as a man, a Jew, a Student of Your Law, by the extensions of my body whose hue reminds, me that I am mortal and growing old — I swear to You that the Jews will never repent...
...If he still doesn't see your point, teach him more carefully how to look at the dial...
...The waters or the chopping itself...
...If a man sits alone, he must ask himself and reply to himself...
...An old chestnut of Passover homi-letics, first propounded by preachers many centuries before him...
...They were careful to read all the answers first, lest — having first read the author's question — they would have a moment's doubt concerning the correctness of their beliefs...
...They must be answered away from the table and then brought to it...
...diately forthcoming...
...The Haggadah, illustrating the obligation upon every Jew to discuss the Exodus on seder night — even if he already knows everything about it and has rehearsed the same accounts many times — presents the following story: It is told of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Elazar, son of Azariah and Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarphon, that they were reclining at the seder in the city of B'nei B'rak...
...B: Can't you...
...B: I don't want to know...
...To merit God as a teacher, one must be a Moses in the first place...
...He washed his hands, dried them, then recited the blessing over the karpas, a vegetable which he ate after dipping it into salt water...
...Could not every man, in his place, have been a Moses...
...A: No question...
...Why have the seder at all...
...But coming into our homes, seeing our wretchedness, our poverty, and our misery, how can the Father fail to understand that we are, indeed, a holy people, heartsick with love for Him, faithful beyond reason, and worthy of His blessing...
...The matzah, according to the Law, has to be eaten before midnight...
...All of these have since been lost to us...
...He is to remain alert to the possibility of mystery...
...There are many reasons offered for this custom...
...Throughout the whole night, they were telling one another about the Exodus from Egypt...
...On seder night, my father wore a very simple white cotton housecoat called a kittel...
...The practice of eating karpas harks back to the Greco-Roman period...
...When we finally stopped and faced each other, I didn't understand why, just that something was going to happen...
...At the seder, there is someone whom to ask and someone to do the asking...
...My father had to ask questions that stemmed from his "here...
...Everything else was "there...
...My father and his family stood...
...We know that he was taught directly by God...
...Mendicants that we were, we had lunched in the Lower East Side, at the home of the Rebbe of Kapishnitz...
...It is up to You to arouse them, up to You alone...
...The child may be prompted to ask why...
...What do you have to say tonight...
...Master: There, I have held nothing back from you...
...Then, You say, You will give us answers...
...One must never forget, said my grandfather, that the son asks "here," at this table and at this time...
...Whom do I ask...
...One kid, one kid...
...The Ragachover hadn't the time or the energy to go beyond the textual citations...
...Isn't that just a lot of fancy words...
...The demand, however, is to make the experience mine, not theirs . . . not just theirs...
...On that night, Isaac was to stay awake . . . and ask his father why the night of Passover differed from all other nights...
...early when the Shpolyer, holding his small son Isaac by the hand, entered the room in which the disciples were gathered...
...And when the moment of dialogue had finally come, Isaac's head lay on his arm against the table...
...Such is the practice, at least, of many Jews from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...A child climbs "up" and climbs "down...
...he may have said...
...After the kiddush, a basin of water, a cup, and a towel were brought to the Shpolyer...
...I wonder if you've been asking yourselves what this exotic confession has to do with you...
...He had prepared his questions of me, his father...
...We were walking-together across his lawn...
...Mullah Nazrudin, the Sufi Prince of Wise Fools, advertised that he would answer any three questions if he were paid an ounce of gold...
...I saw with self-congratulatory clarity that he had never loved me and I had never loved him...
...I have not one word to express my longing...
...And the talk is dialogue, answers to questions...
...A man runs "fast" and stands "fast...
...So said Rabbi Nachman of Bratz-lav: don't ask the man on the chain gang what prompts him to spend his days smashing rocks...
...Monk: How may I enter the Way...
...If no daughter either, the wife asks the Four Questions...
...Rabbi Joseph Rozan, "The Prodigy of Ragachov," was a rabbi in Dvinsk...
...Impatiently, patronizingly, I said, "Neil, don't you know that curiosity killed the cat...
...A: Why are you afraid...
...One is wise and one is wicked and one is a simpleton and one there is who doesn't know enough to ask...
