Every year at the Seder, we read about four sons. The Fourth Son is the one who does not know how to ask. He is the one sitting in our universities, our newsrooms, our communal institutions, and sometimes at our own Seder tables.

He is the one my non-Jewish friends ask me about: We expected hostility from the usual places. What we didn't expect was Jews making the case against their own people better than Israel's enemies ever could. Can you explain this?

Their confusion is not political; it’s moral. They struggle to understand how a people forged by persecution could so readily supply the language used to delegitimize their own survival. Jewish students organizing anti-Israel protests. Jewish academics signing letters accusing Israel of genocide. Jewish public figures condemning Jewish power more fiercely than Jewish enemies ever have.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is visible, documented, and growing. And it demands an honest explanation.

The Haggadah offers one.

Rudderless

The Fourth Son is traditionally understood as disengaged or uninformed. But in our generation, his condition looks different. He is not empty of Jewish identity. He has fragments of it. He knows he is Jewish. What he lacks is a rudder — an internal framework that allows him to think, question, and interpret the world through a Jewish lens.

#He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for. So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it.

He has symbols without substance, memory without meaning, ethics without peoplehood. He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for, what it demands, or how it should shape his judgment when the pressure comes.

So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it. The loudest voices, the strongest consensus, the greatest social rewards end up deciding for him. His Jewishness does not guide his judgment. The world around him reshapes it.

The Fourth Son is rudderless at sea; the strongest waves decide his direction.

After Oct 7

Since October 7, the pressure on Jewish identity has been unlike anything most living Jews have experienced. Jewish students have reported feeling compelled to publicly disavow Israel simply to maintain social standing. The price of Jewish particularity — of saying we have a right to exist and defend ourselves as a people — has risen sharply in elite cultural and academic spaces.

For Jews with a strong internal framework, this pressure is uncomfortable but navigable. They can criticize Israeli policy fiercely, hold genuine moral tensions, and still maintain clarity about what Jewish survival requires. Judaism has always welcomed fierce self-critique. The prophets rebuked Israel. The Talmud argues endlessly. Cheshbon hanefesh, honest moral accounting, is a core Jewish practice and strength.

But there is a crucial difference between these two statements:

"We need to do better."
versus
"We are the problem."

The first is moral responsibility, the second is something else. When Jews reserve their harshest judgment for other Jews, adopt the language of those who deny Jewish legitimacy, and treat solidarity with their own people as suspect, critique has crossed into something the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing identified nearly a century ago: Jewish self-hatred.

As A Jew

In the modern era, Jewish self-rejection has acquired a distinctive voice: "As a Jew…"

"As a Jew, I must condemn…" "Jewish ethics demand we oppose…" "I'm Jewish, and that's why I say Zionism is the problem."

Jewish identity is invoked not to express solidarity, but to legitimize distance from the Jewish people. Jewishness becomes a credential, a way of saying I am not one of those Jews. These statements, eagerly amplified by Israel's enemies, provide cover for accusations that would be recognized as antisemitic if they came from anyone else.

This is not, for the most part, driven by malice. Many of those who speak this way are sincere. They are compassionate people responding to genuine moral pain. But moral reasoning does not develop in a vacuum. When Jewish power is consistently framed as suspect, when Jewish self-defense is treated as uniquely requiring justification, opposition to Jewish sovereignty can begin to feel like ethical clarity rather than adaptation to a hostile moral framework.

What begins as ethical concern can harden, over time, into internalized condemnation not of specific policies or leaders, but of Jewish peoplehood itself.

Open the Door

The Haggadah's response to the Fourth Son is not argument or rebuke. It is an opening.

#What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

The Haggadah says, “You open for him.” You don't wait for curiosity to emerge. You don't win him back with polemics. You give him language, belonging, and a place inside the story, before the distance hardens into something more permanent.

What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

Jewish identity, held clearly and carried with confidence, is not a moral burden to be managed or explained away. It is a moral inheritance to be proud of.

The Fourth Son needs to digest that.

This Passover, open the door.

The ideas in this article are drawn from my forthcoming book, The Fourth Son: Jewish Identity, Self-Hatred, and the Courage to Stand Alone, scheduled for publication at the end of 2026.

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Sir Moses Montefiore:

The great British philanthropist and Orthodox Jew Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) was once seated at a dinner party next to an antisemite who declared he’d just come back from a trip to Japan, where they “have neither pigs nor Jews.”

Without pause, Sir Moses replied “Accordingly, you and I should go there so they can have a sample of each.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli:

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), the 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was immensely proud of his Jewish family’s Levite status.  (In ancient times, Levites worked in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.)  One day in Parliament, an MP named Daniel O’Connell attacked Disraeli in intensely antisemitic terms.  Disraeli’s response was equally blistering:

“Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the Right Honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Israel Zangwill:

British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (1861-1926) was once at a snooty London event where an aristocrat sneered “My ancestors came over with William the Conqueror.”  Zangwill is said to have smiled and replied: “How interesting… mine came over with Moses.”

Albert Einstein:

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) observed rising antisemitism in his native Germany with alarm.  Antisemites demonstrated at his public lectures.  In 1933 he left Germany and publicly renounced his German citizenship.

When the great scientist received a prize in France in 1929, he acknowledged pervasive antisemitism in Europe, quipping: “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.  Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”

Groucho Marx:

When told he and his family couldn’t swim in the pool at a country club that excluded Jews, comedian Groucho Marx (1890-1977), whose wife was not Jewish, protested: “But my daughter’s only half-Jewish.  Can she go in up to her waist?”

Marx was one of the few Jewish members of the exclusive Friars Club, an exclusive Manhattan private club which famously restricted Jewish members.

In 1949, he lampooned the club’s antisemitism, resigning his membership in a telegram: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

Hank Greenberg:

The famous Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg (1911-1986) faced a torrent of antisemitic abuse each time he stepped onto the field in the 1930s.  Originally an unaffiliated Jew, Greenberg began to see himself as a representative of the Jewish people helping build Jewish pride.  “Every home run I hit,” he later recalled, “was a home run against Hitler.”

