The four sons, such worlds apart
Gil Hoffman looks at a study that examines how children's views of the Haggada's four sons have changed.

For many generations, wise, wicked, and simple children, and even those who do not know how to ask, have learned about the Exodus from Egypt during the Pessah Seder.

The Haggada divides children into those categories, but its accounts of the four are vague, allowing children of all ages to decide for themselves which category they fall into.

Jerusalem resident Sandra Rossen-Lahrey believes she fits all four. An educational psychologist and collector of Haggadot, she is currently writing a book on how traditional values, personal environment, and contemporary focus impact a child's impressions of the four sons.

"Studying the psychological aspects of how children view the four sons allowed me to bring my worlds together - education, psychology, and Judaism all wrapped into one," said Rossen-Lahrey, who moved to Israel from Buffalo, New York, in 1990.

Poring over illustrations of the four sons from the Haggadot in her collection, Rossen-Lahrey points out the ways the wise and wicked sons have been portrayed by artists through Jewish history. While the wise son is generally presented as a scholar, the wicked son has evolved from a soldier in a Haggada from Eastern Europe published in 1739 to a boxer in an American Haggada in 1920, to a purse snatcher in Israel in 1953.

But how would modern Israeli children illustrate the four sons?

To find out, Rossen-Lahrey visited schools in adjacent religious and secular Jerusalem neighborhoods and asked some 200 children to draw the four sons.

Her findings reflect age-old stereotypes about wisdom and wickedness, male and female, religious and secular, revealing that a child's upbringing has a definite impact on how he or she perceives people in society.

A child's gender and background had a profound impact on the results of the study. Female secular children usually drew the wise child as a girl, while the religious female and all male students depicted the wise child as a boy. The wicked child, however, was without exception drawn as male.

Religious students typically depicted the wise son studying Torah while secular students preferred to portray wisdom as knowing math. While most religious and secular students showed the wise son with a book, secular students were more likely to show him with a computer.

Children at the religious school drew the wise child wearing a kippa and the wicked child with spiked hair and an earring. Their secular counterparts, however gave the wicked child messy hair and neither child a kippa.

The overwhelming majority of children surveyed depicted the wise son wearing glasses, sitting alone studying. The wicked son was often portrayed with weapons, or committing verbal or physical violence against someone weaker. Many children drew the wicked son taking candy from a baby. The simple child and the child who does not know how to ask were less open to stereotypes, but a child's background still influenced the results of the survey.

The simple son was given negative treatment by most secular students - often drawn without ears or a mouth - because tam in modern Hebrew means "naive." Religious students, however, understood tam positively, because of its biblical connotation: When applied to Jacob in the Book of Genesis, it means "perfect."

ROSSEN-LAHREY says educators should take particular notice of her findings. For instance, many girls drew the simple child as female, even though they portrayed simplicity as a negative quality.

And in the secular school, which is attended by many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, a large percentage of children drew themselves as the child that does not even know how to ask. "It's important for educators to figure out why these children are not asking. They need to put themselves in their students' shoes to see what more they can do to help them learn," Rossen-Lahrey said.

Rossen-Lahrey said she is also troubled by the fact that almost all the students portrayed the wise child as a know-it-all.

"Educators need to change the children's perspective on wisdom from know-it-all to good question-asker," she said, adding that she plans to extend the study to children living in the Diaspora. One result Rossen-Lahrey said she would probably not expect to find outside Israel would be the wicked child drawn with bombs and Scud missiles.

"We see, in general, a combination of tradition and contemporary outlooks," Rossen-Lahrey said. "The study proved children see the world through their limited eyes and perspectives, reflected by their upbringing.

"It is the teachers' challenge to cultivate the intelligence within each individual. "It's really impressive that children living only blocks apart could show such remarkable differences."

Pessah front page