In one of its best-known passages, the Haggadah describes four sons—wise, wicked, simple, and unable to ask—each of whom poses a question (or, in the case of the fourth, fails to pose a question) about the seder, and is met with a parental reply. Marc Angel, questioning the usual translation of the Hebrew word describing the third son—who asks only “What is this?”—offers a novel interpretation:

Although tam is usually translated as “simple” or “naïve,” the word also has a much different meaning. It means pure, unblemished, whole. Our forefather Jacob is described as being tam, and so is Job. Noah is called tamim [“perfect,” a word that derives] from the same root. The tam of the Haggadah isn’t simple at all, but is actually the most profound of the four children.

The tam accepts Jewish belief and ritual, but his question isn’t about what to do—but about why. The tam, in search of wholeness, is not satisfied with an intellectual discussion of the laws and customs [as is the wise son]. The tam wants to understand how these laws and customs increase one’s closeness to God, how they enhance spirituality. The tam is saying: yes, I’ll do what the religion requires, but I need something more. I need to know the inner spirit of what the religion demands of me.

The response is: if you are seeking the inner meaning and you want to deepen your spirituality, then you need to understand: God is great; God is a presence in our lives; God’s mighty hand took us out of Egypt; God’s mighty hand continues to play a role in our lives today. The laws and traditions of Judaism aim at one thing: to bring us closer to God.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.