Golda Meir:

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1898 - 1978) engaged in US-mediated peace talks with Arab states in the 1970s.  On one occasion, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained that he was being tough on Israel because he didn’t want to be accused of favoritism to the Jewish state.  “First I am an American,” he said, “second I am Secretary of State, and third I am a Jew.”

Prime Minister Meir simply replied: “In Israel, we read from right to left.”

Elon Gold:

After antisemites marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” comedian Elon Gold provided a response:

“We don’t want to replace you, we just want to put braces on you…we just want to manage your portfolio…we want to place you in a 30-year fixed low interest mortgage…we want to fit you for glasses, heal you, teach you, inspire you, make you laugh, represent you in a divorce and she replaces you.”

Mike Glazer:

When an audience member started heckling comedian Mike Glazer recently, calling him a “Jew pig” and telling him that Americans don’t like Jews, Glazer paused his routine and offered a reply that quickly went viral:

“I feel like I’m in my Instagram right now.  This is so crazy.  Wow.  You never see them IRL (in real life).  And then once you do, you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s about what I thought!”

Alex Edelman:

When comedian Alex Edelman found himself on the receiving end of antisemitic comments on Twitter, he compiled a list of their user names, labeling it “Jewish National Fund contributors.”  Referencing the list of Jews in Schindler’s List he said: “Let them be on a list for once!”

The post 10 Witty Jewish Responses to Antisemitism appeared first on Aish.com.

In 1492, a Benedictine abbot named Johannes Trithemius sat down to write a treatise defending the ancient art of manuscript copying against a dangerous new technology. He argued that hand-copied text on parchment would outlast printed text on paper by centuries. He made the case that the labor of copying Scripture was itself a form of prayer, a devotional act that no machine could replicate. He was, in the most literal sense, a gatekeeper making his last stand.

He had the treatise printed.

Because that was the only way anyone would read it.

This is the central irony of every wave of democratizing technology: the experts who argue most forcefully against the new tool are often already using it. And yet their concerns are not always wrong. They are just incomplete. The question is whether we have the honesty to hold both truths at once, and the courage to choose freedom over the familiar cage.

The Abbot and the Press

Trithemius was not a fool or a reactionary. He was the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Sponheim, a serious scholar who expanded his abbey’s library from 40 books to over 2,000. He understood what the printing press could do. He used it constantly for his own work. Thirty printed editions of his writings appeared during the 15th century alone.

And yet in De Laude Scriptorum, written in 1492, he made a case that deserves to be read carefully rather than dismissed. He wrote: “The word written on parchment will last a thousand years. The printed word is on paper. How long will it last? The most you can expect a book of paper to survive is two hundred years.” ¹

He was not entirely wrong. Early printed books on paper were genuinely less durable than manuscript text on vellum. This was a real quality concern, not a projected one. Parchment manuscripts from the 8th century still exist today in near-perfect condition. Many early printed books did not survive two centuries.

But Trithemius was also defending something beyond durability. He was defending a way of life, a role, an identity built around being one of the few people in Europe who could produce a book. And when his own monks at Sponheim disagreed with him, when they found the task of endless copying “both irksome and pointless” and finally rebelled against his regime in 1505, forcing him to leave the monastery, what was lost was not the books. The books kept coming. What was lost was his position as the indispensable guardian of them.

The Volunteer Encyclopedia that Beat the Experts

In 2001, Jimmy Wales launched an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could write and edit. No credentials required. No editorial board. No gatekeeping of any kind. The professional response was swift and confident: this was obviously inferior.

Encyclopedia Britannica had spent 250 years building a model around credentialed experts, rigorous editorial review, and institutional authority. The idea that anonymous volunteers writing for free could produce anything comparable was not a serious proposition.

In 2005, the journal Nature published a peer-reviewed study comparing Wikipedia’s accuracy on scientific topics directly against Britannica’s. The difference in error rates was not statistically significant.

The experts were right that some Wikipedia articles were poor. They were right that the model produced uneven quality, that anyone could write anything, that the floor had dropped dramatically. What they could not see was that the ceiling had not dropped with it. The tool gave access to thousands of people who happened to know things that no paid editorial team could have recruited. A retired volcanologist in New Zealand. A Talmud scholar in Brooklyn. A working cardiologist in Bangalore. The gate had kept them out not because their knowledge was insufficient but because the infrastructure of credentialed publishing had no way to reach them.

Wikipedia was not an isolated event. The pattern ran through photography a decade before Wikipedia. When smartphone computational photography arrived, and Sony and others built intelligent auto-modes that produced technically beautiful images without manual settings, professional photographers split into two camps. Some said the auto-mode image is flat, it has no intentionality, the craft is in the decisions the camera is now making for you. They were right about some images. Others said anyone who makes a stunning image made a stunning image, full stop. They were right about others. The tell, then as now, was when the critique stopped being about the specific photograph and started being about whether the photographer had suffered sufficiently to deserve it.

Paul Théberge documented the pattern in 1997, studying how digital music tools were reshaping not just who could make music but what making music meant. As one academic review summarized his central argument: “MIDI signifies a democratization of the musical marketplace, with technology as both a response to musician needs and a driving force that musicians must contend with.”²

The specific domain changes. The dynamic does not.

The technology does not just respond to what practitioners need. It reshapes what being a practitioner means. Every generation of tool-makers hands the next generation a question: now that access is no longer the barrier, what will you do with that?

Today: The Vibe Coder and the Copywriter

The pattern is running again, right now, in two places simultaneously.

Software engineers who spent years learning architecture, debugging, and systems design are watching non-engineers ship working products using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. There are solo founders today running products with tens of thousands of users, built over a weekend, with no engineering background, carrying real technical debt quietly underneath. The product works. The users love it. The architecture is a ticking clock. Both of those things are true simultaneously.

Copywriters who built careers on voice, strategy, and the craft of persuasion are watching AI produce serviceable copy in seconds. In both cases, the gatekeepers face the same two-part question Trithemius faced: is my objection about quality, or about identity?

