Pesach: The Four Questions of Ma Nishtana

Good evening, dear friends. We are continuing our reflection on the Haggadah, and if you remember, we stopped at the four questions that we like to entrust to a child to sing. It is very good to encourage a child to sing the four questions — provided that we, as adults, do not stop there. Ma Nishtana projects us onto four paths of reflection. These four paths are the literal meaning, which is peshat; allegory, which is derash; analogy, which is remez; and sod, the hidden meaning of things. When we open ourselves to these four modes of thought, the four questions take on different aspects. We said that the four questions of Ma Nishtana correspond to the four levels of interpretation, but also to the four types of children before us — or rather, to the four ages

that we pass through over the course of time. We can indeed go through them in the direction of a positive evolution, or, unfortunately, in the direction of total rejection: we begin with the wise son and end up with she-eino yode’a lishol, the one who does not know how to ask. And that is unfortunate. It means that the question of Ma Nishtana has not been reflected upon — not sufficiently — for do not forget that the root of the word shanah contains first of all the idea of repeating — shanah; then shanah, to study; shanun, sharpened; shinnah, to change. So as we study, as we return to our text and refine it, we become steeped in all this teaching, and a change necessarily takes place. So the question is: Ma nishtanah ha-laylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot — “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

We could indeed see the four questions as four interrogations, but we could just as well regard the four interrogations as four answers to the single question: Ma nishtanah ha-laylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot. We moved the Seder plate to arouse the attention of the child, who expected us to go straight to the meal, and who will indeed wonder why we moved the plate and began reading a text, reciting a text, or expounding on the meaning of the matzah — and, above all, he will discover that we are, and always remain, in exile. We are in exile at every moment of life; let us not delude ourselves. There are four exiles, those of Babel, Madai, Yavan and Edom. And the four questions likewise concern these four exiles of the human being: they ask what lesson can be drawn from exile; they ask about the derekh eretz that exile brings us — that is, openness of mind toward other cultures and other modes of thought, which we nonetheless integrate, because we must give them an answer, substituting for them an answer drawn from what we ourselves analyze, through the analogies we draw from our texts. Then there is indeed the rationality of Yavan, Greece, which obliges us to answer according to da mah she-tashiv la-apikoros — “know what to answer the unbeliever” — to answer pure logic. So be it. But beyond that, there is Edom.

Edom, the equivalent of Rome, claims to integrate all these cultures — this openness to science, this openness to logic — and to serve us the whole, so much so that with Edom one can consider oneself possessed of a truly vast general culture. We must answer all of this, and avoid four scourges, four wounds. You know, this week we have just read the parashah dealing with tzara’at, which is usually translated as leprosy — leprosy which is, let us say, the consequence. Four states of being. There is se’et: when we are carried by the feeling that we know everything, that we are better than others, that we have nothing more to learn. There is sapachat: when we observe, or judge, that we do not know everything — true — but then we open ourselves to any current of thought whatsoever,

and we mistake the accessory for the essential. We diminish ourselves before other cultures, and so we become the annex, the accessory, of another body of knowledge. Baheret is when we consider that everything is clear, everything is transparent. Bahir — yet there is no knowledge that does not leave a shadow, just as there is no object that does not cast a shadow, however fine, almost invisible — a film, not a husk. So a man should be able to wear with humility this head covering, the kippah, which places him somewhat in a state of openness and listening — from kippat ha-shamayim, the vault of heaven. For this vault of heaven I substitute another vault upon my head, which demands of me a certain humility.

Because, as you know, transparency does not exist. Blue is an illusory color — white-blue, blue-white. Blue is an accumulation of transparency. The sky is blue because layers of air accumulate and give us the blue we admire, which is also reflected in the blue of transparent waters, and so on. And white, as you know, is the mixture of all colors in motion. When they move at a certain speed, you see only white: mix all the colors on a saucer, spin it, and it turns white. But if you mix all the colors and they are at rest, it is black.

