The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 13:14 imagines the future. A son, born long after Egypt, looks at his father performing the strange ritual of redeeming a firstborn donkey with a lamb and redeeming a firstborn child with silver, and asks a simple question: "What is this ordinance of the firstborn?"
The father's answer, in the Targum's paraphrase, is not a legal lecture. It is a story. "By the power of a mighty hand the Lord delivered us from Mizraim, redeeming us from the house of the servitude of slaves." Every firstborn redemption, generations later, is a reenactment of a single night.
The Aramaic expansion matters. It does not say God brought us out; it says God redeemed us from "the house of the servitude of slaves" (beit avdut avadim). Slavery was doubled, a bondage inside a bondage, and the redemption was total.
Why the firstborn specifically? Because in that midnight hour, while Egyptian firstborns died, Israelite firstborns lived. The Targum insists that the life of a Jewish child is not self-evident. It is a gift wrapped around a plague that did not come. The ritual asks the father to feel the weight of a life that should have been taken and was spared.
Takeaway: the Targum teaches that ritual exists so that a child will ask, and that the answer must be a story, not a rule.