This moment has a name. Call it Expertise Asymmetry Collapse: the point at which a new tool closes the gap between what an expert can produce and what a newcomer can produce so rapidly that the expert's identity cannot absorb the change at the same speed. The quality gap narrows. The identity gap does not. And in that space between them, the gate goes up.

Where the Experts are Right

On vibe coding: most AI-assisted products do carry real technical debt. Insecure architecture, no error handling, unmaintainable logic, hidden fragility at scale. These are not projected concerns. They are documented. A non-engineer who does not know what they do not know can ship a product that works until it very visibly does not.

The Wikipedia model produced millions of articles of genuine value and also millions of articles that should not exist. Both outcomes came from the same open gate.

On AI copywriting: most AI copy is generic. It lacks the specific voice, the earned insight, the emotional precision that converts at the margins. A prompt is not a brief. A generation is not a strategy. The craft carries real invisible knowledge that the tool does not yet fully replicate.

Both of these things are true. They deserve to be said plainly.

Protecting Identity, Not Craft

Here is where honesty gets harder.

When an engineer dismisses a working, user-loved product because the builder skipped the suffering, the objection is no longer about the code. When a copywriter rejects AI-assisted work that is genuinely sharp because the process offends them, the objection is no longer about the writing. The critique has shifted from “this is weak” to “you did not earn this.” And “you did not earn this” is not a quality metric. It is a gate.

Real quality loss: Democratization produces real mediocrity. New tools multiply the 90% alongside the 10%. Craft carries invisible knowledge that access alone cannot transfer.

Projected quality loss: When the critique shifts from the work to the path, it is no longer about quality. Effort justification is not a standard. The gate is protecting identity, not craft.

Trithemius used the press while arguing against it. The question is not whether his durability concern was real. It was. The question is whether he could tell the difference between defending parchment and defending his position as its guardian. The evidence suggests he could not. His monks could.

Emet - Truth

The Hebrew word emet, truth, is spelled aleph, mem, tav (א-מ-ת). The first letter of the alphabet, the middle letter, and the last. Complete truth - from start to finish. Not partial truth dressed as the whole.

Partial truth here looks like: “this tool produces mediocrity.” Complete truth looks like: “this tool produces mediocrity, and I am also protecting something beyond quality, and I have not been fully honest about which objection I am making at any given moment.”

Holding both is uncomfortable. It requires a specific kind of courage to say: yes, the quality concern is real, and also, some of my resistance is about what happens to my identity when the gate I guarded opens. Trithemius could not say that. His monks had to say it for him, with their feet, in 1505.

This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of honesty that can happen to anyone who has built their life around a scarce skill. The invitation is not to stop caring about quality. It is to tell the truth about which concern is which.

Expertise Asymmetry Collapse is not a threat to craft. It is a threat to the story you have been telling about yourself. Those are not the same thing. Emet requires knowing the difference.

Freedom and the Fleshpots of Egypt

The Israelites left Egypt and almost immediately began to grieve it.

“’We remember the fish we ate for free in Egypt,’ they said” (Numbers 11:5). They were standing on the other side of the sea, liberated, and they were mourning the food of their captivity. The prison had been terrible. The food had been familiar. And familiar, after long enough, feels like home.

The word for freedom in Hebrew is not chofesh, release from constraint. It is cherut, the freedom to act from your deepest values, from truth, rather than from your fear. The Exodus was not merely physical liberation. It was the shedding of a slave identity that had become comfortable. The hardest part was not the sea. The hardest part was the 40 years of learning to want something other than the familiar prison.

The expert who cannot release the gatekeeping role is in the same desert. Free to create, to teach, to build at a higher level than the tool can reach. And still grieving the hierarchy. Still mourning the Egypt where being one of the few people who could make a book, make a record, write a line of code, made you indispensable.

The breakthrough available to the expert is not to stop caring about quality. It is to stop confusing quality with scarcity. When Trithemius’s monks left the scriptorium, the Word did not become less sacred. It became available to more people. That is not a diminishment of the sacred. That is its purpose.

And the breakthrough available to the newcomer is symmetrical. Now that the tool gave you access, are you willing to develop the judgment that access alone cannot give you? Wikipedia's best articles were not written by the first person who had access. They were written and rewritten dozens of times by people who cared enough to go back. The tool gave access. The quality came from what people chose to do with that access once the gate was open. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them is its own kind of dishonesty.

The tool lowered the floor. The craft raised the ceiling. Both are necessary. The question is whether you have the honesty to know which one you are working on at any given moment.

What Freedom Actually Requires

Teshuva is commonly translated as repentance, but the word means return. A turning back toward your truest self. Not self-punishment or erasure. Return.

The return available in this moment, for anyone who has built a career around a craft that is being democratized, is not to abandon the craft. It is to return to why you loved it in the first place. Was it the scarcity? Or was it the making? Was it the gate? Or was it what was on the other side?

If it was the making, the tool is good news. The floor just dropped. More people can begin. You can go further. You can teach. You can do the work that requires judgment the tool does not yet have, and you can do more of it, and faster, because the parts that were only ever about process are now handled.

If it was the gate, the grief is real. And the invitation of Passover is to grieve it, fully, and then walk through the sea anyway. Because on the other side is not the absence of craft. It is craft no longer defended by scarcity. Craft that stands on its own. Craft that earns its place not because it was hard to access but because it is genuinely worth accessing.

Trithemius was right that something was dying. The age of the pious monastic copyist was over. He could feel it. What he could not see, because grief does not allow you to see clearly, was what was being born. The Reformation. The Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution. Hundreds of millions of people who could read. Books in every language. Knowledge that had been locked in monastery libraries for a thousand years, free.

Every wave of democratization is a Passover moment. Something is dying. Something is being born. The question is whether you will let the grief become the destination, or whether you will tell the truth about what you are actually grieving, and walk through.

The gate was never the point. What you were guarding was.

