In the Marx Brothers Classic A Night at the Opera, Groucho asks Chico about “the sanity clause” in a contract. Chico responds, “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause!”
Clauses matter. And they can drive you insane. Where you put them can change the entire meaning of a sentence. There’s a big difference between “Let’s eat Grandma!” and “Let’s eat, Grandma!” The same thing happens in the commonly used Feast of Freedom Haggadah.
In the description of the four children, the failing of the wicked child is described like this: “Since he removes himself from the community by denying G-d’s role in the Exodus…”According to this translation, his mistake is first and foremost theological. He denies G-d’s role in the Exodus, and thereby removes himself from the community—a community that we can presume recognizes G-d’s role in the Exodus.
Which sounds very logical and appropriate—except that’s not what the Hebrew says! The Hebrew text moves the clauses around, and states: “Since he removes himself from the community, he denies the essential Divine truth.” Here, the “sin” is not in the first place theological, but rather sociological—he removes himself from klal yisrael—the broad inclusive totality of Jewish peoplehood. In doing that, he runs afoul of the Divine because—and this is the deeper point that the mistranslation misses—an essential aspect of the Divine is the unique role and destiny of the Jewish people.
To repeat for the sake of clarity: the (mis)translation says, “Since he denied the Divine, he left the group.” The Hebrew says, “Since he left the group, he denied the Divine.”
The first assertion is easy to understand. The original Hebrew version is harder, but deeper. To understand it, we have to understand something about what it means to be a Jew.
We Jews have arrogated to ourselves a unique position. As the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua describes it: “All peoples are different. Jews demand to be differently different.” At its core, being Jewish means committing oneself to being a witness to G-d’s Presence on earth; engaging on a lifelong mission to transform the world into a place that could merit being the “Kingdom of G-d;” becoming truly human, the “tender of the Garden” that G-d envisioned from the time of Adam and Eve. None of us can do this individually. Each of us can make a contribution, but ultimately the grand mission can only be accomplished communally.
“No Jew left behind.”
To separate oneself from the community cripples the effort. The devaluation of the People thus serves to deny the essence of G-d. It is when the child walks away from the table that he/she becomes wicked.