My truth tends to emerge from my experience.
The traditional assumed evolution of the Arba banim in the Haggadah is from last to first: from the One Who Does Not Know How to Ask, to the Simple, to the Wicked, to the Clever. But my lived experience suggests the reverse direction: according to the order in which they are actually written.
For years I struggled with typecasting as the clever child. I was the intellectual, and to the extent that I could do that successfully, I was given a place in the world. Had I been a man, I would have become a rabbi. Being a woman freed me to take my journey with fewer prying eyes, fewer consequences.
In my late twenties, I carefully began to discover the wicked child in me, questioning the existing order, make changes in my dress and my thinking. Thus I evolved and still do. The wicked child continues to live in me, occasionally racing around and roaring inside; but she has become part of the whole. As I hit middle age, I aim to run with the wolves. That’s still a work in progress.
In my late thirties I discovered meditation. I was taught to approach the world with beginners’ mind, “What’s this?” My journey of rejecting the intellect and embracing my experience and the body became more full and rich. I evolved again. learned to know life biblically rather than in a western mode. I’m still learning how to ask “What’s this?” or “Tell me about you,” and practice listening to the other’s perspective cleanly, without bringing all the baggage and assumptions the wicked and the clever child bring.
Now I am wondering if perhaps the end point is to get to a place where you don’t even ask. You sit in silence, and let the other person tell you what they choose to. At the end of the book of Job, after all of his fierce questions, G-d appears in a whirlwind and gives him no answers, just a full-on experience, opening his eyes to creation. Job stops asking his questions. Something changes; he repents and is silent. He even "forgets" how to ask; he has become an experiencer, who learns simply by taking in the Being of all things.
In one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha transitions from being a young man, religiously talented, arrogant, (“I can think, I can wait, I can fast”), to a man of the world, rich, a gambler, with a lover, and finally to an old man sitting by the river, ever listening for its message. I believe Herman Hesse would concur that the evolution of the Arba Banim is actually in the reverse direction as I argue, as exemplified in the life of Siddhartha.
Perhaps the above answers why I haven’t chosen to become a rabbi now that the doors have opened to Orthodox women, despite my obviously leanings in that direction. Orthodox ordination would take me in the opposite direction to my life journey. When being a rabbi comes to mean asking “What’s this” – or not asking at all, just listening, just being – then I may consider it. Till then, I am content with my journey.
Yael Unterman