Footnotes

• Johannes Trithemius, De Laude Scriptorum, 1492
  Source: historyofinformation.com
• Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, Wesleyan University Press, 1997
  Source: weslpress.org

The post Let My People Code appeared first on Aish.com.

In the course of retelling the Passover story, the Haggadah quotes the passage from the first chapter of Exodus in which Pharaoh justified the unspeakable repression he intended to inflict on the Hebrews.

“Come, let us deal wisely with them,” he exhorted his nation. “Otherwise they may become so numerous that if there is a war they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the land.” Though the tyrant’s idea of dealing wisely with the Hebrews began with slave labor, it wasn’t long before he advanced to murder. “Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying: ‘Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile.’”

Pharaoh’s false accusation set the pattern for what became one of the history’s most durable antisemitic conspiracies. Down through the millennia Jews have been portrayed as a fifth column, malevolently disposed to betray the nations in which they live. Again and again, the libel resurfaces: When war comes, it will be the Jews who caused it, or who had the most to gain from its outcome, or who manipulated others into fighting and dying. The libel is as old as the pyramids — and as current as today’s news.

To be clear, this is not an essay about antisemites. It is addressed to good and reasonable people who would never knowingly endorse bigotry.

Michael Oren, the distinguished historian who was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama administration, observed recently that the war against Iran has revived “the slanderous claim, from right and left, that Jews have dragged America into a futile war.” The ideological range of those promoting that accusation spans the spectrum. Oren quotes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, podcaster Tucker Carlson, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and MAGA fanatic Candace Owens. He could have easily extended his list.

But it is only the most recent incarnation of Pharaoh's logic.

The modern template was forged in the early 19th century, when the Rothschild banking family was portrayed by French propagandists as profiting from Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo — proving Jews could engineer wars for their own benefit.

In a 1941 speech, American aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh recycled an ancient libel when he told an America First rally in Iowa that Jews were among the “most important groups” agitating for war.

Henry Ford blamed Jews for World War I and bought a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publish vitriolic articles like "Jewish Dictatorship of the United States during War." A generation later, Charles Lindbergh revived Ford's smear. At a 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, he accused Jews of being "war agitators" who were "pressing this country toward war."

The calumny is indestructible. When President George H.W. Bush assembled a coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait, former White House aide Patrick Buchanan railed that only two groups were "beating the drums for war in the Middle East" — the Israeli government and its "amen corner in the United States." The 9/11 attacks instantly spawned a false rumor that 4,000 Jews had been warned to stay home from the World Trade Center. That fueled lies, still circulating, that Zionists had orchestrated the attacks. And when Harvard's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer indicted "the Israel lobby" for the decision to go to war in Iraq, the same ugly slur was cloaked in academic respectability.

So here’s a question for those whose outrage at the current war seems to orbit around Israel, Zionists, or Jewish influence: Shouldn’t this history give you pause?

I am not questioning your honesty. I am not calling you antisemitic. I am asking something more unsettling: Are you sure you're not falling into the same trap as all those well-meaning people in centuries past, who genuinely believed that wars were being waged to advance Jewish interests, never realizing that they were perpetuating a classic big lie?

My purpose isn't to convince you that your views about the present war are wrong. It is to remind you that Jews have been falsely blamed for the world's wars throughout history — and that there have always been decent people who were seduced into believing it, certain that where there is so much smoke, there must be fire.

Every Passover, Jews recount the story of Pharaoh's slander and what it led to — not only as ancient history, but as living warning. "In every generation," the Haggadah teaches, "they rise up against us." For millennia, the world's wars have been blamed on Jewish cunning and Jewish manipulation — the same "hateful old lie," as Oren calls it. When you find yourself reaching for an explanation that sounds remarkably like the one Pharaoh offered 34 centuries ago, are you sure you're making an argument grounded in truth? Or are you, just possibly, recycling the oldest lie in the world?

This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Globe

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Each year at the Seder, we speak about four sons: the wise son, the rebellious son, the simple son, and the one who does not know how to ask. These figures are usually understood as personality types, or different levels of Jewish knowledge. But they can also be read as describing a gradual shift in how Jewish identity is experienced, held, and passed on.

The wise son is engaged. He asks questions, seeks understanding, and assumes that what he has received contains depth worth exploring. His identity is active and alive. The rebellious son comes next. He is not ignorant; he knows enough to challenge, but something has shifted. He places himself at a distance and speaks about the story as something that belongs to others. "What is this service to you?" he asks. He is still present but no longer fully inside.

Then comes the simple son. He doesn’t resist but he has less to work with. The richness of what was once transmitted has thinned. His question is brief because his inner framework is limited.

And after him, the one who does not know how to ask. Here the disengagement is quieter still. No argument, no rebellion, just a lack of connection. The Jewish story has not yet become his story. He is sitting at the table but something essential is missing.

The Haggadah doesn’t mention the absent fifth son because he can't be addressed. The conversation has already ended.

At that point, the Haggadah stops. It does not describe what comes next. But the direction is unmistakable. One more step and we reach the son who is no longer at the table at all.

The Haggadah doesn’t mention the absent fifth son because he can't be addressed. The conversation has already ended.

Drifting Away

Much attention is rightly given to the losses caused by persecution throughout Jewish history. But running alongside that has always been a quieter erosion, the gradual disappearance of people who simply drifted away. Those who sat at Seders, went to Hebrew school, perhaps had a bar or bat mitzvah, and somewhere along the way the Jewish story stopped feeling like their story. No dramatic break. No declaration. Just a slow, barely visible distance that, by the next generation, hardened into absence.

The Haggadah draws a boundary with the four sons: they represent the full range of Jewish engagement, from depth to near-disconnection, but all four are still present. The rebellious son still shows up, even if he challenges. The simple son is still part of the conversation, even if his grasp is limited. Even the one who doesn't know how to ask is there, and that presence matters. As long as someone is still at the table, there is a point of contact, a foundation on which something can grow.

Questions and Engagement

This is why the Seder places such weight on questions. A question signals engagement; it reflects the sense that what is happening matters enough to explore. Where there are questions, there is still a living relationship with the story.

