The Wicked and the Wise

Unlike the Wise Son who acknowledges that Jewish law and Jewish life are complicated and approaches them as a Jew, the Wicked Son sets himself apart from his people and doesn’t really bother to ask.

By Michael Oren

When, last January, he was accosted by pro-Palestinian protesters who accused him of being a “genocide denier,” a “liberal Zionist mouthpiece,” and a “fascist-normalizing ruling class darling,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein responded by attacking Israel. What the Israelis were doing in Gaza, he declared, was “destruction, apartheid, subjugation.”

More recently, after Joe Kent, President Trump’s former anti-terrorism advisor, blamed Israel and the Jews for the current war in Iran as well as the Iraq War and the U.S. intervention against ISIS, Peter Beinart praised him as a “brave man.” Similarly, Tucker Carlson is a “nice person,” according to former Israeli politician and Jewish Agency head Avraham Burg, who recently met with America’s leading antisemite.

Klein, Beinart, and Burg disagreed with their interlocutors on several crucial issues, but their reservations did not prevent them from portraying Israel as uniquely evil or from appeasing outspoken Jew haters. The three of them, therefore, share a fundamental identity. They are all Wicked Sons.

Like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Wicked Son is the Seder’s most engaging character. “Mah ha’avodah hazot lachem?” he condescendingly asks. “What is this service to you?” The key word, of course, is “you” and not “us,” for in contrast to the Wise Son whose curiosity about Jewish tradition stems from a deep sense of belonging, the Wicked Son stands apart from his people.

In essence, he’s saying, “I’m not one of those Jews who observe these mindless, meaningless rituals. I’m different. I’m pure.”

Put in contemporary terms, the Wicked Son is one who’ll go to immense lengths to disassociate himself from Israel’s desperate efforts, however flawed, to defend itself, perhaps even its right to exist as an independent Jewish state.

Today’s Wicked Son says, “yes, I’m Jewish, but I’m not one of those bad Jews.” To the antisemites, he’ll say, “The Jews are not necessarily guilty of starting wars and worldwide recessions, but many of them are indeed racists and war criminals, and I’m not one of them. I, unlike those inexecrable Israelis, am the good Jew.”

The Wicked Son is such a constant source of fascination for us because he has always been a facet of Jewish history. From Korah, Dathan, and Abiram who, together with 250 Israelite leaders, rebelled against Moses and Aaron in Numbers 16 to the Hellenists who fought the Maccabees, there have always been Jews who placed themselves apart—and above—our people. What wickeder son could rival Nicholas Donin, the 13^th century French Jew who converted to Catholicism, translated the Talmud into Latin then convinced the Vatican to outlaw it? Cartloads of our holy books were subsequently set ablaze.

So omnipresent were Wicked Sons throughout the ages that we daily pray for protection from them. One of the final blessings in the Amidah—silent devotion—prayer pleads:

Let there be no hope for informers and may all the heretics and all the wicked instantly perish. May all the enemies of Your people be speedily extirpated; and may You swiftly uproot, break, crush and subdue the reign of wickedness speedily in our days. Blessed are You Lord, who crushes enemies and subdues the wicked.

Added to the liturgy in the aftermath of the Second Temple’s destruction, the invocation became the subject of an entire study by Rambam in the 12^th century and, in the Shulchan Aruch four hundred years later, a central tenet of Jewish law. A rabbi or prayer leader who omits the blessing must be immediately removed.

In more recent eras, beginning with the Enlightenment in the West, Wicked Sons proliferated. They were Jews who insisted they were Frenchmen or Germans first, who disparaged Eastern European Jews as rabble and Mizrachi—Middle Eastern—Jews as worse. They were the parvenu American Jews who, at the turn of the 20^th century, lobbied to prevent the Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms from immigrating to the United States. They were the members of the American Council for Judaism who opposed the creation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis during World War II and, after, the creation of Israel. They were the assimilated Jews pilloried by David Mamet in his eponymous 2006 masterpiece, The Wicked Son:

I’ve seen it, and, perhaps, you have too—the self-proclaimed ex-Jew, scoffing at the funeral, the wedding, the seder, and leaving in dudgeon when his behavior was not tolerated…Imagine this man at a Japanese tea ceremony, at a Zen Buddhist silent meditation, indeed, at a Catholic mass, a Hopi rain dance. At which would he not sit, if not interested, at the very least, polite?…Would this individual huff and puff and offend those involved in their religious observance? He would rather die. And yet he is driven, driven, to decry, to disrupt, and to denigrate the observance of his own people—about which he is as ignorant as he is of the rain dance and to which he owes, as a civilized being, at least as much respect.

The Hamas massacre of October 7, one would have thought, was sufficiently horrific to silence the wicked but has instead vastly amplified them. These are not merely the Un-Jews defined by Professor Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky who “believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness.” Rather, they are the Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Say No, IfNotNow, Neturei Karta, and the cavalcade of Hollywood Jews who accuse Israelis of the worst crime known to humanity and ardently long for their defeat. They are the Jews who, pace the Haggadah, not only ask “what is this service to you?” but question the moral and historical imperative of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland, the indomitability of its defenders, and the sanctity of Jewish life. They are the Jews who dedicate their Seders to their hope for Palestinian freedom from Israeli slavery instead of their gratitude for the fulfillment of Hatikvah’s dream of being “a free people in our own land.”

Today, no less than in the times of the Torah, the Hasmoneans, the Crusades, Wicked Sons are a threat. But they are also tragedies, for the Wicked Son tactic of “I’m not one of those bad Jews,” ultimately fails. They can throw a bone—fittingly, for Passover, a shank—at the Jew-haters, hoping it will keep them chewing, but invariably their turn to be eaten comes. The grounds under Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek are laced with Wicked Son ashes.

Not surprisingly, the best means for dealing with Wicked Sons is supplied by the Haggadah:

Since he has excluded himself from the community, he has denied a basic principle of faith. Therefore, you should blunt his teeth and say to him: ‘It is because of this that God did [miracles] for me when I went out of Egypt’ – for me and not for him; had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.

In other words, we should shut the Wicked Son up and remind him that his attendance at this Seder table is the result of generations of Jews reaffirming that they—not you, and not the Palestinians, the Hopis, or any other people—were freed from Egypt and present at Sinai. Millennia of Jews stood with their people, not apart, and the freedom we enjoy this night, that makes it different from all others, was purchased with countless acts of sacrifice and courage through time, and by the selflessness of tens of thousands of IDF soldiers today. We must recall that the true miracle of Passover is not the exodus or the parting of the sea but the fact that we are here to celebrate it at all. Wisdom, we’ll inform him, resides in those who question Jewish life and law as proud members of our people. Wickedness arises from ignorance and delusion, egoism and condescension, and, above all, from ingratitude.