Maimonides writes the following about the seder in the Mishnah Torah, Laws of Chametz and Matzah, Chapter 7:

“We should make changes on this night so that the children will see and will ask: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” until we reply to them: “This and this occurred; this and this took place.”  What changes should be made? We should give them roasted seeds and nuts; the table should be taken away before they eat; matzot should be snatched from each other and the like.  When a person does not have a child, his spouse should ask him (questions). If he does not have a spouse, he and a friend should ask each other: “Why is this night different?” This applies even if they are all wise. A person who is alone should ask themselves: “Why is this night different?”

We see that questions are indispensable to the seder, but it is not enough to ask questions or read them from a Haggadah.  The questions must arise for individuals, especially children, in reality, in the present moment.  We must do strange things so they will ask.  Not even to ask specifically about the Exodus, but just to ask, “Why?”    What does it mean to ask, “Why is this different?”  It means to be amazed, to be in a state of wonder.   We do things at the seder to create an atmosphere of curiosity, of strangeness, in which something different and foreign is happening.  The child is perplexed, their paradigm has been shifted from under them. 

We do not answer the child’s question.  They ask, “Why do we dip twice?” The real answer of course is, “In order that you should ask.”   But that is an absurdity.   It does not answer anything.   The answer we want to give is that God took us out of Egypt.    We want to give an answer about the Exodus.  So why not just teach about the Exodus?   Why on Pesach must the answers come from questions, from the absurd, from a sense of wonder, from the feeling that something is amiss?  

Human beings like to preserve the status quo, what is called by psychologists our “schema”.  We each have ways of understanding the world.  If suddenly things change, and the normal meaning of things seems not to make sense, there is incoherence, we become anxious and confused.   But at the same time research shows that this can actually lead to greater learning and open mindedness.   

A few years ago, researchers at the University of British Columbia brought two groups of study participants into their lab and asked them to read a short story. One group read an adaptation of a story by Franz Kafka, The Country Dentist, which was typically “Kafkaesque,” meaning that its twists and turns made little obvious sense.  The second group of participants read a version of the same story that actually made sense.  A little while later, the researchers assigned both groups to a task that involved spotting hidden patterns in rows of letters. They discovered that participants who had read the confusing version of the Kafka story were nearly twice as good at spotting correct patterns in the strings of letters.

When things are “different” we are perplexed, but also our minds are opened to new ways of seeing things.  At the seder, not only must there be a need to know, but this need to know must emerge out of difference, a shaken sense of the schema by which we find coherence.  The Exodus was the greatest change the Jewish people experienced.   It is almost impossible to go from being a slave one moment to being free the next.  For this reason most Jews, the Medrash tells us, did not actually leave Egypt.  The change was too hard.   Each year if we are to relive the Exodus we must come face to face with the shakiness of reality, we must find the beautiful open mindedness which hides within the anxiety of having our schema shaken, our lives changed to the unexpected from under us.  

This year has been a Kafkaesque change for all of us.  The impossible, the absurd, is suddenly not only possible but normalized.  This is the essence of Pesach – that we must find a way to capitalize on the shakiness of difference and from it expand our consciousness to find new meaning, new learning, new ways of seeing ourselves, our history and the world around us.