What a beautiful and busy few weeks we have had here at the Nursery School. When you walk onto the second floor you can immediately feel that Passover is near. You can experience the delicious smells of Passover food wafting through the common space, the tastes of matzah pizza and macaroons, and the sounds of children singing the Passover songs loudly and proudly. You can see children busy re-enacting the Exodus story with puppets, drawings and their own bodies, and you can feel the focus and joy that envelops our school. As I walk from classroom to classroom I am moved by the sense of hard and thoughtful work our children are devoting to making Hagaddahs, painting Elijah’s and Miriam’s cups, creating matzah covers, and so much more. The teachers continue to be surprised and delighted by how much the children have enjoyed listening to and retelling the Passover story. They truly have already begun to take on our ancient Jewish tradition of telling and retelling, of never forgetting, and continuing to make the story relevant and modern despite its age.
One of the central ideas of our Passover story is that of empathy. We are commanded to feel as though we ourselves were slaves in Egypt. When the wicked one of the four sons is described in the traditional Haggadah, it is said that his misdeed was asking, “What does this have to do with me?” He was unable to have a sense of his connection to this ancient story. Developing and deepening children’s sense of empathy is something we work on daily here in the school. We stop when a child hurts another child’s feelings to help them recognize the consequence of their words or actions. But developing empathy also takes place when children play. When a child pretends to be a mommy, they are developing a sense of what it must feel like to be a mommy. When a child pretends to be a baby, they are experiencing the sense of being a baby, as imagined by a more grown child. And so one can look at the work our children do on a daily basis as being reflective of one of the strong values of Passover.
While children develop their sense of empathy in a general way, each and every day, over the past few weeks we have seen children delve into the central characters of the Passover story with their whole selves. We see children pretend to be slaves, complaining about their work. We see children loudly boss one another around in the gym saying, “I am Pharoah” and commanding that their friends work! Children are playing in the water table pretending that they are Miriam or Pharoah’s daughter, discovering a baby in a basket. Children are pretending to be Moses, shy or anxious about facing Pharoah for the first time. The children are deeply invested and intrigued by this central ancient narrative of our people. They ask that our teachers tell and re-tell the story, each time asking for more details. It is moving to watch the children feeling somehow that this story has something to do with them. It has inspired me to try to also find new ways of developing my sense of empathy and connection to the story – by thinking about others in our world who may be experiencing suffering as the Jews did in Egypt, thinking about what it must have felt like and continues to feel like for people throughout our globe who do not have a voice, who do not have the freedom to express their feelings or their ideas or to control their destiny.
Another central theme of Passover is asking questions – this is the holiday of questions. The most famous questions are the Four Questions but it is interesting to learn that the Rabbis were suggesting these four questions merely as examples of the kinds of questions one might ask at the Seder. The goal is not that these specific questions get answered but rather that the Seder be an evening where we are sharing and engaging with this ancient narrative in a meaningful way.
Children are natural question-askers. Unfortunately we adults often are natural question-answerers! It is important to NOT always answer our children’s questions. One goal of the Passover Seder is to create a context for children and grown ups to ask their difficult questions. For if we create room for asking those difficult questions we find ourselves engaged in a more authentic relationship with this ancient text. Over the past few weeks our teachers have made an extra effort to provide room for questions without jumping to provide the answers. For in fact, by answering the questions we can shut down the conversation. We communicate that we are experts and that children don’t know. But actually, if you listen to the kinds of questions that our children are asking, you will find that they know so much. And some of their questions are ones we should seriously consider asking ourselves.
This Passover season I would like to challenge all of us to just ask questions. Invite and encourage your children to ask questions, and also ask questions yourselves, and ask those with whom you celebrate this season: what are your questions? And then, just listen!
I would like to share some of the questions your children have been asking – they are truly amazing!
- Why do the Jewish people have to be slaves?
- If they use bricks to make the pyramids, how do they make the pointy stuff at the top?
- Where was Pharaoh when the sea closed?
- Why did the Pharaoh use his power to be mean?
- Why does the Pharaoh first let the people go and then why did he change his mind?
- Why do we hide the matzah?
- Why do they have the word Exodus? What does that word mean?
- How could a loving God send all those bad plagues?
- Why do we put juice out for Elijah?
- I wonder how the water split in the Passover story
- Why does Moses pick his stick up and things happen and he’s not a magic man?
- Why is it called the Red Sea when it’s not red?
- How did the Red Sea get to be red?
- Why did Moses say, “Let my people go,” when they were not Moses’ people?
- If you can’t see God and he is invisible, then how do you know that God is really there?
- Why did they kill a lamb and use the blood instead of using a red magic marker?
- How did Pharaoh’s son die?
- Why did the plagues only get on Pharaoh’s people?
- When it was dark (during the plagues), was it dark for the Jewish people too?
- Why did God need the plagues to punish Pharaoh?
- Why didn’t Pharaoh copy the Jewish people and put a mark on their door?
- Do we eat other kinds of stuff besides what’s on the seder plate for Passover?
- Did Pharaoh become a mummy when he died?
- How did the girls make the tambourines with Miriam?
- Were all the Egyptians bad people?
- What happened to the princess?
- How did the Egyptians fit all their “stuff” into their sarcophagus?
- How did the bush get on fire? Did the Egyptians put the bush on fire?
- Where did the mummies go when they took everything out of the sarcophagus?
- If God is good, why did he get mad?
Shabbat shalom and Happy Passover.
Ilana received her B.A. from Harvard College and a Master's Degree in Education from Bank Street College. She was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives there with her husband and three children.
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