Last week a Chabad emissary posted a triumphant video: outside the ADL conference, he and a friend wrapped tefillin on a Jewish pro-Palestinian protester. The wrapper in question defended the act against his own comrades’ jeers—“This has nothing to do with politics. This is religion and a connection to God. I’m a Jew and I’ll always be a Jew.” The poster’s takeaway: Judaism can unite where politics divides.

A beautiful story about achdus?

“Separating religion from politics in this context smells like separating Judaism from Zionism” began a dissent. When the OP insisted the young man was just ignorant and deserved a chance, the reply was that any Jew publicly marching under “From the River to the Sea” flags has already identified himself with the Rasha of the Hagada. He knows exactly what he believes; he has simply swapped one set of ikkarei emunah for another. Giving him tefillin doesn’t draw him closer—it hands him the ultimate “As a Jew” prop: “Even Chabad agrees with me on Gaza.”

The exchange grew heated. “You would disqualify a Jew from Mitzvot because he’s not a Zionist?” The answer: he disqualified himself. We withhold tallis and tefillin from get-withholders; why hand them to open terrorsplainers? The 80% who opted out in Egypt never made it to the korban Pesach either.

As Pesach approaches, the Haggadah hands us the script for exactly this moment. Call it Hagada Dentata—the Haggadah with teeth—because the Torah itself sets the scene with surgical precision.

The Rasha’s question appears in Exodus 12:26: “When your children say to you, ‘What is this avodah to you?’” Right there, on the eve of the final plague, before Kiddush HaChodesh, before the korban Pesach is even commanded. The wicked son speaks before there is any avodah to speak of. He has already excluded himself with the pronoun “you.” The midrash tells us that roughly 80% of the Hebrews in Egypt died during the plague of darkness. Why? They had already answered the Rasha’s question preemptively: “Mah ha’avodah hazos lachem?”—this service, this leaving, this nationhood, this fight, is for you, not for us. So God erased them before the real avodah even began.

Now look at the next chapter. Exodus 13 contains the first two passages in the entire Torah about tefillin (13:9 and 13:16). Those verses are the scriptural hooks for the Tam and the Eino Yodea Lishol—the simple son and the one who doesn’t know how to ask. Tefillin belong to those still willing to bind themselves, body and soul, to the collective story. The Rasha’s verse sits one chapter earlier, deliberately severed from the mitzvah of connection.

Ramban (in his explanation of the Haggadah’s “hakheh es shinav,” cross-referenced to Bereishit 49:10) is brutally clear: “blunt his teeth” does not mean a slap. It means deny him the korban Pesach. Tell him, “Because of this God did for me when I left Egypt—for me and not for you.” He can watch the rest of us eat the roasted lamb, but he does not get to bite. His teeth stand on edge. The exclusion is the response.

That is the precise status today of the openly pro-Palestinian Jew who still shows up waving a Jewish star at an anti-Israel rally. He has declared, in the language of the Rasha, “This service—this Jewish state, this right to defend ourselves, this peoplehood—is for you, not for me.” He has joined the side of those who would finish what Amalek started. He is poresh min hatzibbur in the most literal and lethal sense.

Kiruv, in its classic Chabad form, operates on a beautiful but tenuous binary assumption – especially now: every Jew is a potential ba’al teshuvah. But there comes a point when the binary breaks. When a Jew has not merely lapsed into ignorance but has actively enlisted with the genocidal enemy, he has forfeited the automatic presumption of z’chus. The mitzvah of kiruv does not require us to chase after those who have converted to the Church of Social Justice and now use their Jewishness as moral cover for blood libel.

This is when street tefillin becomes a privilege, not a right: oseh mitzvah v’torfin lo bifanav—sometimes the wrong person can be performing the mitzvah. The Chabadnik who wrapped Isaac still gets his mitzvah credit, just as one who gives tzedakah to an undeserving recipient does. But the broader kiruv industry needs to ask itself: what is our batting average with open pro-Palestinians? Do they become ba’alei teshuvah, or do they simply walk away with a new selfie caption guaranteed to clicks for virtue-signaling—“Even the religious Jews know I’m right”? Talk about cultural appropriation.

If one of these lost souls comes to us first, ba l’taher—let him come to be purified—then we respond with the full warmth of ahavas Yisrael. But we do not chase him. We do not hand him the signifiers of holiness so he can virtue-signal on Instagram that “As a Jew I don’t believe in this.” The 80% who chose darkness were not hunted down with tefillin straps in the streets of Goshen. They were allowed to remain exactly where they had placed themselves—outside the camp, outside the korban, outside history.

At every Seder we reenact that ancient triage. We do not throw the Rasha out of the house—he is still a Jew—but we blunt his teeth. We remind him, dentally, that the korban Pesach is not for him. Not this year. Not until he stops saying “to you” and starts saying “to us.”   In a time when some Jews have chosen the side of our enemies, the ancient text suddenly feels less like quaint ritual and more like operating instructions for Jewish survival.

Hagada Dentata. A narrative with teeth.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)