The Wicked Child

Thanks for your response, your thoughts have made me think a lot.  

I guess I wasn’t clear about how I’m thinking about this book and the wicked child.  What I think I was trying to say is that the whole book of Slaughterhouse Five asks the wicked questions.  This next part needs lots of qualifiers...the wicked question, for me, in this case, was: are you sure human beings are good?  Billy Pilgrim is part of Slaughterhouse Five, but he is not asking me wicked questions, he is the tool Vonnegut uses to ask these questions.  So yea, satire is important and good and I want to learn to appreciate it, this is something I have to work on.

Your reference to Holocaust survivors made me think of the book The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.   It’s the story of Leo Gursky, a pathetic Jewish man living in NYC who lived through the Nazi occupation by “becoming invisible” (which seems pretty similar to Billy’s “so it goes”), and Alma Singer, a young girl whose father has passed away and whose mother is depressed by her husband’s death and is translating the book The History of Love.  Ummmm that wasn’t a very good description, but this book is one my favorites of all time.  (maybe amazon does the book more justice?)  So what do I expect from these pathetic characters?  I’m not sure...I can understand why they are so numb. I can imagine that one obvious way to cope with these terrifying events would be to close yourself off, to detach.  I don’t know what’s it’s like to be a prisoner of war or to have to hide from governments that want to kill you; I do know what it’s like to want to detach, to want to forget, to not want to share.  From these experiences, I’ve learned that it’s important for me to talk about how I’m feeling.  But maybe this can’t work in the context of really traumatic events?  Perhaps the only way to cope with war is to detach?  Typically, I’ve coped with the wars that the US and Israel wage by refusing to engage with them, by detaching.  This has not  been good for me because sometimes my brain doesn’t work the way I want it to, and when everything comes out all at once it’s so incredibly overwhelming that I don’t even know how to begin to process.  Sometimes, my confusion manifests itself in ways that are destructive.  If my feelings about wars that neither I nor anyone I love is physically fighting can sometimes feel this overwhelming, then what is it like for the people who are actually fighting them?  What is it like to be a civilian in a war zone?  What is it like to be scared for your life?  I don’t know, but I really hope that those people who do know have people around them to help them figure out ways to cope with their experiences so that they don’t detach, because isn’t impossible to detach completely?  I’m not really sure if this is making any kind of sense...    

I’m glad you brought up Quaker Meeting too...I didn’t know that that was the idea behind Meeting.  I work at camp that has Quaker origins, but it your telling of Quaker Meeting makes me see how different silent meeting at camp is from traditional Quaker Meeting.  For me, the 15 minutes of collective silence every morning are the ones where I feel most connected to my community, like we’re all one thing with the same light in us and around us.  I am rarely in my own thoughts during meeting and though I've been "moved" to speak, I've never felt like God moved me to speak.  It's felt more like the my experiences have moved me.  Again, not really sure if this makes any sense.

I’m pretty sure that the root of the four children story comes from commentary on the telling of the Exodus in the bible.  I guess it’s written four different ways in the Torah and the rabbis decided that each way represents the way parents should tell the story depending on the child.  Also, every year a huge debate at my family’s sedar is about the word wicked, and that maybe we should strike it from the hagaddah because it does feel a little wrong to call questions wicked.