...Bar-Chamra is a psychologist at a Midwest university...
...One learns not from hearing what has been said, but from asking to hear what hasn't yet been made clear or even uttered...
...Why do You wait, Heavenly Father...
...He was snoring gently...
...preciate me...
...most are as ingenious as they are incorrect...
...A few more seconds and midnight will have come...
...It's different there...
...And what did / once say at my Nothing very original, I'm afraid...
...A woman's "permanent" is only temporary...
...A: Do I just give the appearance of wisdom...
...A short man, bearded, approached us from across the plaza...
...It is the last verse...
...One can be taught to ask...
...the Lord is One" — had come upon the world...
...The man says, "Why do you want to know...
...And that is why there are no direct answers to the Four Questions, at least none in the text of the Haggadah — and certainly no immediate and direct replies to the simple demands for explanation that are the Four Questions — why unleavened bread and bitter herbs, why Jews take to masquerading as worthies at a Greek symposium...
...My father did point...
...It is not recorded whether the vegetable was potato, parsley or radish (my father used radishes, red radishes...
...The Torah spoke of four kinds of sons...
...the darkness of spirit, the betrayal of hope...
...Not a bird chirped, we are told, when God identified Himself as Master of History...
...Who knows 'two...
...Blessed is He Who gave Torah to His nation Israel...
...Perhaps a sloppy answer will provoke a real question . . . and all your preparation will not have been in vain...
...It is harder to accept that than to resign oneself to the fact that not all questions have or deserve answers...
...From the questions and answers, the seder ends not by returning to one speaker in a community of intent listeners — but to song...
...at least to notice that the night may be filled with surprises...
...Why...
...As they spoke of ancient freedom, they slipped inexorably into the blackness of despair...
...The whole business had been a sham...
...Prod us into seeing You with opened eyes...
...B: They made me come...
...the community awaited his arrival for the seder...
...It was not Mr...
...They were answers...
...Stop being hopeful...
...I have no questions of God, only one request...
...I relied on tradition...
...B: There's no question that my answer was no question...
...the vegetable was an hors d'oeuvre...
...The more they spoke, the greater and longer became the night, the blindness of men and God...
...A: What is a question...
...And we are not told, have as yet not been told, whether Isaac awakened and whether the Shpolyer heard the questions before midnight...
...A: Why don't you want to know...
...B: What do you mean...
...Excuse me," the woman says, "Are you a psychiatrist...
...I made Neil into a small brother or elected him my first student, I don't know which...
...The Shpolyer, obsessed with redemption, had then been moved to speak of God's hesitancy at sending the Messiah...
...Then he left...
...There is another reason why the wicked son is close to the wise one and not at the bottom of the list.In the company of the wise, perhaps the wicked will change...
...Since travel was forbidden on the holiday, my friend and I were walking back to a yeshiva dormitory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn...
...The traditional explanations for karpas ignore culinary history, however, and say karpas is eaten just to arouse questions...
...Or is it already too late for an answer once that question is posed...
...When I am hungry, I eat: when tired, I sleep...
...What my grandfather had asked his father was in a different place, under different conditions...
...Wait us out and You risk witnessing our very hearts plunging into coma...
...He belongs with the rest of the sons, unnamed by the Haggadah and unnumbered by it...
...Tf there are disciples with whom to study and whom to answer, there can be no despair...
...I did not invent ways of exciting my little boy's curiosity...
...B: Leave me alone, for God's sake...
...A: Where do you live...
...In the synagogue, they had praised His Holy Name and worshipped Him with love and fervor...
...Rule X had been invoked...
...Probably not...
...He once asked: Why the admiration for Moses, the prophet of the wilderness, the divine scribe, Moses our Master...
...B: That is...
...I was Simon...
...You are killing me with your damned questions...
...Or to make their exodus my own...
...Stop being patient...
...We kept moving towards one another, hypnotically, as if our meeting were portentous, as if there were some fateful purpose to it...
...You think we shall repent of our sins and be worthy on our own of asking the final questions...
...The Shpolyer zeyde (the"Grandfather of Shpoly)" was a second- or third-generation Chassidic Master...
...Why ask...
...My father blinked...
