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The Five Cups of Passover Wine?
As everyone knows, on the first night of Passover we eat matzah and bitter herbs, we recline at the table, and we drink five cups of wine.
Five cups of wine? We drink four cups of wine, don’t we?
Well, that depends whom you ask.
Of course, it really is only four cups that we drink at the Passover seder. Acceptance of this practice, however, has not always been universal. Rather, it evolved as the best possible compromise between two contradictory Talmudic traditions. And only by going back to the root of the custom can we fully appreciate the relevance of our annual reenactment of the Exodus from Egypt.
The four cups of wine reflect four separate phases that concluded with the Jewish people’s transformation from Egyptian slaves into a free and autonomous nation. Within the narrative of the Exodus itself, four different expressions of redemption allude to the process through which the Jews attained their freedom — a freedom that was not born in an instant, but only as the culmination of four distinct and imperative stages.
Vehotzeisi. And I will take you out from the burdens of Egypt. Although Pharaoh endured ten plagues before he sent the Jews forth from Egypt, only half that many persuaded him to release them from their labors. This enabled the Jews to adjust to independence, to learn what it meant to make their own decisions before the time when they would be held accountable for the choices they would make.
Vehitzalti. And I will rescue you from their service. A slave whose master makes no demands upon him is still a slave. Having already been exempted from their labors, now the Jews were prepared to face the challenges of real freedom.
Vegoalti. And I will redeem you with an outstretched arm. History teaches us that freed slaves often fail to make the adjustment from slavery to freedom. The culture of slavery may be so deeply rooted in their psyches that they cannot succeed as free people. Similarly, the Jews needed divine assistance to purge their hearts and minds of the corrupt values of Egyptian culture, foreshadowing the way Jews all through history have had to struggle against the corrosive influence of foreign ideologies.
Velokachti. And I will take you to Me as a people. Once liberated from the physical and psychological bondage of Egypt, the Jews still faced the subtle dangers of unrestricted freedom. Only with a sense of identity and purpose, only with a clearly defined national mission, could the Jews emerge from cultural anarchy to embrace true freedom.
But there remains one final expression in the narrative of our collective transformation from slaves to free people: Veheiveisi. And I will bring you into the land. As a free and sovereign nation, could the Jewish people begin to fulfill their mission even before they established themselves in their land, in Israel? Or is it impossible for us as Jews to consider ourselves truly free while we remain exiled from our ancestral homeland? This is the essence of the debate whether we drink four or five cups of wine.
What is our conclusion? We have none. We simply don’t know. However, we do know that we have to drink at least four cups. So that is what we do, then wait for Elijah the Prophet to come, not to drink the fifth cup, but to tell us whether or not we should drink it ourselves.
But some of us refuse to wait for Elijah to affirm our commitment to the Holy Land. This year, like every year, hundreds of Jewish high school graduates from around the country will defer their first year in college to study Jewish tradition and Jewish law in the land from which we are exiled. No threat of terrorist violence has been able to dissuade these young men and women from renewing their connection to the the heritage and land of their ancestors.
And, perhaps even more impressive, their parents have set aside their own fears and their own worst nightmares to encourage their children to travel half way around the world to pursue their highest calling: to rise to the challenge of Jewish freedom.
Passover: the Illusion of Freedom
After generations of slavery and oppression, amidst miracles unprecedented and unrepeated, the Children of Israel marched forth out of Egypt and into the wilderness as a free people for the first time in their collective memory. Fifty days later they stood together at Sinai to receive the Torah — the code of 613 commandments that would define every aspect of their lives.
What happened to freedom? What happened to the promise of redemption when all that really happened was the trading of one master for another?
Much of the modern world has built its understanding of freedom upon Thomas Jefferson’s famous formulation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what would life be like in a society of unrestricted freedom? How many of us would choose to live in with no rules at all, where everyone was free to drive on either side of the road, to take whatever they desired regardless of rightful ownership, to indulge every whim and impulse without a thought of accountability? The absolute “freedom” of pure anarchy would provide no protection for the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Consequently, it would provide no freedom at all.
Intuitively, we understand that some freedoms have to be sacrificed in order to preserve order and ensure the common welfare. If so, we are forced to refine our concept of freedom. In contrast to ancient Egypt, in which our ancestors were coerced by the rod and the whip to bow before Pharaoh’s will, the G-d of our redemption allows us the freedom from immediate retribution. By doing so, the Almighty empowers us with the freedom to make our own choices, to take responsibility of our own actions, and to transform ourselves from creatures of physical impulse into beings of spiritual refinement.
