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235  forty-five Rethinking the Wicked “Son” Parashat Vaetchanan (Deuteronomy 3:23–7:11) Julie Pelc When I was sixteen years old, I made an appointment with my rabbi to ask about the Jewish tradition’s seemingly cruel response to homosexuality, an identity, I argued , not within the control of the individual to alter. My rabbi, not knowing my reasons for asking this question or pausing to reconsider his own biases, replied that resisting homosexual urges “is like choosing not to eat a cheeseburger. I may want to eat a cheeseburger, but I know that it is forbidden.” I was stunned. Even as a young teenager, I knew him to be wrong. I later told a friend (who unbeknownst to me was deeply conflicted about his own homosexuality in relationship to his traditional conservative Jewish upbringing), “It’s not like choosing not to eat a cheeseburger; it’s like choosing not to eat at all!” More than any other moment in my formative Jewish education, this interaction taught me that knowledge and truth must be constantly evaluated and reevaluated in light of new information and deeper understanding in successive ages and generations. I did not know it then but later discovered (to my delight) that there are texts and ideas embedded in the tradition itself that acknowledge my realization about the relativity of knowledge and truth. I found that even in texts read year after year, new insights and interpretations lay waiting for the fresh perspective of a new generation . In the book of Deuteronomy, in Parashat Vaetchanan, we find a text that, when read anew, can encourage us to open doors of inclusion and acceptance previously assumed to be permanently closed and locked. The parasha consists of the final pleas from Moses to the children of Israel preceding Moses’s impending death and the people’s departure into the Promised Land without his leadership as a guide. As might be expected, the parasha is replete with reminders about the people’s special relationship with God, their history together, and the laws the people must obey so as not to incur God’s wrath against them. The parasha includes famous passages such as the opening section of the traditional Shema prayer (in its original context) and also a repetition of the Ten Commandments. But the parasha also includes a selection that may seem at first glance to be completely out of place: a story later reinterpreted by the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud to be the words of the “Wicked Son” in the litany of the Passover seder.1 Interestingly, though, in this context, there is no such judgment made on the child, his question, or his identity as a Jew. Additionally, the child is not gendered male; in fact, the text 236 Julie Pelc reads “children,” which essentially allows for a much more generalized interpretation including many different kinds of children and many different kinds of challenges and questions. The verse reads, When, in time to come, your children ask you, “What mean the decrees, laws, and rules that the Lord our God has enjoined upon you?” you shall say to your children, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand. . . . Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these laws, to revere the Lord our God, for our lasting good and for our survival, as is now the case. It will be therefore to our merit before the Lord our God to observe faithfully this whole Instruction, as He has commanded us.” (Deut. 6:20–25) The text in Deuteronomy does not react with anything resembling the anger implied in the Passover Haggadah to the question(s) raised by the younger generation; it acknowledges that these children did not experience the Exodus firsthand and so must ask their predecessors about both their experience of slavery and their subsequent liberation. The Passover Haggadah, in quick judgment of the boy and his question (plus the seamless switch from “children” to “son,” assigning both gender and singular, individual responsibility to the questioner), deems the appropriate response to be, “because of what God did to me, in taking me out of Egypt,” explicitly reminding seder participants that the wicked son “distances himself from the service [by saying “to you” and not “to me”],”2 and so generations of Jews performing the rite of the Passover seder are explicitly instructed to exclude him in the reply, admonishing him by telling him if he...

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