...B: Which one...
...The Shpolyer knew that the Questions had to be asked first . . . and he was certainly no less scrupulous in his observance of the Law than were his followers...
...The Shpolyer looked at his followers, at his sleeping child, and — bitterly — at Heaven...
...He follows His people into the streets and into their homes...
...We exchanged the traditional greetings...
...What follows here are my memories (for one must tell a personal story when the topic is important...
...The objection from so-and-so (reference) can be resolved by closely examining this-and-that (reference...
...Monk: What is the Tao (the Way, the Truth...
...So the card read, pouring out sources exhaustively and leaving to the reader the task of deciphering the often star-tlingly original reasoning that tied the citations to one another...
...Monk: Yes...
...Truth, he maintained, could be won in this world only after intellectual and emotional pain...
...Blackberries are red when they are green" is a proper English sentence...
...You must think that we can awaken by ourselves, that without help we shall come to ask of You the questions You wish to hear...
...And you wonder why I mistrust language, why one Friday evening, long ago, I concluded that I was caged in isolation, that I could reach no one in words and was myself beyond reach...
...I despair of being understood and of understanding...
...I," said the faithful Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, "am the son who is unable to ask...
...The seder finishes with children's ditties — "Who knows 'one...
...Tell me...
...The kindly Rabbi Mendel of Riminov could not bring himself to call a Jewish child "wicked," despite the text...
...now that we are uniquely "here," ask as only you can ask...
...Even should You then take a step in our direction, You will have moved towards us too late...
...The seder is over...
...so you should ask...
...Neil was thoughtful for a moment...
...It was taking time for the seder to get under way...
...Sometimes the only appropriate response is to remind the questioner that for the moment, at least, we have to confine the acceptable limits of the discussion...
...1 know my own child...
...The great Rabbi Moses Schreiber of Bratislava discarded any answer that came to him without effort...
...We parted...
...A: Do you have an answer, really...
...The woman grows upset...
...And I was so sure that I did...
...It was comfortable and I had been converted into a highly principled hedonist who gauged everything in terms of comfort and was about to rewrite history, starting — of course — with my own...
...So, Evan S. Connell, Jr., (Notes from a bottle found on the beach at Carmel): "The Eskimo has twenty words to express the conditions of snow...
...The volume of his mail made correspondence very costly...
...Night became dawn...
...The woman repeats her question: "Are you a psychiatrist...
...During this reenactment of the Exodus, the Jew begins with eating the fare of bondage...
...In due course, he got a postcard from Dvinsk, covered, as usual, with references...
...We know that he wept and shouted, that at one point he fell to the floor in a faint, that at another time he danced and sang with his disciples...
...You leave it to us, by ourselves, to arise from our sleep and pose the right questions to You...
...And the Holy One Blessed be He came and slaughtered the Angel of Death that killed the butcher who slaughtered the ox that drank the water that extinguished the flame that burnt the stick that hit the dog that bit the cat that ate the kid that Daddy bought for two coins...
...B: I don't know...
...Ask A: Why don't you know...
...We are singing together...
...The universe took a breath and held it...
...After the Messiah comes, they will repent...
...B: Not that...
...They live in squalor and in fear, surrounded hy their enemies...
...Not silence or dialogue, but community, the brotherhood of the young and the once young...
...A wise man's question is half the answer...
...Cup his head in your hands, if you must, and bring his eyes level with the instrument...
...I do not know what the Shpolyer said or did with the afikoman...
...the visitor exclaims happily...
...To become a Moses, apparently, one has to be a Moses...
...Now what are your other two questions...
...There will be only sleeping Jews with deadened hearts, no one left any longer to ask questions...
...Father in Heaven, we will not rouse ourselves...
...I remember that question with perfect clarity — the surrounding bushes, the dull color and texture of the grass, the sun striking the visor on Neil's cap, the angle at which we were cutting towards the sidewalk...
...We had met before the tribunal, presented our cases...
...It is likely that at one time the meal preceded the recitation of the Haggadah, the ancient texts expounding upon the miracles of the Exodus and the importance of re-experiencing the event in all its awe-someness...
...B: No question...
...Did the Shpolyer sit or stand...