For the son who doesn't know how to ask, the Torah shifts the responsibility squarely onto us: you open for him. We do not wait for curiosity to arrive on its own. We create the conditions in which it can begin. Because without that opening, silence doesn't stay neutral. Over time it becomes distance, and distance becomes absence.

The deeper issue is not what a person knows. It is whether the story feels like it belongs to them. Jewish continuity doesn't run on information alone. It runs on connection, on the experience of being inside a story that carries meaning and makes a claim on your life.

Four Inner Sons

The four sons are not only children in the Haggadah. They are also states that exist within each of us. A person can be deeply engaged at one stage of life and quietly distant at another. That movement is ongoing, shaped by attention, by learning, and by the environment we build around ourselves and the people we love.

The absence of the fifth son asks each of us a quiet, uncomfortable question: what are we doing, at this table and beyond it, to make sure the chain continues?

The Seder brings this into focus with unusual directness. It is not only a reenactment of the past; it’s an act of transmission happening in real time. The way the story is told, the space made for questions, the seriousness or lightness with which the night is approached — all of it shapes whether the next generation experiences this as something real and theirs, or something observed from the outside.

The absence of the fifth son is meant to be felt. It asks each of us a quiet, uncomfortable question: what are we doing, at this table and beyond it, to make sure the chain continues?

That chain has survived persecution, exile, and catastrophe. What it can’t survive is indifference. As long as someone is still at the table, the story isn’t over.

It’s up to us to open the door and invite them in.

The ideas in this article are drawn from my forthcoming book, The Fourth Son: Jewish Identity, Self-Hatred, and the Courage to Stand Alone, scheduled for publication at the end of 2026.

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On Passover night we journey back to Egypt and discover that the Haggadah is speaking directly to us, right now. We can discover our roots, our resilience and what it means to live as a proud Jew in a world of rising antisemitism. The Haggadah reminds us what we stand for — and what we must stand up for.

Here are three thoughts to spark your Seder table.

1. Find God's Hand in the Darkness

The Jewish people in Egypt were drowning in despair. Many wondered if their suffering would ever end. Overwhelmed by slavery, there was a creeping sense of hopelessness.

Look around you today. Since October 7th, Jews across the world have faced attacks that once seemed unimaginable. We don't feel safe. In Israel, sirens pierce the night, missiles fall, and children have made bomb shelters their second home.

How do we hold onto faith?

The Haggadah guides us to say "Baruch HaMakom" — Blessed is the Place (referring to God). God has many names, so why on Seder night do we use this one? HaMakom literally means "The Place" or "The Space." When someone sits shiva after losing a loved one, we use this same name as we offer comfort. The message: when you feel utterly alone, God fills your space. You are being watched over with love.

We are all asking, "Where is God now?"

If we open our eyes, we will find His hand in the darkness, though we may need night-vision goggles to see through it. Loss of life is tragic, and the innocent deaths and trauma of war are real and devastating. And yet: Israel has been bombarded with weapons that should have caused catastrophic destruction. Our pilots flew over enemy territory and came home. Thousands of rockets have fallen, and the mass casualties they could have caused never materialized. Jews of every background have discovered a strength within themselves they never knew existed.

This Seder night, look for the hidden hand of God in your own life.

2. Grow Better, Not Bitter

At the Seder we eat a sandwich of matzah, maror (bitter herbs) and haroset (a sweet mixture of fruit and nuts). There is wisdom in this ritual.

Maror represents the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, the heartbreak and pain of each punishing day. But the Seder is not only about recalling the past. It is our chance to live the present with clarity.

Each of us has a taste of maror on our lips right now. Perhaps it's the vicious blood libels that famous podcasters spread to millions. Or the massacre in Bondi Beach. The truck packed with explosives rammed into a Michigan synagogue while children played inside. The ambulances set on fire outside a London synagogue. Our people in Israel facing enemies who want to annihilate them. More bitterness to swallow.

We can grow tired. We can grow bitter.

But the Seder gives us a formula for overcoming hurt. When all you see is pain, you become your pain. When bitterness takes over, you become a bitter person. Don't let that happen. Take your maror and cover it with sweet haroset — your moments of blessing, your gratitude for being part of this remarkable people. Then wrap it all in matzah, the bread of faith. Live with courage.

This Seder night, grow better, not bitter.

3. Raise Your Glass

We lift our cup of wine and declare: "In every generation they rise against us to annihilate us, and God rescues us from their hands." We act as though the hatred is new, shocked when mobs march against us, chant for our destruction, praise terrorists and blame every ill on the Jews. But antisemitism wrapped in the language of anti-Zionism is still antisemitism, just in a different package.

None of this is new. Travel back thousands of years and you will find the same story. In every generation, evil convinces itself that this time it will finally snuff out our light.

It never does.

We have been expelled, conquered, burned, gassed and massacred. We are still here. After the crematoria, a nation returned to its land. We rebuilt. We grew. We turned despair into hope.

We must be brave and claim our truth. We must never grow indifferent to who we are. We are a living testament to the strength of our faith and our eternal covenant with God.

This Passover, raise a glass to everyone at your table, to Jews around the world who refuse to disappear, and to a living God who has never stopped watching over His children.

The post Three Things Every Jew Needs to Hear at the Seder This Year appeared first on Aish.com.

The Exodus from Egypt was not a single event. It was a carefully sequenced process that addressed the human being’s three dimensions: what you believe, what you value, and what are your core character traits. <The Passover story addresses all three, in order. None of them can be skipped.

Beliefs: The Ten Plagues

The ten plagues are not a mere display of divine power. They are an education.

The Midrash groups the plagues into three rounds, each round delivering a distinct message. The first establishes that God is the Creator, the source of all existence. The second reveals that He is the Orchestrator, directing the events of history with precision and purpose. The third demonstrates that He is the Sustainer, actively upholding and maintaining the world at every moment.

The plagues systematically dismantled the Egyptian worldview.

