Embracing the rejects

A few weeks ago, a friend forwarded me a document entitled The “Everyone Knows” of Pesach. The author of the document – a friend of my friend – was wanting to compile a list of all the myths we teach our children and repeat ourselves regarding the practices at the Seder.

And while he only described a handful in the document, the Seder is replete with things we think we do for one reason, while our actual reason for doing them – as I like to point out over and over again – is another.

Take the kos shel Eliyahu, a cup of wine that we pour at our Seder but do not  drink– leaving it, we say, for Eliyahu to come to our house and drink. It’s a nice idea – especially if you want to terrify your children with stories about how the ghosts of prophets roam the streets looking for Jewish homes to enter in search of wine (and who said Jews don’t have a concept of Santa?!).

But the fundamental reason for this fifth cup is, actually, far less exciting. In a nutshell, the gemara (Pes. 118a) records a debate concerning whether we need to drink four or five cups at the Seder. And so, in deference to the opinion that we might need a fifth cup, we pour that fifth cup at our table but don’t drink it.

But this does lead to a really boring follow-up question: after the Seder, what do we do with this cup of wine? No one has drunk from it, and it’s not actually been used in the service of a mitzvah – so what do we do with it?

And while most people just pour the wine back into the bottle from whence it came, the Ḥatam Sofer – the great 18th-century rabbi who defined much of Judaism in the modern era – is reported to have observed a fascinating custom: he would cover the kos shel Eliyahu at the end of the Seder and, the following day when it came to kiddush, he would use that cup of wine (Minhagei Ḥatam Sofer, ch. 10, n. 7).

And I think that there is something really powerful about this custom – because I think it reflects, not only a major ethic of the Seder itself, but illustrates the application of that ethic into practice.

Because, when you think about many of the things we do at the Seder, the focus is very much on the “rejects,” for want of a better expression. Matzah, the core symbol of the Seder and Pesaḥ as a whole, is very obviously inferior to bread. But on Pesaḥ we switch our focus – we reject and prohibit bread and turn to matzah, instead.

And, to reinforce this, we break one of the pieces of matzah at the start of the Seder – not only are we eating matzah instead of bread, but we’re eating broken matzah.

We also eat maror because it is bitter. And while we embrace the bitterness because we want to tell ourselves the story of how we went from slavery to freedom – we intentionally eat something we wouldn’t really choose to otherwise eat.

The focus of the Seder is children: a group of people who were, historically, ignored. “Children should be seen and not heard,” the old adage goes – but not at the Seder. The group so often rejected must be embraced.

And even the child who is simple, or wicked, or incapable of asking questions is embraced – we don’t just focus on the wise kids but all the kids.

Even the very text of our Haggadot embraces this reality: the gemara (Pes. 116a) records a debate between Rav and Shmuel regarding the content of Maggid – and we do both. No opinion is rejected, all are embraced.

And all of this makes sense, because the Torah repeatedly insists that we remember the hardship of slavery and suffering and channel that into our own commitment to not ignore those who are – be it literally or proverbially – on the margins of society. It’s a core theme of Pesaḥ.

And thus, when it comes to the debate around whether we drink four cups or five, we, again, embrace both opinions. But here it’s trickier – because there’s not much we can do with the fifth cup. The very fact that it’s on our table is a testament to our embrace of those things otherwise rejected, but it just sits there doing nothing.

And so, the Ḥatam Sofer found a way to illustrate and extend the ethic of the Seder: he used the rejected cup of wine for something else – for the purpose of a mitzvah – and used it for kiddush the following day.