Ultimately, the freedom we possess is the freedom to choose our own master, to choose the leaders and system of laws that will best serve our collective interests in the long run.
Because we live in a society with others who also demand freedom, our choices will necessarily be limited by the conventions of society. More significantly, the values of the society in which we live will shape our own attitudes, influencing the ways we think that priorities we hold dear. From the moment we are born, our impressions are determined by others: our parents, our teachers, and our peers, as well as writers, celebrities, sports stars, and advertisers.
How often have we asked ourselves whether the ideas that govern our choices as spouses, as parents, and as community members are truly our own? How often do we stop to reflect whether we have acquired the values that guide us in our relationships and our careers through thoughtful contemplation or through cultural osmosis?
The illusion of freedom convinces us that our own gratification comes before our obligations to others, before even our obligations to ourselves. If we allow our desire for unrestricted freedom to steer our lives, we will find ourselves enslaved by our desires no less than a chain smoker is a slave to his cigarettes or an alcoholic is a slave to his gin. Convinced that freedom is a goal in itself, we will sacrifice everything of true value for the cruel master of self-indulgence. Deceived into believing that responsibility is the antithesis of freedom, we will invest ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, in philosophies like this one:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, now now. And feeling good was easy, L-rd, when he sang the blues, You know feeling good was good enough for me, Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
These are the words that made Janis Joplin into a counterculture idol, before she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.
Less dramatic examples confront us every day. Politicians, movie icons, and athletes destroy their careers and their family lives for a few fleeting moments of pleasure. Parents allow their children to grow up without direction or discipline lest they quash their creativity or damage their egos by imposing structure and meaning upon their lives. A once-productive citizenry increasingly looks to receive support on the backs of others, whether through welfare, lawsuits, or pyramid schemes that leave countless victims footing the bill.
More than anything, Passover celebrates the freedom to think, to take stock of our lives and reassess our values, to take a fresh look at our own motivations and our own decisions, to acknowledge where we may have lost sight of truly meaningful goals and sincerely commit ourselves to striking out on a truer course.
Last year we were slaves to our inner masters; this year we have a chance to set ourselves free to seek the paths of truth and follow them toward the destination of enduring spiritual redemption.
Passover and the First Holocaust
After yesterday’s terrorist bus bombing in Jerusalem, the first in years, Jews around the world felt the painful reminder of our precarious place among nations dedicated to our destruction. With the Passover festival approaching, these thoughts from 2005 remind us that Holocaust is not a phenomenon of the last century, or even the last millennium.
The extermination of six million Jews in the Nazi death camps represents but the most recent in a long history of Jewish holocausts. It was preceded by the Chmielnicki massacres in 17th century Poland, the Almohad massacres in 12th century Spain, the Inquisition and the Crusades and the relentless spilling of blood by the Roman legions — all these and similar chapters in the long, brutal history of attempted genocide against the Jewish people.
When did it all begin?
According to Jewish tradition, it began 3328 years ago, when nearly two and a half million Jews died in a single night.
It was the beginning of the plague of darkness, the penultimate blow in the systematic destruction of the Egyptians and their empire. Pharaoh had already released his Jewish slaves from their oppressive labor midway through the cycle of plagues, driven by the desperate hope that he could appease the G-d of the Jews. But he refused to grant them permission to leave.
For some Jews, the relaxation from their burdens offered an opportunity to reflect upon the responsibilities of freedom and the opportunity that had been promised them to build their own nation. For others, however, it gave time to grow comfortable in the paradise that was Egypt, to adopt an attitude of entitlement for their new-found prosperity, to forget that freedom is never free.
During their 210 years as slaves in Egypt, the Jews had gradually absorbed the corrupt values of that culture, its idolatry and its immorality, retaining only their names, their language, and their style of dress to set themselves apart from their Egyptian hosts. With no merit to deserve divine redemption, the Jewish people received their exodus on credit, credit to be repaid by accepting the Ten Commandments at Sinai and committing themselves to the higher moral and ethical standards of G-d’s chosen people.
600,000 Jews — 20% of their total number — accepted these terms, preparing themselves psychologically and physically to exchange the comfort and familiarity of Egypt for the uncertainty of the empty desert. Four times as many rejected the condition, refusing to make good, as it were, on the credit extended them from heaven, convincing themselves that, with the Egyptians humbled and the yoke of slavery removed from their necks, they could void their contract with the Almighty and remain unencumbered in the land of their former servitude.