...For the moment, we can still say, like the Shuna-mite to her beloved in the Song of Songs, "I am asleep, but my heart is awake...
...T never lacked for friends my own age, but I had no younger brother...
...Who he was I never learned...
...Most painful of all is the recognition that the father at the seder table hasn't all the answers...
...In the synagogue, when the Scroll of the Law is unfurled and the reader chants the Biblical portion, all the community is silent — as still as they were at Sinai...
...The questioning began...
...The Rizhyner said: "I have heard the Grandfather's claims...
...There is no reply...
...A: Isn't your answer merely another question...
...They must content themselves with crusts and fragments...
...The questions have been dealt with...
...And Isaac slept on and his father would allow no one to touch the silenced, oblivious, would-be questioner.' The community around the Shpolyer stood without questions, unquestioning, as midnight drew near...
...One event is swallowed by another...
...Were the questions bothering you before you strayed...
...B: Isn't it...
...But then they remembered that they still had students ("their students came to them...
...Before you stop reading this, ask yourself why...
...We are all of us reduced to blows and caresses...
...Because I prefer an intelligent scoffer to an idiot...
...I don't know what I've asked or answered here...
...And what is the answer, then...
...I have tried to keep him awake...
...I sink beneath my questions like a cigarette tossed into the snow, drowning in its own heat...
...It's not important...
...It is wicked only because such a questioner, if sincere, doesn't belong at the table...
...There were questions to be asked at my father's table on the night of the seder...
...Did he point to the matzot on the platter when he said, "This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the Land of Egypt...
...And when Isaac's turn finally came, when the little boy was to stand up proudly amidst the crowd of his father's disciples and followers and ask the Four Questions, he was asleep...
...Or, in the confusion — I ask you — did one of the disciples perhaps bump the little boy...
...B: I just moved...
...Most of the time they were mine...
...Don't trust an immediate answer...
...He was buried in the one...
...Since then, they had been teaching in the Academy of B'nei B'rak, trying to keep the Jewish people alive...
...he would ask...
...When God spoke from atop the mountain, all creation was speechless and awed...
...Near the Manhattan Bridge, the streets were almost empty of pedestrians...
...Answers become questions in their own right and questions, answers...
...The questions are always new because there has never before been quite the same "here...
...When I was 15 or so, I spent Suk-kot with a school friend in New York City...
...True, if there is no son, a daughter will do...
...There you may enter...
...I remind God only — and swear this to Him by my beard and sidelocks — that when He sends the Messiah, Jews will respond...
...He was blond, thin, and full of questions...
...This, however, we do know...
...As questioner, he confronted his father with a problem that no father had ever faced before...
...Which kittel was he wearing at the last Passover seder we shared...
...A: Why don't you answer...
...Who answers...
...Or didn't it...
...Those of the generation before me were there to be asked...
...Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn was informed of the Shpolyer's curious seder and of the final desperate oath the old man had taken, that the Jews would never repent...
...Suffice it to say that the kittel is worn on four major occasions: on Passover Eve, during the High Holidays, by a groom under the marriage canopy, and as a corpse's shroud...
...A man, impatient for answers and overjoyed that he had a master who would listen, presented his payment in advance, as Nazrudin had demanded...
...Then, my son," Reb Chaim said, "they weren't questions at all...
...Reuben and Simon come as litigants before the court, each claiming full ownership of . . . "; "Two witnesses, Reuben and Simon, testify that the new moon had appeared on the night of...
...And the Shpolyer continued to speak about the exile and dispersion, redemption and ascent, pilgrimage and destruction...
...I'd never seen him before, but his appearance was familiar enough — dark suit with a longish coat, a black rabbinic hat...
...B: Not this one...
...And now I hear, "What will you ask your son to repeat to you when he is at your seder table...
...Again, no reply...
...The philosopher in a seminar at Columbia: one can try to convince a man by appealing to his reason or to his immediate experience...
...The Rabbi of Lubavitch calls them the "fifth sons...
...To tell you the truth, Rabbi, I've had many questions about our religion...
...Reb Chaim asked him gently if this were so...
...I had returned home because home was the only place to be on that night...
...Nonetheless, if one has merited a son, it is the son who must recite the Questions...
