I can't recommend Coca-Cola for Kadesh, but it may be the secret to unlocking Seder Night
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As a certified Boring Person, I am not a fan of alcohol. It’s got nothing to do with morals, health, or anything of that sort, I just don’t like the taste. But it means that, come Seder night, I am always faced with a quandary.
I was always taught – and thus assumed to be unambiguously correct – that one must drink wine at the Seder. And, in fairness to those who taught me, not only does the Mishna Berurah explicitly state that it is ideal to use wine for every Kiddush (272, 5), but several prominent halakhic figures, such as Rabbis Moshe Feinstein and Tzvi Pesaḥ Frank, are quoted as insisting on wine at the Seder.
Which means that every Pesaḥ I find myself consuming vast quantities (or, eight cups’ worth to be precise) of Bartenura’s red wine. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Bartenura isn’t wine, it’s soda!” And you’re not wrong. But for someone who doesn’t enjoy the taste of alcohol, Bartenura is soda tinged with enough of the taste of alcohol to make it less than enjoyable.
You can imagine my relief, then, when reading the discussion found within Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Rimon’s excellent Haggadah, The Seder Night: Kinor David (more on it in a future recommendation list), on whether one must drink wine at the Seder.
Not only does R. Rimon point out the universal acceptability of grape juice for Kiddush (Shulḥan Arukh, 272:2), but that many great rabbis – among them, Reb Ḥayyim of Brisk and the Ḥazon Ish – would use grape juice for their four cups on Seder night (Teshuvot ve-Hanhagot, II, 243). Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach would, similarly, use grape juice in which was mixed a small amount of wine (Kol Torah 40, Nissan 5756).
Even further still is R. Rimon’s statement that one can use the ḥamar medinah, “a common beverage of the country,” for the four cups. This is, admittedly, a difficult term to define, but generally assumed to mean a drink served to a guest as a sign of respect rather than to quench their thirst – R. Rimon’s example is fruit juice but, based on the way we do things in our house, it’d be name-brand soda as opposed to the cheap stuff from Walmart.
Now, I don’t mention all of this because I think you should use Coca-Cola for your four cups (in fact, I’d seriously discourage it) but because I think that this entire discussion of what to drink at the Seder reveals a chasm between what our focus should be on Seder night versus what it ends up being.
Here’s the problem: between the significant debate surrounding why we drink four cups and the answers we often give, we’re left with a tremendous amount of what I’d call “abstract ambiguity.” There is no definitive answer as to why we drink four cups, there are just a lot of different answers – some of which are more popular than others. The reason for the four cups, like so many other things at the Seder, is ambiguous.
And even if we ignore that ambiguity – let’s say we accept that the four cups are there to articulate the four different expressions of freedom God uses when speaking with Moshe (Ex. 6:6–7) – we’re still left to grapple with what that even means! Almost all the answers as to why we drink four cups are incredibly abstract. Take even the act of Kiddush itself: as fond as I am of quoting Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s view that Kiddush is how human beings bring an additional element of Shabbat’s holiness down to earth, I don’t actually understand what he’s saying in any meaningful sense!
We’re thus confronted with a morass of abstract and ambiguous ideas circling our Seder. And we thus find ourselves making a subconscious choice. Rather than expending the necessary intellectual energy trying to comprehend it all (and probably failing), we choose to obsess over the one thing that’s tangible: “I may not have a clue what it is I’m doing or why I’m even doing it, but I know I need to have red wine – so that’s what I’ll do.”
And though I understand why we obsess – and often need to obsess – over the concrete aspects of our Jewish lives, I fear that, by doing so, we give ourselves a pass to not contemplate the deeper, more abstract ideas at the heart of everything we do.
In the run-up to this Seder night, then, let’s pay less focus on what we’re drinking and more on why we’re drinking. Rather than blindly accepting or misunderstanding the answers we’ve always heard, let’s take the time to discover more about the practice. (I believe someone had some good Haggadah recommendations recently – see the link below – that might have interesting perspectives on the four cups.)
We may still not truly understand it, we may struggle to find anything meaningful within it – but if we at least try to do so, we can train ourselves to focus on what really matters.