David_Roberts-IsraelitesLeavingEgypt_1828
The human condition, however, is never static. One who stops growing immediately begins to die; one who stops moving forward instantly begins to slip backward. There is no standing still, no place to rest in this restless world, and the 2,400,000 Jews who thought to deny their destiny, who imagined they could stop the sands of time and were buried by them instead.
The fate of the 80% was not divine vengeance; it was spiritual inevitability. To survive for thirty three centuries, the Jewish nation would have to appreciate that it had no alternative other than survival. Assimilation, conversion, or abdication of Jewish identity may at times have seemed an attractive option to the burden of living as Jews, but the consequences of spiritual extinction are every bit as grave — indeed, much more so — than those of physical extinction.
Ask the Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, only to be called marranos — pigs — by their Christian brothers and to be burned at the stake in the auto-de-fe of the Inquisition, if their abandonment of Jewish identity was worth the price. Ask the assimilated German Jews stripped of their property, forced to wear yellow stars, and incinerated in Nazi crematoria if they met a better end than those who refused to disavow their Judaism.
Indeed, the narrative of the exodus testifies that, as the Jews prepared to leave the ruins of Egypt after the plague upon the firstborn, “the Almighty gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians.” As slaves forfeiting their identity within Egyptian society, the Egyptians regarded the Jews only with disdain. Once the Jews began to act with Jewish dignity, their former oppressors could not help but respect them.
And so it has been ever since. When we live as Jews, the rest of the world respects us for our values and our conviction. When we shirk our responsibility as upholders of morality to accommodated the ever-changing moral whims of the world around us, we bring upon ourselves nothing but suffering.
The freedom we celebrate at Passover is the freedom to remain true to who we are, who we always have been: The nation that introduced the world to the very concept of freedom, and the nation which has shown the world through the ages that the price of freedom is far less dear than the price of forsaking it.
Why do we think so?
We think so because all other people think so;
Or because—or because, after all, we do think so;
Or because we were told so, and think we must think so;
Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so;
Or because, having thought so, we think we will think so…
Henry Sidgewick
Marriage of Convenience
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
― Kurt Vonnegut
The orderly rolled my gurney to a stop before an imposing double doorway. “Okay,” he said, “This is where you get your kiss.” I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to me or to my wife. In any case, my wife kissed me and laughed and cried all at once. Then I was rolling again.
I arrived in surgery and scooted over onto the operating table. I joked with the anesthesiologist. He found my vein on the first try. I recited Psalms to myself and wondered distantly why I wasn’t scared out of my wits.
They sliced me open, broke my sternum, compressed my lungs like empty sugar bags, and stopped my heart to patch the hole between its upper chambers with a piece of my pericardium while redirecting the blood that flowed through an anomalous vein.
I don’t remember that part.
I also don’t remember my hands clawing the air, straining against nylon straps, struggling to tear the ventilator mask from my face and the dressing from my chest. My wife stifled a cry when she saw me in recovery. Apart from the convolutions of my fingers, the pallor of my face starkly mirrored the countenance of death.
“He looks so good,” the nurse told her.
When I did regain consciousness the next day, numbed by morphine and dazed by the residue of anesthesia, I asked my cardiologist if he could release me that afternoon. “I have to catch a flight to Jacksonville this evening,” I said.
I was trying to be funny. He thought I was delirious.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
![[ File # csp3608269, License # 1131644 ] Licensed through http://www.canstockphoto.com in accordance with the End User License Agreement (http://www.canstockphoto.com/legal.php) (c) Can Stock Photo Inc. / Eraxion](https://proverbsandprovidence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/anatomy-lungs.jpg)
Lacking prescience, however, I had no excuse for the cavalier attitude with which I approached this whole business. No matter how distinguished my surgeon’s credentials, and no matter how casually he explained away the operation as routine (with the probability of success better than 99%), cardiac surgery remains as heart-stopping as it sounds: they carve open your chest and, during an extended period of clinical death, cut and paste around your most vital organ before sewing you back together.
Call it what you like; it hardly ranks among the more attractive forms of elective surgery.
Yet “elective surgery” was how the doctor had described it. After all, I had virtually no symptoms, and my condition might not advance for twenty years. Then again, deterioration could begin within months, or even weeks. And so, at my cardiologist’s insistence, I opted to exchange the distant prospect of lingering death for the immediate promise of physical pain followed by months-long recovery.