Now you can understand the meaning of the black-and-white tallit, and of those who wore it blue and white. It is the dividing line between transparency and all the colors in motion — and through all the colors one must see all the nuances of thought, the multitude of behaviors and approaches. Transparency belongs to the heavenly realm; it is not at my level. So when I sin through self-satisfaction, or through a sense of inferiority — that is sapachat — or because I believe everything is clear, what awaits me? The netek. The netek is when I begin to lose my hair, when things begin to disintegrate, to fray. Netek is rupture. At that moment I am no longer connected, and I suffer when the connection disappears. We are all in the same situation.

So the leprosy that strikes man is also present on the night of Pesach, when we question ourselves about this physical exile — must one sometimes take pleasure in the environment in which one lives? — about intellectual exile, when we find no one to talk to, when we no longer understand one another, when we are misunderstood; not to speak of spiritual exile. And when all of these come at once, then indeed we are in Egypt, for that is what Egypt is in its essence. [The connection breaks off. The host: “Rav Benizri has disappeared. Rav Benizri, can you hear us? — There were several networks. — All right? We lost you for a minute.” The Rav: “Where did you lose me?” — “In exile.” — “Where did you lose me?”]

[“From Egypt. In exile.”] Yes — I told you that exile has four levels. There is physical exile; intellectual exile, the exile of thought, when we are misunderstood — this happens socially, with our children, within the couple; and spiritual exile, when we no longer find our bearings, when we are disoriented and what we expected is not what comes. [The host: “Rav Benizri, we still have a small problem — we are disoriented too.” The connection breaks off again and is restored.] So I was speaking of this whole that disconnects us from reality and from our expectations, so that the spring we so longed for does not shine as we would have wished.

Must we then truly sink into despair, into despondency? No — that is the principal answer to all our questions. For from the moment we have integrated the idea that this transparency of being belongs to another world, then, if I am here, it is to reduce, day after day, the opacity that surrounds me, in order to plant within the vayehi — that is, within toil, within the pains I take — the future, the vehayah. I do this at different stages. And that is my freedom; that is my movement of liberation. For freedom remains an illusion; in any case, we cannot be free. We are conditioned by the day of our birth and the term of our life; we are conditioned by the society in which we live; we are conditioned by knowledge, which we cannot store up, so vast is it; we are conditioned emotionally.

But this conditioning — we triumph over it through the Torah. We came out of Egypt. And attaining this notion of […] — that is, the verticality of man’s being, which aspires to the heights — through a spiritual ascent, his own spiritual ascent: that is the liberation of each one of us. So the four questions concern the chakham, the rasha, the tam and the she-eino yode’a lishol — the four types of children that we ourselves are, from the base up to the head, from malkhut, this royalty: the child is king, he is pampered — and we will climb the rungs little by little, little by little, until we reach the sphere of chokhmah (wisdom), the highest sphere. What separates us from the Absolute is, let us say, the veil that remains between this kippah and the vault of heaven.

This is what we would call, in our own small language, the keter, the crown. The Kohen wore it at his level too. But what we must know, what we must accept, is that each person, at his own level, has his ten degrees of ascent, which form one unit of ascent, a human ladder, and we should not start establishing frontiers and limits between these and those. It serves no purpose. Tell me: what is the opposite of the chakham in the Haggadah? It is not the rasha, the unbeliever. The opposite of chakham is tipesh — the fool. So why does the Haggadah not say “The tipesh, what does he say?”

Because of the fool we do not speak. With a fool, dialogue is impossible. The rasha is better than he, because the rasha has a critical sense so developed that we can turn things around and find him beside the chakham, in the service of the chakham. But that is by the way — a parenthesis. So our four questions, as we said, are bound up with the Torah: for example, the mitzvah of matzah and the mitzvah of maror. We are worthy of a blessing: we recite a blessing al akhilat matzah and a blessing al akhilat maror. We consider that maror — the pains we take — is worth a blessing. They carry a message, provided we are able to draw out all its meaning, all the richness of this message.

But sometimes we lack tools, we lack inspiration, we lack intuition. Then, unfortunately, we let ourselves be carried away, and maror becomes synonymous with mavet, death — for the numerical value of mavet and of maror is the same, is it not? 446. Yet we are a people that does not die. This has been verified: we have passed through all the crises of humanity. We have lost some feathers, it is true, but we are here — here as we have been […], as we were in our moments of glory: capable of perceiving the word of G-d, capable of hearing it, capable of raising up prophets from our ranks, so that the whole people of G-d would be composed of nothing but prophets, with that intuition which lifts it to the heavens.

