We all know the imagery at the seder: It is late in the evening. Everyone has eaten lotsa matzah. We have drunk several cups of wine, talked about freedom from bondage and extrapolated the discussion to apply to subsequent historical moments.
The children have sung Mah Nishtanah and now, late into the evening, it is time for the prophet Elijah — Eliyahu Hanavi — to arrive and sip some wine that we have set aside for him, in his own special cup, on our seder table. It is Elijah, the only Jewish figure in the Bible who never died, but who instead alighted to heaven in a fiery chariot when his life’s work on Earth was done, who someday will return to Earth to herald the coming of Moshiach, the Messiah.
When I was a small boy, it was my assignment one Passover night to open the door for Elijah. I was really small, and this was the first time I ever had been assigned to open that door, to let in — a ghost. It was a bit spooky. At least, it was in my very small-boy mind.
I went to the door, as everyone at the table stood and began singing “Eliyahu Hanavi, Eliyahu HaTishbi,” the traditional song by which we acknowledge Eliyahu. I turned the doorknob and, with a bit of hesitation, started pulling the door open.
Meanwhile, a problem had developed at another seder, next door to ours. They had run out of sugar as they were serving coffee and tea to conclude their seder banquet. Someone there decided to come to our house to borrow some sugar, and, just as I was opening that door, our next-door neighbor’s fist was starting to knock on it. Only … her fist arrived a split-second after the door was opening, so it hit me instead. Punched in the nose on my first encounter with a ghost.
But — the sweet memories of childhood aside — why do we leave a cup for Elijah?
In this week’s parsha, Va’era, we read at the outset that God commands Moshe to tell the Jewish slaves of Egypt that He is the Father of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. He has heard their children’s cries from the depths of slavery, and He remembers His Covenant, pledging to our forefathers that He will return us to our land. Now is freedom’s moment, God tells Moshe:
“[A]nd I will withdraw you from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments; and I will take you to Me for a people, and I will be to you a God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you into the land concerning which I lifted up My hand to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. … I am the Lord” (Exodus 6:6-8).
Our rabbinic sages studied those three verses and decreed that, for every active verb that describes specific actions by which God would take us out of Egypt and into freedom, we should drink a cup of wine at the seder. They counted four such verbs: v’hotzeiti (“and I will withdraw”), v’hitzalti (“and I will deliver”), v’ga’alti (“and I will redeem”), and v’lakachti (“and I will take”). Therefore, we drink four cups of wine at the seder table.
However, some among the rabbinic sages said we also should drink a fifth cup because they included a fifth verb, the word beginning verse 8: v’heiveiti (“and I will bring”). Thus, while one rabbinic opinion felt the seder should commemorate solely the themes of Exodus — getting out and marking the miracle that God brought us out of Egypt — other rabbis felt the miracle of Exodus could not have been complete if we merely departed but with nowhere to go, because then we would have languished aimlessly in the desert. They felt the miracle of Exodus was tied inextricably with the “end game”: that God not only was withdrawing us from Egypt but also was bringing us into Israel. Therefore, those rabbis tallied the fifth verb — v’heiveiti — as part of the Exodus miracle, insisting that a seder entail five cups of wine.
And so, there developed an unbridgeable philosophical dispute among the rabbis: Does freedom entail merely getting out of slavery, or does true freedom further require a new beginning? In vintner’s terms: four cups or five?
The rabbis could not reach unanimity. They all agreed we should drink four cups but could not reach consensus on whether a fifth cup is required, too. Whenever the rabbis experienced such a deadlock, their expression was: Teiku — a Hebrew acronym meaning, essentially, let’s leave this one for Eliyahu to decide when he returns to Earth. Let’s leave the fifth cup for Elijah.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School and the UC Irvine School of Law and a member of the national executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, is a columnist for several online magazines and rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County. His writings appear at rabbidov.com.
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