That was what I expected. Instead, from beginning to end, while my wife and children and parents were dealing with their respective emotional traumas, the greatest discomfort I suffered throughout the entire episode came not from the incision, not from anesthesia withdrawal, not even from the mild pneumonia I contracted during recovery, but from a persistent hangnail that nagged me from the day after surgery until I returned home and exorcised it with my cuticle clippers.
THERE IS A LESSON
The great tennis player Arthur Ashe, after contracting AIDS via blood transfusion, was reported to have said, “If I ask why this has happened to me, then I must also ask concerning all the good that I have had in my life.”
Indeed, Mister Ashe, may you rest in peace — you should have asked both questions, as should we all.
If life is all One Great Accident, then there is no why. But the exquisitely textured fabric of our universe, the elegant design of our world, and the transcendent nobility of Man when he listens to the calling of his soul — all these testify to the genius of an invisible Conductor who guides the symphony of Creation.
And if there is a plan behind the apparent chaos, then whatever happens for good or for bad should prompt us to ask, “Why?”
Click here to read the whole essay, from my column in the inaugural issue of The Wagon Magazine
Dustin Hoffman and the Miracle of Purim
The Festival of Purim may be the most misunderstood celebration in all Jewish tradition. Even the historical background seems to contradict the template of Jewish history and survival.
Confounded in the cultural and spiritual darkness of Persian exile 2372 years ago, the Jewish people faced a calculated plan for genocide beyond anything devised by Adolph Hitler. A conniving King Ahasuerus, inspired by his devious viceroy, Haman, laid out a scheme to exterminate the entire Jewish nation in a single day.
With the full force of the king and his empire turned against them, how could the Jews hold out any hope of salvation?
But in the wink of an eye, literally overnight, Haman fell out of favor and, through an improbable confluence of apparent coincidences, the Jews became the king’s most favored nation while the enemies who conspired to destroy them were themselves destroyed.
And how do Jews commemorate the divine intervention that saved them from annihilation? On this day that the sages equate with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we replace fasting with feasting, exchange prayerful reflection for revelry, and eschew the simple white garments of purity for masks and costumes.
Purim becomes a day of backwards and inside-out, of contradictions and reversals, of parties and paradoxes.
In keeping with the counterintuitive practices of Purim, allow me to conscript a pair of latter-day Jewish cognoscenti to dispel confusion with the light of clarity:
Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack.
How Little Ripples of Kindness Create Big Waves of Happiness
Of all the Jewish holidays, none is anticipated by little children more than the festival of Purim.
The theme of reversal figures prominently in the traditional observance of Purim, which is seen as a kind of alter-ego to the solemn holiday of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In place of fasting there is feasting. In place of prayerful reflection there is revelry. In place of the simple white garments of purity there are costumes and spectacle.
Children especially look forward to dressing up on Purim. But Purim is in no way a Jewish Halloween. Just the opposite: children dress up and go door-to-door not to ask for treats and threaten tricks, but to give away gifts of food to others.
Which brings me to the point of this narrative, with only one more small digression.
Caravan to Midnight with John B. Wells
Listen to my recent interview with John B. Wells on Caravan to Midnight:
Ancient wisdom for modern times (interview starts at about 1:40:00).
Willful Ignorance: the new normal
Maybe we really are living in the Matrix.
Day by day, even hour hour by, the headlines become more surreal and the actions of our leaders become more incomprehensible. Who could have imagined that all the conspiracy theories of extraterrestrial mind-control and computer-generated mass-delusion would start to seem like the most reasonable explanations for where we are and how we got here.
The most recent administration scandal over the United States Central Command (CentCom) deleting military intelligence brings to a crescendo the chorus of claims of the White House stifling inconvenient truths about the Islamic State to avoid dealing with the real threat of terrorism. Last year, the Pentagon’s inspector general began investigating after CentCom analysts protested that their findings had been manipulated to whitewash their conclusions. Now it appears that files and emails were not only misrepresented but actually erased.
As we pass the 30th anniversary of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, it’s beyond mind-boggling that the culture of denial has grown worse than ever. Back then, NASA administrators ignored warnings that O rings lose resilience at low temperatures and might fail on takeoff — which is exactly what happened.
But as irresponsible as it seems to disregard objections as insubstantial or unfounded, by what conceivable logic does one erase information because it supports an undesirable conclusion? Can we make pneumonia vanish from a patient’s lungs by shredding x-ray images? Can we make a brain tumor disappear by dragging the MRI results across the desktop and into the trash file?