So the chakham — his question, his inquiry, will be about the matzah. Regarding matzah, I told you that the child only begins to speak, our Sages say, once he has begun to taste bread, once he has begun to chew grain. And in this bread lies what the Torah has given. You know, it is astonishing. The first mitzvah of the Torah, which was given to Adam — to man as such — I am not speaking of the blessing, the blessing being to be fruitful and multiply, but the mitzvah, the command not to err, is tied to eating the fruit of the earth: “Of every tree of the garden you may surely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” — that which puts good into evil and evil into good — “you shall not eat of it.” It concerns food. Is this really the first commandment we would have expected from the Creator? I would not say the first — the only one. And it is a fact that the only blessing imposed by the Torah concerns nothing but the eating of bread: we recite Birkat HaMazon only after a meal based on bread, on these complete foods. For through the produce of the earth man nourishes his body, and above all his spirit, and in this way he has integrated the four — or rather three — essential elements that presided over the formation of the universe: the earth that produced the plant, the plant that nourished the animal, the animal that nourished man; and man restores all of this, through his spirit, to the absolute source of creation. In other words, it is the restitution of a world, of an enriched microcosm that man carries within himself, through the matzah, through lechem, through bread. I said matzah, because all bread that we prepare is, first of all, a matzah.

You know that there are four kinds of fruit that Adam is said to have eaten when he sinned. Our Sages inquired about these four fruits. Some said that the tree from which he ate was wheat — at that time wheat was still a tree, and it was reduced to the state of a plant after Adam’s sin. Others said no: he sinned because he yielded to the temptation of the sweet fruit of the fig, the te’enah. And there is a play on te’enah: to’anah — in reality he was seeking a pretext, a way to assert himself. And, as a rule, unfortunately, we relish what is forbidden. A further view: there are those who said no, it was the vine; he became intoxicated, he lost his mind, he was no longer conscious —

which opens for him a way — a path of repentance. But there are others who said no: the fruit he ate was the etrog, the citron. The citron was considered a perfect fruit. He fell into the trap of this perfection that he attributed to himself, which made him — did it not? — a man capable of being a creator like G-d. So we know very well that the nachash who speaks to him is none other than man. This serpent is man. It is not simply an animal rising up before man from outside; it is man who is “more cunning than all the beasts” — the most cunning, the most learned, the wisest.

It is man. Man indeed has this faculty of nachash […]; he carries this nachash within him, this gift of going forward, of intuition, of imagination. And you know, what did the Egyptians wear as phylacteries? The Egyptian kings wore, as phylacteries, a serpent’s head, because for them it was the symbol of knowledge. We — or rather the Torah — substituted for this serpent that the Egyptians wore on their foreheads, on their crowns, the parchments of the Torah: the proclamation of the unity of G-d, the sanctification of every firstborn, the remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, and the obligation of redemption. Here too you see four elements. Had I the time, I would have drawn the analysis and the analogy between these four elements that we carry on our forehead, the tefillin, and of course these four questions, these four wounds from which man suffers and which lie at the origin of his leprosy, and so on. For we are told that the first leper was the nachash — that is to say, the first leper was man, when he sinned. And leprosy is not an internal disease; it is an external disease.

It attacks only the skin, that is, the envelope of man. It is when man, in the end, steps out of his envelope and no longer considers it as such, as a limit, that leprosy arises — that is when it strikes him. So I return to my four questions, to my four children, and I say: the chakham will inquire about the matzah, about the essence of his nourishment — that which will release the energy of matter and restore it in its essence, to its original creation, but this time enriched, because it has in some way justified its existence. He has set it free. What we do is release this energy, but we do not leave it in the service of our lowest instincts; on the contrary, we raise it to a supreme level of spirituality, to the level of its original creation, of its ma’amar, the utterance by which it was created. It becomes ma’amar; it becomes a bearer of speech. And let us not forget that Pesach is peh sach — the mouth in motion, the mouth that speaks, the one that releases this knowledge of man — whereas Par’oh is peh ra, the evil mouth, the one that sees everything in its sheer materiality, to the point of making it a divinity. Yes, there are those who live only in the world of economics, those who live only in the world of art, those who live only in the world of science, and those too who live only […].