...It was their privilege and responsibility, as well, to have us show them what we knew, to test us and reassure themselves that we had asked others and had absorbed the answers...
...A former student of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin had lapsed in his religious practices...
...He had practiced them by heart, perhaps a hundred times...
...On the night of Passover, the Shpolyer and his disciples had prayed together at the evening service that ushers in the holiday...
...Master: (pointing to a mountain stream) Do you hear the sound of that torrent...
...The decision had been just...
...I know 'one.' One is our God Who is in Heaven and on Earth...
...If he still doesn't see, say that you're sorry . . . and forget about him...
...Without the questions of the children and their attention, the seder is incomplete...
...Regarding your question, see such-and-such (reference...
...The time had come for reciting kiddush, the blessing of sanctification over the goblet of wine...
...That exchange remains as important to me as the time, many years later, when I looked at a leaf-bare tree in winter and realized how strange it was and how different from myself...
...Look at us...
...The more I wait for him, the deeper his sleep...
...Neil had been filling the air with questions, I don't remember about what or if I had any answers for them...
...His written replies were invariably in the form of a few words of explanation amidst a flood of bibliography...
...B: Why do you ask...
...Paupers, slaves, and fugitives haven't the luxury of eating whole cakes...
...And at the seder...
...Little wonder that he knew so much...
...The man uncomfortably admitted it...
...You get the picture...
...There were some in the room who took it upon themselves to prod at the sleeping child so that the Questions could be asked...
...Master: Do you smell the mountain laurel...
...Reb Chaim asked...
...You are a psychiatrist...
...having all the answers, have forgotten the questions...
...B: [No answer.] A: That's no answer, is it...
...Oni is "poverty, affliction, rape," but it recalls another Hebrew word that means "response, chant, reply...
...Our hearts, too, are falling asleep...
...The seder is a time for interruptions, for asking and answering...
...It seems to me that we spent a lot of time together, much of it talking...
...There was no God . . . and I was His prophet...
...They were stopped only by their students who came and said, "Our masters, the time of reciting the morning sh'ma has arrived," i.e...
...Where we read "wicked," he carefully said, "The second son...
...Why, I ask you, did all that happen...
...At least they have been heard...
...When my father was a youngster, he offered the following interpretation to his father: these five sages of the Second Century had witnessed the pillaging of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple...
...Then came the dog and bit the cat that ate the goat...
...That he wrote many books raises for me no question of his sincerity...
...I think my mother knows, but I am afraid to ask her...
...Where there is love, no answers are necessary...
...We don't know the sequence, when he wept, when he danced, when he collapsed...
...Afterwards," the man replied...
...Says the Haggadah: Blessed is the God Who appears in One Place but in Whom are all places, blessed is He...
...Because ignoramuses, however well-meaning or superficially pious, are insufferable...
...The meal has been shifted over the centuries such that it now follows the reading of the Haggadah...
...The final two steps are death and God...
...The fool and the one without questions, presumably, are only ignorant, not essentially godless and unobservant of the Law...
...Or the sounds of dancing...
...Who could not have grown so totally wise at the hands of such a Teacher...
...Others — especially the children — no longer wish to stay up...
...The passage in the Haggadah derives from the Mishnah in the Tal-mudic tractate on Passover...
...He need not fear...
...Where there is love, there are no questions...
...The rabbi had afterwards gone into his own apartments — to think, to study...
...I have waited for my son to ask things of me, but he sleeps...
...I told him the chapter in Talmud which I had covered during the previous semester in the yeshiva...
...At the amused urging of the grown-ups, Isaac, who had learned at school all the formulas of the seder, had announced loudly and seriously, "After the father returns from the synagogue, he says kiddush over the wine...
...He had learned the questions in their Hebrew original and in Yiddish translation...
...The Shpolyer seemed unaware that he would have to hurry for Isaac's sake...
...They were pained and embittered by the contrast of liberty at the hands of God and the slavery into which Palestine had sunk in their own day...
...Redeem us...
...There were those who began the study of philosophy with The Guide to the Perplexed of Maimonides...
...A visitor to a state mental hospital stops a professional-looking man in the halls...
Vol. 1 • April 1976 • No. 9