Come to think of it, maybe this was the original strategy intended to make Obamacare viable: destroying evidence of disease would certainly keep medical costs to a minimum.
WE HAVE SEEN THE ENEMY…
It’s not just the government. As a society, we have become increasingly disinterested in a pesky little problem once known as reality. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of fantasy movies and fantasy football, of virtual images and virtual messaging, of games that have become more compelling than reality, and of reality that has become more mind-bending than science fiction. All this aided and abetted by the undo and reset buttons that instantaneously restore our make-believe worlds to perfection when things go wrong.
The rejection of reality cuts across every major issue of our times and infects every corner of political and social ideology. Climate change advocates and skeptics alike exaggerate their claims and malign objectors. Pro-choice zealots dismiss the horrors of late-term abortions, while pro-life zealots often refuse to even consider the complex issues of rape and incest, and sometimes even the life of the mother. Supply-side Republicans continue to trumpet the effectiveness of a trickle-down tax structure despite the widening gap between rich and poor, while tax-and-spend Democrats cry out for fairness despite empirical and historical evidence that everyone loses.
In our information age, we are less concerned with facts than ever. With a single click of the mouse, anyone can find legions of pundits asserting preconceived half-truths and countless articles defending outright falsehoods. We are all adrift on a sea of misinformation, carried along by the winds of self-validation. Had Samuel Coleridge imagined this, he might have written, experts, experts, everywhere, nor anyone to think.
Unsurprisingly, in the field of politics it’s even worse. The most brazenly untruthful political figure in the history of the country calls for her opponents to take a lie-detector test, and a master of reality-television who has reversed himself on almost every substantive issue is winning hearts (if not minds) by branding himself as the candidate who “tells it like it is.”
If Laurence Fishburne appeared to offer us a choice between the red pill and the blue pill, which would we choose? Have we so lost our interest in reality that we would happily opt for a world of illusion, or are we still capable of recognizing that a life of illusion is no life at all?
And again, it’s even worse in the world of politics, where neither red nor blue is likely to offer us any escape from our waking nightmare.
THE CHOICE
But we really don’t need a pill at all.
King Solomon said, “The wise man’s eyes are in his head.” Closer to the brain than to the heart. Looking outward, seeing inward.
What we really need to do is ask ourselves a few hard questions, then follow them up with a few honest answers.
We need to ask ourselves why we no longer value our word the way our parents and our grandparents did. We need to ask why they felt more connected to one another corresponding through written letters than we do through face time. We need to ask why they were willing to sacrifice for higher values when we have forgotten what higher values are.
First we have to be willing to ask ourselves these questions. Then we might be ready to face the universal truths that are self-evident from the answers: that trusting others and being trustworthy go hand in hand; that relationships are only worth as much as the effort that we put into maintaining them; that commitment to something greater than ourselves is the only thing that makes life worth living.
True, the world seems to be spinning toward its own destruction. But even if we can’t save the world, we can stand strong and not allow the world to pull us down with it. Keeping our word, showing respect to those we disagree with, offering a kind word to a stranger or a smile to a passerby — these few faint beatings of a butterfly’s wings might be enough to stir the winds of change, blowing away the clouds of chaos to let the light of reason shine once again.
Spitting Image 1:2 — The Soldier and the Soul
My son told me this morning that, as he was just beginning his training in the IDF special forces, he met a soldier who was just finishing his service in the same unit, the Gadsar Reconnaissance Division of the Nahal Brigade.
“I envy you, ” said the retiring warrior. “And I feel sorry for you. I envy you for the incredible experience you’re about to have. And I feel sorry for you because it will be harder than you can imagine.”
I immediately imagined two souls passing as one descends from on high to take its place inside a newborn child and the other departs this world on its way to receive its eternal reward.
“I envy you,” says the ascending soul to the one about to enter the material world. “And I feel sorry for you. I envy you for the joy you will find serving the Master of the Universe, a joy that I will never know again now that my time on earth is over. And I feel sorry for you, for you have no idea how difficult it will be for you to remember who you are and what your purpose is amidst so much pain and confusion.”
The more we seek to avoid pain, the more we deprive ourselves of the inner pleasure that is the source of true happiness. The more we rise to meet the obstacles and challenges that confront us, the more we find joy in this world and make ourselves deserving of the pleasure that awaits us once our time here has passed.
Yonason Goldson 