Rasha mah hu omer? What does the rebellious child ask? There are several questions raised by this passage. What did the rebellious child have in mind when he asked this question? What does the Haggadah mean when it says that one should ‘blunt his teeth?’ Also, this last expression is superfluous – it would have been enough if the Haggadah had said, “You should say to him, ‘It is because of this….’” Another difficulty in this passage is how the Haggadah answers the Rasha. The answer that we give is the same answer that is given to the fourth child, the one who does not know how to ask. The Rasha is really asking about the pesach offering. Since one is required to eat this offering at the end of the meal when the person is no longer hungry, the Rasha wonders, “What is the purpose of this offering?” Most sacrifices are consumed as the main course of a meal, but not this one. Since there is no physical pleasure in eating the pesach offering, the Rasha wonders why we even bother eating it at all. The Rasha asks, “What is this offering/service to you?” Since he says “this offering” it must mean a very specific offering – the pesach offering! What is the point of this offering since you get no physical pleasure from it? In all the other sacrifices either the priests or the supplicant gets to enjoy the offering by consuming part of it. The Torah answers the Rasha’s question by saying, “It is a pesach offering to the Lord;” that is, this offering is not for you but for God and therefore you are not supposed to enjoy it! The pesach offering is not to satisfy the body but to fulfill our obligation to God. How does one answer the Rasha? One does so by acknowledging that he is disassociating himself from the community through his words. One then answers him by being as caustic and sarcastic as he is. Even though this verse doesn’t really refer to him, we use it to answer him so that we treat him as if he knows nothing. We interpret the verse as a reference to him and thereby ‘blunt his teeth’ to aggravate him. In affect we say to him, “Since you wanted to know about why you can’t enjoy the offering, instead of offering it for God’s sake, we want you to know that God did all this for me and not for you – had you been in Egypt, you wouldn’t have been redeemed.”