Consider what the Jewish people had been living with for generations: an Egyptian worldview saturated with idolatry, where power was distributed among competing forces and gods. The plagues systematically dismantled that worldview. Each round forced the Egyptians and the Israelites alike to confront a truth about the world that their environment had obscured.

The process took nearly a year. You cannot rebuild a person’s understanding of reality in a single moment of drama. The plagues were spaced out, escalating, each one building on the lesson of the one before. By the time the tenth plague arrived, the epistemological ground had shifted entirely. The Jewish people no longer lived in a world of competing powers. They lived in a world with one Creator, one Orchestrator, one Sustainer.

Altering beliefs must come first. You cannot reorient your values if your picture of reality is broken. A person who still believes that multiple forces compete for control of the world will inevitably hedge. They will try to serve two masters, keep their options open, play it safe. Only when beliefs are set can the deeper work begin.

Values: The Passover Offering

Once the Jewish people understood that God alone governs reality, they faced a harder question: what are you going to do about it?

Understanding is not enough. A person can know that something is true and still organize their life around something else. This is the gap between beliefs and values, and the Passover sacrifice the Jews offered in Egypt was designed to close it.

The lamb was a deity in Egyptian culture. Taking a sheep, setting it aside publicly for four days, slaughtering it, roasting it, and placing the blood on the doorpost: this was not a quiet, private act of faith. It was a declaration. It said: I know where ultimate authority lies and it is not with the powers that surround me. Your god is dead and I am serving a Higher Source.

The blood on the doorpost was not for God, who doesn’t need markers to identify His people. It was for the Jews who put it there.

The visibility was essential. The blood on the doorpost was not for God, who does not need markers to identify His people. It was for the Jews who put it there. It was a values stress test. Beliefs held privately cost nothing. Values are only real when they are expressed in action, particularly when that action carries social risk. The Passover Offering asked each family: now that you understand reality, will you live accordingly, even when the culture around you worships something else?

This is the second dimension. Not what you believe, but what you truly value and ready to genuine commit to. Only once you have worked through what you believe to be true can you make a public declaration of allegiance.

Character Traits: Chametz and Matzah

Beliefs are about understanding. Values are about goals and commitment. But character traits are about how you inhabit your own skin.

The symbolism of chametz and matzah is remarkably precise.

All destructive character traits stem from two roots: arrogance and misdirected desire. Anger, jealousy, and stubbornness are all expressions of an inflated sense of self. Unbridled desire leads to engaging the physical world as a destination rather than a vehicle.

Chametz represents both arrogance and desire.

Take flour and water, the same basic ingredients as <matzah. Now add time, heat, and manipulation. The dough rises. You work it. You bake it into something more elaborate, more textured, more blown up than what it started as. That is arrogance, the drive to inflate, to project, to perform a version of yourself that exceeds the raw material.

And the additives, the flavoring and sweetness that transform simple bread into something indulgent: that represents desire. When eating becomes about the experience of eating rather than about sustaining the capacity to serve, the relationship between a person and the material world has quietly inverted. The physical is no longer a vehicle; it has become the destination.

Matzah strips away both roots.

Flour and water. No leavening. No embellishment. No time to rise. In place of arrogance, matzah offers humility and simplicity: my essence is a Godly soul, and that is sufficient. I do not need to inflate myself to matter. The raw material is enough, because the raw material carries a spark of the infinite.

Matzah restores holiness, the elevation of the physical towards a higher end.

And in place of desire, matzah restores holiness, the elevation of the physical towards a higher end. The physical world is good, but it serves a purpose beyond itself. Eating becomes functional, a means toward an end. The material is not rejected, it is redirected. Every act of consumption becomes an act of service rather than an act of self-indulgence.

Matzah resets the two root traits: humility where there was inflation, sanctity where there was appetite.

Beliefs can be corrected through evidence. Values can be redirected through decisive action. But character, the habitual posture of the soul, requires a deep-seated recalibration, a stripping away of everything that has accumulated on top of the original design, down to its roots.

A Night of Liberation

The three stages of Passover follow a logic that mirrors how real transformation works: first understand, then commit, then refine.

This also explains the sequence of the Seder. We retell the story of the plagues (beliefs), eat the remembrance of the Passover Offering (values), and then eat matzah (traits). The evening recapitulates the arc of liberation in a single night.

The post The Three Liberations of Passover appeared first on Aish.com.

Benjamin Franklin wanted America’s national seal to show Moses at the Red Sea, stretching out his hand as Pharaoh’s army drowned behind the fleeing Israelites. His proposed motto was just as revealing: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also turned to the Exodus story when imagining America’s identity. Their proposed seal featured the Israelites in the wilderness, guided by a pillar of fire and a cloud—an image of a people not merely escaping oppression, but being led toward law, purpose and nationhood.

The Founders understood that the Exodus was the great political story of the Bible: a slave people delivered from tyranny so it could become a nation under a higher law.

That same idea lies at the heart of Passover.

Passover is not simply about freedom; it’s about what freedom is for. The Israelites left Egypt to become a people, bound by covenant, disciplined by law and destined for a land of their own.

Every year, Jews are commanded to relive the Exodus, educating the next generation the founding story of the Jewish people.

And the story is not complete when Egypt is left behind.

The journey leads to Sinai, where Israel receives the Torah and its commandments. It then leads to the Land of Israel, where that Torah is meant to shape public life. That is why one of the Haggadah’s central passages, “My father was a wandering Aramean,” was originally recited by farmers bringing first fruits to the Temple in Jerusalem. In other words, the core text of the Seder points beyond liberation to restoration: a people settled in its land, cultivating it and giving thanks for national renewal.

The story is not finished until Jerusalem.

The Haggadah is unfinished by design. Redemption is not complete until Jewish life is restored in its own land, with Jerusalem rebuilt as the center of its national mission.

That is why the Seder ends with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” The Haggadah is unfinished by design. Redemption is not complete until Jewish life is restored in its own land, under its own institutions, with Jerusalem rebuilt as the center of its national mission.

The Exodus is not only about escaping Pharaoh. It is about ensuring that the Jewish people can survive, govern themselves and defend the national home that the story itself points toward. A freedom that cannot be defended is not yet secure. A Jerusalem that cannot protect its people is not yet fully rebuilt.

