Restoring the Fifth Cup at the Seder
Tonight, Jews around the world will mark the beginning of Passover with a Seder. This theatrical family-packed choreographed event includes a script known as a Haggadah along with mandatory menu items such as eating matzah (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs), and drinking cups of wine at specific intervals of the celebration. Besides fulfilling the mandates to expound on the Exodus and educate our children about the story of our slavery and liberation from Egyptian tyranny, we also are mandated to re-enact the drama so we could feel as if we are being redeemed from bondage. We are leaping through time and turning a “then” into a “now.”
The Passover Seder in its full current format is a celebration of freedom but from an exilic (galut) paradigm. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Jerusalem being razed, hundreds of thousands killed as well as the Hadrian persecutions and the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem by Romans, the future of the Jewish people looked quite bleak. The idea of continuing to celebrate a past liberation event during the early days of the Post Second Temple period would seem preposterous. Nonetheless, Passover not only survived but both the Haggadah and Seder, post-70 CE revolutionary innovations, bounded a people throughout 1,800 years of exile.
It would make sense to simply read the first 16 chapters of Exodus to recount the whole slavery to liberation story on Passover evening. Instead, we use a Haggadah, a compendium of biblical texts, benedictions, midrashim, and songs. Indeed, some of the Haggadah texts and Seder rituals were part of the Passover evening celebration during the Second Temple period. However, Judaism, through the Haggadah and Seder, was able to adjust and transform the biblical memory of the Exodus to provide a renewed hope to the Jewish remnant who were still recovering from the horrors of Churban Bayit Sheni (the cataclysm of Second Temple destruction).
Concluding Passover evening with “Next year in Jerusalem” should speak volumes on the development of the Haggadah and the Seder and how it continued the hope of redemption in severe and difficult times. This liturgical line first appears in the 1370 Barcelona Haggadah and eventually is adopted as the standard finale for Ashkenazi Jewish Haggodot by the mid-15th century. It was a response to the devastating impact of the Crusader massacres on European Jewry.
But what happens when Jewish sovereignty returns to the Land of Israel? How do we celebrate Passover in a season of rei’shit tze’mi’chat ge’u’la’te’nu, the first flowering of our redemption? As we quickly approach the diamond anniversary of the State of Israel later this month, we are way past the budding season of redemption. And yet, we continue to celebrate Passover within the context of galut.
Somehow, the post-traumatic exile syndrome of 1,800 years has stunted our national redemptive acknowledgment senses.
In my humble opinion, we need to celebrate chag cherut (Festival of Freedom) in a geulah (redemptive) paradigm. It begins with a small adjustment in our Seder celebration – restoring and drinking the fifth cup.
The earliest record of drinking wine on Passover evening is recorded in the Book of Jubilees (135-105 BCE). As recorded in the Mishnah Pesachim (chapter 10), drinking four cups of wine at mandated segments of the Seder is obligatory for the rabbis. The origin of this rabbinic institution is debated with Rabbi Yocḥanan ben Nappah (180–279 CE) sourcing the tradition to the four expressions of redemption mentioned in Exodus 6:6-7.
Therefore, say to the children of Israel, ‘I am The Eternal, and I will escort (וְהוֹצֵאתִי) you from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will save (וְהִצַּלְתִּי) you from their labor, and I will redeem (וְגָאַלְתִּי) you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. and I will take (וְלָקַחְתִּי) you to Me for a people, and I will be to you a God…
However, Talmudic manuscripts (Pesachim 118a) reveal the existence of a forgotten, fifth cup of wine at the Seder when the Temple was still standing.
Our rabbis taught: The fifth [cup]—he says the Great Hallel [Psalm 136] over it, according to Rabbi Tarfon, but some say, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not lack” [Psalm 23].
Based on Rabbi Yochanan’s origin theory of the cups of wine at the Seder, the 5th cup would represent the fifth redemptive expression of Exodus 6:8 – “And I will bring (וְהֵבֵאתִי) you in unto the land…”
What is quite fascinating is that some leading early medieval rabbis during the time of the first and second Crusades included the tradition of drinking a 5th cup at the Seder – Rabbi Isaac Alfasi (1013-1103), Rabbi Abraham ibn Daud (1110-1180) and Maimonides (1138-1204). Besides the tradition being sourced in the Talmud, the inclusion of a fifth cup at the Seder would be a hopeful reminder of an eventual future return to Israel in a period where hope was being extinguished. However, the tradition of drinking a fifth cup of wine was never fully accepted by the rest of Jewry.
With the State of Israel and Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty is not time to fully restore the fifth cup at the Seder?
David Nekrutman is an Orthodox Jewish theologian involved in the calling of Jewish-Christian relations for over 20 years, the Executive Director of The Isaiah Projects and Founder of Biblical Excavations.
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