The four cups might not be as epic as we think – and that’s a good thing

With Pesaḥ just a couple of weeks away, welcome to another year of divrei Torah for your Seder! I plan to send ten divrei Torah between now and Pesaḥ via this Substack.

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I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the past few weeks mining my collection of Haggadot and reading everything I could find to collect my Seder ideas to share. But, in an interesting twist of fate, one of the most powerful ideas I came across – one that has, for me, particular resonance this year – was one I just stumbled across when doing something else.

It happened when I was trying to find a quote from Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein for one of my derashot and plucked from my shelf Rabbi Haim Sabato’s excellent Seeking His Presence, a book that transcribes R. Sabato’s conversations with R. Lichtenstein during 2010–11 on a wide variety of important issues. Given that, in his own writings, R. Lichtenstein often seems to have the side goal of getting into the Guinness World Records for “longest possible sentences containing four-syllable-or-higher words,” the conversational style of Seeking His Presence makes it a much more accessible, readable, and quotable book than most of R. Lichtenstein’s own works.

And so, there I was, rooting around the chapter in which R. Lichtenstein talks about his Zionism, when I came across an astonishing perspective.

R. Sabato asks R. Lichtenstein how to square the Religious Zionist dream for the State of Israel with the imperfect reality of the modern state: “There are those who see the spiritual condition of the State of Israel after over sixty years and they wonder, is this ‘the child for whom we prayed’ (cf. I Sam. 1:27)?! How can one respond to them?”

And it’s in his answering of this challenge that R. Lichtenstein reaches for a metaphor. And with this being R. Lichtenstein, his choice is halakhic: the four cups we drink at the Seder.

In particular, R. Lichtenstein raises a classic question concerning our drinking of the four cups: what do you do if you don’t have enough to drink for all four cups?

At the heart of this question is a debate over whether the drinking of four cups at the Seder is one complete mitzvah (that’s just divvied up into four cups spread throughout the Seder) or whether it’s four discrete mitzvot. The former creates an all-or-nothing reality: if you can’t drink all four cups then you can’t fulfill the mitzvah. The latter, however, recognizes that, while all four cups are necessary, it’s still possible to salvage something from the Seder if you can only drink fewer than four.

But this debate, for R. Lichtenstein, is about much more than the four cups themselves. Because the most famous explanation for why we drink four cups is because God uses four different synonyms for redemption when declaring His intent to redeem the Jewish people from Egypt (Ex. 6:6–7, Yerushalmi Pesaḥim 10:1).

(As an aside – because this is me, after all, writing this – we often state this idea that we drink four cups because of the four expressions of redemption as, not only fact, but The One True Fact And There’s Definitely No Dissent. But, in reality, there are an estimated – if exaggerated – sixteen billion other reasons why we drink four cups at the Seder. Even the Yerushalmi itself, which is the source of this fact, gives another three.)

(And yes, I realize that my insistence here is contributing nothing to the beautiful idea of R. Lichtenstein I’ve yet to actually get to – but, as I said, this is me writing this.)

For R. Lichtenstein, these two schools of thought on the nature of the four cups at the Seder also represent two philosophies on redemption, two perspectives on how to process the (vast) gap between the world we see and the world we want.

If the four cups are one mitzvah, then it’s all-or-nothing. If we can’t live in a world where all four expressions of redemption are clearly visible before us – if our lives aren’t perfect or our world isn’t perfect – then we have nothing.

But if the four cups are discrete, then even when things are far from ideal – even when it is impossible to drink all four cups, when it’s impossible to believe that things are completely good – there is still what to salvage. Redemption can be piecemeal. Things only need to be better; they don’t need to be perfect.

With two weeks still to go between now and Pesaḥ, it’s already become trite to say that “this year, Pesaḥ will feel different.” The horrors of October 7th, our fearful prayers for the protection of those living in and defending our beloved land, and our desperate pleas to God to redeem the hostages, have left us unable to fully embrace almost anything over the past six months.

And now we head into Pesaḥ – a time we’re supposed to celebrate God’s miraculous salvation of our people from Egypt and declare our confidence in it happening again.

And look, you’d be forgiven for struggling to muster that confidence in a year like this. But this is when an understanding of the four cups can help reframe our entire Seder. Because it might just be that each and every cup is its own mitzvah. And what that means is that our confidence in God’s redemption is not the vain hope of a totally miraculous world tomorrow but the simpler belief in things only needing to be a little better.

As we drink the first cup at the Seder, we’ll drink a testament to incremental progress. Hopefully, we’ll internalize a new ideal: that things only need to be better; they don’t need to be perfect.

And just as we will internalize this with the first cup, so will the same be true with the second cup. And the third, as well. And finally – hopefully you’ve spotted the pattern now – the fourth as we near the end of our Seder.