The Four Sons: An inner view of the Haggadah

Insights into Rabbi Ashlag's Kabbalah podcast

When we first look at the Haggadah, it seems to be a collection of somewhat disconnected paragraphs, with the overall motif being the story of the Children of Israel coming out of Egypt.
However, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai teaches in the Zohar that the Torah is not a history book. Rather, it is a book of instruction that deals with our present day relationship with the Divine. Just as a person wears clothes, so does the Torah itself wear a garment. The garments of the Torah are the stories we find within it. But just as nobody is silly enough to mistake the garment for the person, so we need to look beneath the surface of these stories to find the real essence of the Torah. To take the stories at face value and think that they are all the Torah is, is just as silly as relating to a person only from the outer clothes that he or she wears.
So when we sit down on Seder night to read the Haggadah, our purpose is not to tell a story of what happened 3000 years ago, but to examine in what way we are in exile now from ourselves and from our Creator, and to discover what redemption from that exile comprises. Packed within the words of the Haggadah is both the soul’s experience of exile, and our joy in redemption, in the reconnection that God uniquely grants us on Seder night, the holy night of freedom. Only when we recognize our own exile we can value the freedom that God gives us the opportunity to gain.

These motifs are very well portrayed in the section of the Haggadah on the four sons. It is a section that seems baffling, even silly when regarded in an external manner, but when we explore it using our knowledge of the language of the Zohar and the insights we gain from Kabbalah as taught by the great Kabbalist Rabbi Yehudah Leib Ashlag we discover that this is a section that clearly defines what constitutes redemption and what constitutes exile, and also examines our sometimes unexpected responses to the light of redemption.