This matters right now. Israel isn't fighting Iran, Hezbollah, and their proxies for revenge. It's fighting for the right to exist without a missile pointed at every city, and to finally dismantle the network that has made Israel's destruction its entire reason for being.

The Jewish national project was never meant to end with bare survival. Restored in its land, Israel is meant to become a model society, joining freedom to justice, power to moral restraint and national life to sacred purpose.

No modern Jewish thinker expressed this idea more powerfully than Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Israel and one of the most important religious Zionist thinkers of the 20th century. Rav Kook argued that the return of the Jewish people to their land was not just a political necessity or a refuge from persecution. It was a moral and spiritual turning point. In exile, Judaism survived, but only partially. In a Jewish state, he believed, the values of Torah could once again shape agriculture, language, law, culture and public life.

And that mission was not only for Jews. Rav Kook believed a restored Jewish commonwealth could elevate humanity by showing that national life itself can be guided by justice, holiness and human dignity.

That is the lesson the Founders saw in the Exodus story, and it is the lesson the Haggadah still teaches.

Passover is not just a holiday about being free. It is a celebration of what freedom is for: the transformation of slaves into citizens, of a multitude into a nation, and of suffering into a moral mission.

That mission still requires defending Jerusalem, from Pharaoh in one age, from Iran and Hezbollah in another, so that the story of redemption can continue toward its true end.

The post Next Year in Jerusalem — and Why It Still Matters appeared first on Aish.com.

Living in Israel during the current war with Iran, in between running to our bomb shelter during ballistic missile attacks, I usually try to chill out by reading the news. (Yes, I know that’s crazy, but a brain that repeatedly gets interrupted by air raid sirens during sleep cycles doesn’t think clearly.)

What irritates me is that only about 20% of the news communicates what actually happened. The other 80% is experts predicting, speculating, and pontificating about what will happen, what’s likely to happen, and what’s impossible to happen. Will US allies help secure the Strait of Hormuz? Will Saudi Arabia and Oman attack Iran? Will rising oil prices trigger a recession? Will Trump stop the war with a negotiated settlement? Is there any chance left of a regime change in Iran?

The human compulsion to want to know what’s going to happen comes from our desire to control, which puts us in direct competition with God.

The Purpose of the Exodus

As Jews around the world prepare for their Passover Seder celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, a relevant question to ponder is: What was the purpose of the Exodus?

You might answer, “Freedom,” but God had a different purpose in mind. Throughout the Biblical account of the Ten Plagues that led up to the grand finale of the Israelite slaves leaving Egypt, God repeatedly declared His purpose:

• “So says God: through this you will know that I am God” (Ex. 7:17).
• “So that you will know that there is none like God, our God” (Ex. 8:6).
• “So that you will know that I am God in the midst of the earth” (Ex. 8:18).
• “For this time, I will send all my plagues against your heart … that you will know that there is none like Me in all the world” (Ex. 9:14).

And in case subsequent generations didn’t get the point, God lays it out clearly long after the Israelites are freed: “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt in order to be your God” (Num. 15:41).

Knowing that God is God is the import of the first of the Ten Commandments the entire nation heard at Sinai. What sounds like merely an introductory statement —"I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage"—is, according to our Sages, a commandment to believe in God, a God who acts in history for our benefit.

Bottom line, God’s job description is that God is in control. Although human beings have free will in the moral sphere to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, what actually happens is determined by God, who loves us and acts in the world and in our personal lives for our ultimate spiritual benefit.

Ignoring the God Factor

Can you imagine the media of ancient Egypt reporting the news during the period following Moses’s first encounter with Pharoah?

Government officials declare that there is no possibility that Pharoah, head of the world’s leading empire, will accede to the outrageous demand of Jewish leader Moses to free the Israelite labor force.

According to unnamed authoritative sources, Aaron turning his staff into a serpent and water into blood are merely sorcery tricks well known to Egyptian academics. Moses and Aaron pose no threat to the stability of Pharoah’s administration.

Experts predict: Despite the devastating cost of the plagues to the economy, the Egyptian regime is still intact, offering no possibility that the Israelite slaves will be freed.

All of the available metrics could never have predicted that a powerless population of slaves could challenge the mighty Egyptian regime and walk out free.

Egypt was indeed the mightiest and longest-lived empire the world has ever known. The Great Pyramid of Giza, which dominated the landscape for a thousand years before Moses, was the tallest man-made structure in the world until 1889, when the Eiffel Tower was built. Ramesses II, likely the Pharoah of the Exodus, had erected four colossal, seated statues of himself at the entrance to the temple at Abu Simbel. Each statue (they still exist) is 20 meters (66 ft.) tall, a testimony to the massive power of Pharoah’s regime.

All of the available metrics could never have predicted that a powerless population of slaves could challenge the mighty Egyptian regime and walk out free. It only could happen, and did happen, because of the God factor, the power of the all-controlling God to achieve the unlikely, the improbable, and the impossible.

Miracles Today

While we have seen some painful losses, we here in Israel, 3338 years after the Exodus, are again witnessing open miracles. Iran has launched over 300 ballistic missiles at Israel during the current war. A ballistic missile is 40 feet long and carries about 2,000 pounds of explosives, easily enough to destroy a whole multi-story building and kill everyone in it. For example, in January 2023, a Russian missile hit a nine-story residential apartment block in Dnipro, Ukraine, and killed 46 people.

In the last four days, three ballistic missiles fired from Iran at Israel scored direct hits in crowded urban neighborhoods, in Dimona, Arad, and Tel Aviv. Our air defenses attempted to shoot them down and missed. (The companies that produce those systems claim only 90% success.) In all three direct hits, the missile landed next to an apartment complex, but not on it. The death toll was zero.

In Arad, the force of the blast propelled a three-year-old boy out of a third-story window. Rescue workers on the ground found the boy, lying on his bed, with just a few scratches.

