PESACH 5778 rapidly is approaching. How do I know. The place is a mini-madhouse with “pre-P” cleaning.
מה נשתנה הלילה הזה
The children learned the question at school; the grand-daughter is an “old hand” at singing the song.
I’ve heard lots of rabbinical comments about the “son unable to ask” – OK, make that “the child unable to ask”; more on that later.
My Spouse pointed out that the question reads: ושאינו יודע לשטול את פתח לו
The hagadah clearly shows את and NOT אתה.
Why would the rabbis write that the mother will be the one to ask for the child “who does not know how to ask”?
Because – and we all know it – the child’s initial education comes at the child's mother’s breast, and later at her knees. Dad is off doing something else – working, studying, but not tending to a small child’s needs.
I never noticed this before and I am, as Yehudah ben Teima contends, of the age of a “hoary head”1 so this is hardly my first time reading the hagadah.
Ben Teima's comments appear in almost every sedur2 remarking
To be fair, my Spouse is an educator and before semi-retirement, was head of Judaics and Hebrew at a Jewish day school; she knows her “stuff.”
We – actually my Spouse – has a LARGE PRINT Avot from the ArtScroll Mesorah Series., complete with “an anthologized commentary and anecdotes.” Beautiful book.
Even before we get to Misnah 1 there’s a lesson to be learned.
We say it every Shabat where I make minyan: כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעולם הבא",
Note it is לעולם הבא and NOT בעולם הבא.
This version of Avot commnts that we have a “share toward the World to come," suggesting “olam haba is something we create for ourselves by the way we live in this world. We gain olam haba by working toward it" by performing mitzvoth. (Emphasis from the book.)
The Pesach hagadah, Avot, and the Torah have many things in common. To me, the most obvious one is that no matter how many times it is read, the reader can find something he (or she) never saw before.
AS FOR “SON” VS. “CHILD”
If we don’t educate our daughters – both in “general studies” and in :”things Jewish” we are depriving future generations of knowledge.
Children, boys and girls, learn behavior and habits – both good and bad – during their formative years; those years beginning in the cradle.
If a mother lacks knowledge, the child will get off to a slow start.
The child may be able to “catch up,” but catching up will be at the expense of other things and may be more difficult than learning things by osmosis.
Osmosis is a major influence on how we learn to speak (unfortunately, electronic media – tv, computers, notebooks, tablets, etc. and et al have replaced books as vocabulary builders).
To be a little “indelicate,” it’s what is between the ears, not between the legs that should determine how we educate all of our children.
Sources
1. Avot 5:21
2. Avot 5:23 and Pesachim 112a; immediately after R, Ismael’s 13 medot and just before the “Al Israel” kadish.
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
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