The wicked son asks

This is a little scary. For the first time, the computer censored out today's post, and it showed up blank. Just the title, "the wicked son asks", and then a blank. It is painful to try to reconstruct a thought. I'll try. It went something like this:
Late into the night after the seder, we were folding up the tables and chairs and I remembered the mishkan, the holy worshipping place in the desert, a place for remembering, for delighting, and for hoping. I remembered the Torah's intricate instructions regarding the construction of a mishkan that can easily be folded and moved along as we progressed through the desert. I thought of this, and knew what a seder table is. Late into the night, as we washed Grandpa's silver trays and put them away, we were talking about certain seder guests from outside of Israel, who seemed to convey the attitude, "I like Judaism, just not the fighting parts. I like Moses, but leave out the parts where he killed a slavedriver. I like the hagaddah, but leave out the bit about the Egyptian army drowning in the sea. Tell me about our arrival in the promised land. Tell me we got there and it was all set for us, with placecards like on the seder table, a place all ready for each of us. I like Israel, just not the fighting parts". At our seder table there were four Israeli soldiers. That's not the whole story. At our table was Yosef, who fought in 1948, another time like the hagaddah's telling, when the land was promised to us, and we had to fight for it. It took a man like Joshua to bring us right into Israel. It took a man like my father-in-law Yosef. I first met Yosef, in uniform, in 1973, the day he came home from defending Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Altogether at our table we had at least fourteen people who have served in the Israeli army. And the children who are not old enough to have served yet. These soldiers at our table are gentle people, rational people, people who far prefer to solve problems by talking. But these soldiers at our seder table are people who understand that Judaism balances chesed with gevurah (Please join my exploration about balancing chesed with gvurah -givinglovingkindness with toughstrength- during the counting of the Omer, the 49 days from the seder to the day we're ready to stand, all of us together, at Sinai, and receive Torah). Late into the night, as we swept away all the matza crumbs on the floor, we suddenly understood the four sons. The rasha, the wicked one, asks, "What happened to you when you left Egypt?" Because he says "You" and not "We", he has cut himself off from his people.