All of these — all these four lives — when they are not channeled toward a liberation of being, the liberation that triumphs over death […]. For the first mitzvah given to the Jewish people, together with the sanctification of time, is the Paschal sacrifice: to take up these Egyptian divinities, this idolatry, this animal which was considered worthy of having one’s time sacrificed to it, in order to put it on one’s table. But no — it is not to put it on one’s table; it is to put it on the altar of the Most High, because even our table is considered an altar, because our table is worthy of blessing, it is a bearer of blessing. That is how we restore this […]. So we understand that the question of the wise son will concern mah ha-edot ve-ha-chukim ve-ha-mishpatim asher tzivah Hashem Elokeinu etkhem — “What are the testimonies, the statutes and the laws that Hashem our G-d has commanded you?” — that is, what is the purpose of these laws?

These laws that are chukim seem at first like dogmas, and that is how they are taught. But beware: they are witnesses, they are beacons, they are signs that attest to the word we exchanged with the Creator, which is held in trust with us. Yet we do not shelter it from all logic; on the contrary, it becomes mishpat, it becomes law, it becomes jurisprudence, it becomes a chapter of law that one can discuss, for there are seventy ways of approaching the study of the Torah. But the answer we give to the chakham is: ein maftirin achar ha-Pesach afikoman — “One does not conclude after the Paschal offering with an afikoman.” Know that we cannot conclude the Pesach — that is, go back to eating after the Paschal lamb — once we have stripped the Paschal lamb of its idolatrous side, of its materiality; once we have made it a sign, a witness to our freedom, to our ability to free it from its animality and restore it entirely to its essence, enriched with a word of being, because it too will be added to our way of approaching things and seeing them. Then there are no more victuals, no more sweets; afikoman — we do not go beyond this; it is finished. What remains is the taste of this act we accomplished on the festival of Pesach, which would secure our liberation through the law, through which we indeed merited this Exodus. Mitzrayim, I told you, is a dual. Mitzrayim is the limits of our life, set by the day of birth and the term of death. These are physical, intellectual, spiritual limits; you can always find this duality. It is with duality that the book of Bereshit begins — with the letter bet. As for unity — we are indeed in search of this unity, but always starting from a duality, and without duality there is no unity.

For one exists only in relation to two, does it not? Addition begins with one plus one — hence with Mitzrayim, with two boundaries, does it not? And we are to find the connection between these two boundaries and make of them a unity of thought. This duality exists at every level, and one would still have to expound on this at length, if we are to do so. That is indeed the reason why the question of Ma Nishtana — the first question, Ma nishtanah ha-laylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot? She-be-khol ha-leilot anu okhlin chametz u-matzah, ha-laylah ha-zeh kulo matzah — “Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we eat chametz and matzah; on this night, only matzah.”

Now matzah, as I told you: as long as we keep kneading the dough, there is no chametz. Chametz appears when we have stopped kneading the dough. When we have left it at rest, chametz springs up in the idleness of being — when one is bored, when one finds nothing to do. Then there is chametz. This chametz has a flavor; it is what gives bread its flavor. And on Shavuot we do indeed bring the bread of chametz; but to bring the bread of chametz, one must first have passed through matzah — that is, one must work on oneself constantly. One must work on oneself constantly so as not to get bogged down in problems of every kind.

There are moments in life when we have been given Shabbat — on Shabbat we are at rest; on the festivals we are at rest. But it is precisely at that moment that our chametz […]. Chametz is not an ingredient one has added. It is not like a cake recipe: add a spoonful of yeast. No — beware: chametz here is part of the flour. It is simply time that governs chametz. Chametz is a derivative of time, and to leave the enclosure of time is the beginning of liberation, the beginning of man’s freedom. I will stop here and leave you to ask your questions.

You see, I have not finished with the chakham, but there is a way to continue. There are many Pesachs in life […].