Dear Friends,
Perhaps the most famous and well recognized section of our Haggadah is the section dealing with the four sons. Many beautiful Haggadot have been illustrated with wonderful drawings of these four sons, and pages and pages of commentaries have been written explaining the questions they ask, the answers given to them, and what we can learn from these four sons.
In a beautiful essay, Rabbi Norman Lamm asks the question: who are the four influential fathers (or parents) who raise, nurture and help influence these four sons? Hopefully, none of us believe that we as parents are able to control, create and fully shape exactly who our children become, but it would be naïve to believe that our influence and impact on our children and their future paths is inconsequential either. One could therefore claim that our four sons have to a great extent built and developed their character based on the types of parents they have.
I would like to therefore share with you Rabbi Lamm’s words and thoughts. Please understand that Rabbi Lamm was writing for an American audience and his words were written many years ago. Some of the ideas and themes do not necessarily perfectly equate within a 21st century Canadian audience, but some of the messages are timeless and very meaningful.
Who are Rabbi Lamm’s four fathers? There is the Domineering Father, the Wise Father, the WASP Father, and the Democratic Father.
Our Domineering Father is a very aggressive father. He is insensitive to his son as an autonomous human being and all communication between father and son in this kind of a relationship is a one-way only conversation: from father to son. The Torah tell us ואמרת אליו and the father should tell him; in the words of Rabbi Lamm, not only does this father tell him, but he outdoes the Torah and “he tells him off.” He tells him, he orders him, he commands him. In the words of Rabbi Lamm “it is a relationship which satisfies the father’s embattled psyche, but leaves his son and all others in the family disarrayed and repressed.” This Domineering Father lays down the law and destroys his family. This father’s only answer to every question is, “because I said so.”
Rabbi Lamm laments that, “a whole generation of Jews were sidetracked from Judaism by parents who “told” instead of “taught,” by melamdim who used an outsized ruler instead of insight and understanding. So a generation arose which neither learned nor listened nor obeyed, and wallowed in the dark abyss of Jewish ignorance.” This father creates a child who is a שאינו יודע לשאול because his child is not taught how to have a voice and how to ask a question and ultimately the child no longer cares to ask a question.
Our next father is the WASP Father. “WASP” is the euphemism for the highest-status American in contemporary society, the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” The Jewish WASP Father is, of course, not a real WASP at all, but all his life he spends, or wastes, wishing that he were one. He cannot forgive God or his parents for the calamity of having been born Jewish and perhaps not a native-born American. He acknowledges his Judaism, but he is American first and foremost. He will not permit the stigma of foreignness to harm his children and his children must never know that they are the children of aliens; certainly not, Heaven forbid, that they still in galut.
This father is a complex ridden, burdened WASP Father. He may give some charity to Jewish causes, he may even join a Temple and participate in a service every once in a while, but he is always wary about being “too Jewish.” In the words of Rabbi Lamm, “what bothers our WASP Father is that he is expected to tell his children that they come from Egypt, that he did not come to America with Columbus.” This WASP father begets a ben tam, a simple son whose connection to Judaism is often even less than his father. Rabbi Lamm concludes this description by saying, “laugh not at him. Pity him instead.”
Our third father is the father Rabbi Lamm is most troubled with: the Democratic Father. The Democratic Father is the opposite of the Domineering Father to an absurd extreme. He will not impose his own religious beliefs on his child – even at times to the point of not even informing the child about what those religious beliefs could be. The Democratic Father is, above all, open-minded. He considers the family to be a democratic institution. He believes the Torah binds him as the Haggadah puts it, “li ve-lo lo – for me, but not for him.” “I am bound by the Torah, but not my son; let my child choose for himself.”
This Democratic Father presents no father image to his children. He is only a pal and a friend, a perpetual adolescent; and when his son grows up, he outgrows the Democratic Father himself. Rabbi Lamm suggests that such a Father’s li ve-lo lo is the ideal formula for raising a rasha. Rabbi Lamm laments that the Democratic Father is a fool before he is a scoundrel. His approach is utterly illogical and inconsistent. He does not allow his child to choose whether or not he will brush his teeth, go to school, steal from the fruit vendor, or become a professional beggar. But a way of life that will determine whether his existence has meaning, whether he is rooted in history or not, whether morality is binding, whether the Torah and its laws are important – this his child can choose for himself!
Our final father is the Wise Father and not surprisingly he begets the ben hachacham, the Wise Son. This is the father I and all of us strive to be. He knows what the Domineering Father does not: that you cannot fill a child’s head and warm his heart by twisting his arm. While the Domineering Father lays down the law by “telling” his son, the Wise Father tries to teach the law by talking with his son.
Concerning such a father, the Haggadah itself reveals his secret of success: “you shall speak with him concerning the laws of Passover.” Notice: not “tell,” but “talk” or “speak.” The Wise Father will have to be a disciplinarian, but he will do it with care and love. The goal of the Wise Father is to make Torah simply too beautiful to resist. Even more important, the Wise Father would never think of imposing any duties on a child that he does not himself practice. For the attitude of “do as I say, not as I do” is not only unethical and immoral – it is also unwise and ineffective. The Wise Father will teach his son to do what he does. He will not send him to eat matzah and maror, but invite his son to join him in his religious observance.
Rather than sharing with you an original Pesach message, I am borrowing from Rabbi Lamm this year because I believe his message is both timeless and instructive. I don’t necessarily agree with all his points and I of course recognize that raising children is among the greatest challenges any of us have, but I do believe there is much to learn from his words.
We must of course remember that our children need to bear ultimate responsibility for their deeds and actions, as they all have free will and free choice, but the lessons they learn from us, their parents, will undoubtedly impact on their directions in life.
As we gather with our families at our Pesach seder and we look around our table at friends and relatives who likely have a bit of all four of the sons and don’t fit squarely into any of the descriptions given above, let us remember and be thankful that we have all four sons sitting around our table.
Pesach is a time when families come together and hopefully reaffirm their love, commitment and devotion to each other. May this Pesach bring you and your family health, happiness, great pride in your children and success in your future endeavors.
Rabbi Seth Grauer
Rosh Yeshiva/Head of School