The three-year-old boy who flew out of the window and landed on his bed

A retired U.S. F-16 fighter pilot who took part in missions over Iraq and Afghanistan said in an interview after the 12-day war with Iran last June:

“I know what it’s like to fly thousands of kilometers into enemy territory. I’ve done it. But what Israeli Air Force pilots are doing in Iran? That’s on another level entirely.

“They’re flying distances twice as far as what we flew. Refueling mid-air, entering areas with air defense systems, carrying out precise strikes — and returning home. Every night. This isn’t normal. It’s superhuman.”

”In war, you’re sure there will be. And here? Nothing. Zero.”

When asked what surprised him the most, he answered: “Zero malfunctions. In training, you expect at least some malfunctions. In war, you’re sure there will be. And here? Nothing. Zero.”

Jews are forbidden to rely on miracles. We are required to engage in “reasonable effort” to accomplish our goals. During this war, for civilians that entails following the directives of the Home Front Command and going to a protected space when the air raid siren sounds. For the IDF, it entails the courageous, non-stop fighting of an existential war to eliminate the threat of Iran.

But what actually happens in this war is ultimately determined by God, because the same God who took us out of Egypt 3338 years ago is still bucking the odds and is still in control.

The post The God Factor: From the Exodus to the Iran War appeared first on Aish.com.

This news alert comes regularly: ballistic missiles fired from Iran toward Israel. Within moments, millions of Israelis rush to shelters as air defense systems activate across the country. Sirens blare, families grab their children, drivers pull over and run to the side of the road, and entire cities pause as people search for safety.

For the last three weeks, we outside Israel have watched these alerts come several times a day and night. They've come so regularly that our phone dings, we glance at it, and go right back to whatever we were doing. But this is not normal. It can never become normal. No matter how often the alerts come, we need to stay outraged by how abnormal they are.

Resilience Is Not the Same as Acceptable

The human spirit adapts quickly. When sirens interrupt life again and again, there is a life-threatening danger to those running to shelters. But there is also a danger that we begin to treat this as routine. Missiles flying toward civilian populations can never be routine. Running with children to a bomb shelter can never be normal. The fact that Israelis have developed the strength and resilience to endure it does not make it acceptable or ordinary.

Here in America, we do not have reinforced safe rooms in our homes. Our children do not grow up practicing how quickly they can reach a shelter. We do not interrupt dinner, school, or sleep to run for our lives. We live with a level of security we often take for granted. That contrast should humble us and awaken a deeper sense of responsibility to those who don't have that luxury.

What We Can Do from Here

After October 7, the Jewish community outside Israel responded in extraordinary ways. American Jews rallied in the streets. Communities organized missions to Israel. We packed duffel bags, sent equipment and clothing, wrote letters to soldiers we'd never met, and added Psalms to our daily prayers. Many of us reoriented our schedules, our conversations, and our emotional lives around the reality that Israel was at war.

Millions of our brothers and sisters are effectively on the front line because every inch of the country is within reach of missiles.

Now Israel finds itself at war again. True, there are miracles happening each day, and we are fortunately not praying for the safety of hostages right now, but this is still an incredibly dangerous moment for our people. Millions of our brothers and sisters are effectively on the front line because every inch of the country is within reach of missiles. At the same time, heroic soldiers are defending the nation across multiple fronts: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Syria, and in the skies over Iran. The entire nation carries the burden together.

Many of us outside Israel feel helpless. We can't easily travel there right now, and there's no urgent call for the physical supplies we mobilized before. But our lives cannot simply continue as if nothing is happening. Our brothers and sisters may not expect us to stop living, but they do expect us not to be indifferent.

Set an alert for news about the sirens in Israel. Each time Israelis are running to shelters, pause and pray.

One small but meaningful step we can all take right now: Set an alert for news about the sirens in Israel. Each time Israelis are running to shelters, let it become a spiritual alarm. Pause and say one chapter of Psalms. One short prayer. If they are running to shelters, we can run to prayer. Their moment of fear becomes our moment of connection with God on their behalf.

And along with prayer, reach out in simple human ways. Each time there's an alert, send a message to someone you know in Israel. A friend, a relative, a former neighbor. Just a short text: "Thinking of you." "Praying for your safety." "Stay safe." When they run in and out of shelters, they should know that Jews around the world are thinking about them in that very moment.

Words Are Not Neutral

We must also be careful with our language and with what we post publicly. No one in Israel expects American Jews to stop living, cancel celebrations, or stop preparing for Passover. Life must continue. But there is a reasonable expectation that we won't be tone deaf.

Don't talk about being "rescued" or "stuck" in reference to the place that is home to millions of our people, the homeland we should all be working to move to, and from which those who live there have nowhere else to go.

The Torah teaches the prohibition of causing pain through our words. In our time, that principle extends to the images we share and the complaints we broadcast. Everyone has challenges. Life is complicated everywhere. But at moments like this, we must put our frustrations in context. If what we're facing is not life-or-death, if it doesn't involve running to shelter from ballistic missiles, maybe it doesn't need to be shared widely right now.

Closer Than You Think

And for many in our own communities, this is not distant news. Around us are friends, neighbors, and colleagues whose children and grandchildren live in Israel. Some have sons or daughters serving in the army. Others have grandchildren running to shelters in the middle of the night. Even as they come to work or sit at our Shabbat tables, their hearts are thousands of miles away, following every alert and every update. For someone whose child is sleeping near a shelter or whose son is serving near the border, life is not proceeding normally at all. Acknowledge that. Ask how their family is doing.

Our brothers and sisters in Israel are living through something no society should ever have to endure. Their resilience is extraordinary, their courage inspiring. But we must never let their reality become something we treat as ordinary.

Missiles targeting civilians is not normal. Running to shelters is not normal. Living under that threat is not normal.

And even from thousands of miles away, with love in our hearts, loyalty in our prayers, and sensitivity to those around us who are carrying this burden personally, we must remind ourselves of that truth, again and again.

The post Iran Keeps Firing, Israelis Keep Running, We Keep Scrolling appeared first on Aish.com.