And it is in the light of the central position bestowed on children by the Pesach holiday, evident on the variety of educational resources displayed throughout the feast and especially during the Sederim (the Ma Nishtanah, the Keara, the dish with the special foods, the search for the Afikoman, the children’s songs at the end, etc.), that we can understand a meaningful detail that appears at the very beginning of our parashah.

When Moses announces the eighth plague, the arrival of locusts, Pharaoh, at the request of his servants tired of the situation, seems to agree with the request to let the people go to worship God, and asks, “who are they that shall go?”, to which Moses replies: “We will go with our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters…” (Ex. 10:9).

Three questions arise: Why was it important to take the children along? Why take the young and the old? And why does the Torah put children before old people?

Let us review the answers:

Why was it important to take the children along?

Rabbi Samuel Bornstein (Poland 1856-1926) answers: “The reason why we must take our young with us,” Moses told Pharaoh, “is that we must hold a feast to the Lord, and how could we rejoice or celebrate a holiday if we were to leave our children behind in an alien land? Without our children, no joy can be complete.”

First lesson: Without children, no celebration is possible.

Why take the young and the old?

Says Rabbi Yissochar Frand (Yeshiva Ner Israel, in Baltimore): Pharaoh understood something about the Jewish people. In order for there to be a Jewish people, there has to be a past and there has to be a future… We are a religion with a concept of mesorah, a concept of tradition that we get from our fathers and from our fathers’ fathers. This concept is vital to what Judaism is all about. But we are also a religion that believes that unless we have someone to give this heritage to, we have no future.

Second lesson: the importance of intergenerational encounter.

Why does the Torah put children before old people?

According to the Ktav Sofer (Rabbi Abraham Shmuel Binyamin Sofer, Hungary 1815-1871): Facing the threat of assimilation, children need to leave with more urgency than old people. Old people stand firmer in their tradition; therefore, their rescue is less pressing.

Third lesson: to focus on the children and youngsters.

These commentaries leave us with enormous teachings. Our homes and our communities must be rooms for the encounter between generations, allowing the passing on of tradition. We need to take over the past in order to hand it down to those who come after us. And we have to definitely channel our efforts towards the young, so that our children and our children’s children will not only be heirs but also carriers of a meaningful Judaism, inspiring and committed, so that they will be capable of passing it on as well to their descendants.

As Rabbi Simcha Bunem (Pshischa, Poland, 1765-1827) used to say: “A child with no parents is an orphan; a nation with no young people is orphaned as well”.