Three and a half weeks. That’s how long Israeli schools have been closed, as Iranian missiles continue to fall on our cities. More than three weeks of children underfoot, spouses in each other’s way, everyone doing their best to hold it together — and sometimes failing. The walls are closing in. Tempers are short. Things are said that shouldn’t be said.
Nobody talks about this part of war.
We talk about heroism. We talk about resilience. We post pictures of soldiers and light candles for the fallen. But the quiet friction inside the home — the snapping, the irritability, the creeping sense that you cannot spend one more hour in this apartment with these people — that part stays private. It feels too small to mention. Too unworthy.
And now Passover is coming. Which means we are about to sit down together at the seder table — the same people we have been trapped with for weeks — and tell the story of redemption.
Inevitably, there will be someone at the table, maybe a child, maybe a teenager, maybe an adult sibling or a difficult in-law. Someone whose edges are showing. Someone being sharp. The kind of person who makes the evening harder than it needs to be.
The Haggadah has a name for this person: the wicked child.
The traditional reading of the wicked child passage has always sounded harsh. He asks “what is this service to you” — distancing himself from the community, from the whole enterprise. And the Haggadah’s response seems to match his sharpness with sharpness: hakheh et shinav — blunt his teeth.
But Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, in his Passover Haggadah, reads this very differently. Blunting the teeth is not punishment. It is not exclusion. It is a question: what is making him so sharp? What is underneath the hardness? The response the Haggadah demands is not to push the difficult child away but to lean in — to find the pain or fear or alienation driving the sharp words, and address that. You don’t write off the wicked child. You try to reach him.
This is what Jewish tradition calls being a student of Aaron.
Hillel’s famous formulation in Avot (1:12) instructs us: hevei mitalmidav shel Aharon — be among the students of Aaron. Love peace, pursue peace, love all people, and bring them close to Torah. It sounds like a sequence with a purpose: love people so that you can bring them to Torah. Invest in the relationship as a means to a religious end.
Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook rejected that interpretation entirely. The passage does not say love them in order to bring them close. It says love them, and bring them close to Torah — two separate things, in that order, for different reasons. Love people because they deserve to be loved. Because they are created in the image of God. Because Aaron loved them. The Torah part, Rav Tzvi Yehuda said, will follow on its own. But the love cannot be instrumental. The moment you love someone as a strategy, it isn’t love anymore — and they will feel the difference.
This is Aaron’s method made into a principle.
The Talmud in Avot d’Rabbi Natan describes how Aaron actually operated. When two people quarreled, he would go to each one separately and tell them the other was heartbroken over the fight — that the other person was desperate to reconcile, could not sleep, was consumed with regret. Even if that wasn’t entirely true yet. By the time the two parties met, both had already softened. Both were already halfway home. The text records that when Aaron died, 80,000 men wept — all of them named Aaron, by parents whose marriages he had saved.
What Aaron understood is something most of us resist: in almost every conflict, both sides are waiting for permission to back down. They are not waiting to be defeated. They are waiting to be loved first, before they’ve earned it. Aaron gave them that permission. He told them the truth about where they could be rather than where they were.
We are three and a half weeks into a war. In another week we will sit down at a seder table and tell the story of a people who left slavery and walked toward a land they could not yet see. The person across from you who has been sharp this week — what is underneath it? Fear, most likely. Exhaustion. The sirens, the uncertainty, the same walls closing in on them that are closing in on all of us. The wicked child of the Haggadah is rarely actually wicked. He is usually afraid, or hurt, or alienated, and sharpness is what that looks like from the outside.
Aaron would not have written him off. He would have loved him before he earned it, and trusted the rest to follow.
The seder table was designed for this. Four children, four types, four different relationships to the same story — and all of them invited. The table is not only for people who have already arrived. It is for people on the way. Some of them are difficult. Some of them are sharp. Some of them have been impossible to live with for three weeks.
Sit down with them anyway. Tell them the story. Love them first.
That is exactly what Aaron would have done.
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