The Four Children, Just For Funsies

OK, well, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to nerd out a little bit on the Haggadah before Pesach (Passover, in English), could I? So for those less familiar, the Passover seder is a sort of a ritual storytelling journey of the Exodus, from enslavement through liberation, featuring symbolic foods and particular sections of the seder that are told and, hopefully, discussed and unpacked at the seder table, over a long, full meal. (Protip: Karpas (the vegetable that gets dipped) can be any veg + dip, not just parsley in salt water, so make your blessing over roasted potatoes, carrots that you can then dip in hummus or guac, get broccoli, asparagus, whatever, get a whole spread set out and then you can have a nice substantial nosh that’s fair game to keep you going through the Maggid/storytelling section until it’s dinnertime.)

First of all, as I’ve said many times, Jesus didn’t have a seder. Scholars debate whether or not he was involved in the eating of the korbon Pesach, the Paschal sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem, but it wasn’t a seder as we know now. That was a post-Temple innovation. (As such, Christian seders have nothing to do with Jesus and are really not cool with Jews—appropriation, supersessionism and all that.)

But I am sending big big Easter blessings to my Christian peeps, and hope your Maundy Thursday is powerful and meaningful today.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to look at a snippet of the Four Children, look at their origins in the Biblical text, a few commentaries, have a little pre-Passover jam about them. I know that some of you will be very familiar with this, having read it year after year, and some of you will be coming to this text for the first time. Right on! Let’s have fun. This is just a chunk of the middle of the Haggadah, the Passover seder ritual.