Dvar Torah on Parshat Va'eira

At the end of last week's parsha, Moshe and his brother Aharon, as instructed by God, had gone to Pharaoh and asked that the Israelites be allowed to take a few days off from their labors in order to go and worship God in the wilderness. Pharaoh refused, and punished the people for their impertinence and laziness by cutting off their supply of straw, with which they made bricks for building, and demanding that they produce the same number of bricks as before. This additional oppression was, naturally, taken very badly by the Jewish people, who complain to Moshe, blaming him for their worsened situation. Moshe then seems to echo their complaints when he says to God: "Why did you make things worse for this nation? Why did you send me?"

God's response, which begins at the end of last week's parsha, Shemot, and continues into the beginning of this week's parsha, is essentially to tell Moshe to wait and see. He reiterates His commitment to free the Jewish people, make them his nation, and bring them to the land he promised to their forefathers. This is what He says: "... say to the children of Israel: "I am the Lord; I will REMOVE you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, I will RESCUE you from their bondage, and I will REDEEM you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. I will TAKE you as My people, and I will be your God. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will BRING you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and I will give it to you as a heritage: I am the Lord."'

The five verbs that I have written in capitals - "I will remove you...rescue you...redeem you...take you...bring you" are discussed at length in the Talmud, Midrash, and commentaries. Traditionally, the four celebratory cups of wine which we drink at the Passover Seder correspond to the first four of these words, which are called 'the four expressions of redemption' - removing the Israelites from the oppressive, backbreaking work they were forced to do for the Egyptians, rescuing them from their subjugation to Egypt, redeeming them by punishing the Egyptians ("an outstretched arm and great judgments") and thereby preventing them from enslaving the Jews again, and then taking the Jewish people as partners in a covenantal relationship, sealed with the acceptance of the Torah on Mount Sinai, some 50 days after the exodus from Egypt ("Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God"). Taken together, this is seen as a description of the process of the exodus.

Obviously, the question that we must ask, and which has been asked for centuries, is this: why do we not commemorate the fifth expression - "and I will bring you into the land of Israel" - as a separate, final step in the redemptive process, and drink a fifth cup corresponding to it? Why does our commemoration of the redemption from Egypt stop, as it were, with the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and not continue to the final goal, as God presents it in these verses, of the people of Israel settling in their ancestral homeland? The fact is, there are traditions in which we do drink, or at least pour, a fifth cup of wine, in order to commemorate the entry into the land. Some present this fifth cup as a Mitzvah, others as completely optional, but these traditions are just that, traditions, whereas the four cups are mandatory, prescribed as an essential part of the Seder service by the Mishna (Pesachim, chapter 10, Mishna 1), and the subsequent codes, and are today universally accepted. Only a small minority of Jews have the custom of pouring a fifth cup of wine at their Seder, and it is not seen as obligatory. Why is this the case? Why the distinction between the fist four phases of the redemption and the fifth, final phase?

I would like to suggest that the answer lies in the fact that, just as we do today, the Rabbis of the Talmudic and medieval periods saw a distinction between two essential elements of our peoplehood. The first four cups correspond to the basic elements of our being a people - freedom from oppression and subjugation, our own legal and ethical system, and a shared sense of peoplehood, in a relationship with God. The Rabbis understand that, having left behind the physical and political subjugation of Egypt, and having received the Torah, we were in possession of the essential elements of our peoplehood. For us, as Jews, the freedom to live up to the covenant which we made with God at Mount Sinai is the essence of our national identity. The fifth element, a national life in our national home, is something that our tradition is apparently less sure of - hence the lack of a mandated fifth cup, which would commemorate our relationship to our historic national home.

An expression of the ambivalence felt toward this final element of the redemptive process can be found in Nachmanides' preface to the Book of Exodus. Nachmanides (1194-1270) is often seen today as a "Zionist" thinker: he moved, late in life, to Israel, and was very active in reestablishing Jewish life there after the brutal ravages of the Crusades and the Mamluk invasion. He writes eloquently of the Mitzvah to live in Israel and not allow any other nation to control it, or to even abandon it to emptiness and desolation. He seems to be expressing a typically "Zionist" approach when he writes in his preface to the Book of Exodus: "Behold the exile is not over until the day they return to their place and regain the level of their forefathers, and when they left Egypt, even though they had gone out from the house of slavery, they were still considered exiles, for they were in a land which was not theirs, lost in the desert." With these words, Nachmanides would seem to argue that, without a homeland, without a return to their ancestral home, there is no real redemption for the Israelites.

And yet, immediately following the words above, he writes: "And when they came to Mount Sinai and built the Tabernacle, and The Holy One, Blessed be He once again caused his presence to dwell among them, they then returned to the exalted level of their forebears...and they were then considered to have been redeemed." It would seem that Nachmanides is contradicting himself, first claiming that the exile is over only when the people of Israel are back in "their place", and, immediately after that, stating that, with the giving of the Torah and the building of the Tabernacle in the desert, they are "considered to have been redeemed".

I think Nachmanides is struggling with the problem of the fifth cup. Although he understands that the story of the Jewish people's redemption does not end until they have returned to the Land of Israel, he also knows that, uniquely, the people of Israel can, in effect, construct an alternative homeland - whose location is the Torah and the Tabernacle - a life in the presence of God. This virtual homeland seems, on some level, to render the physical one irrelevant, and enables the people to see themselves as redeemed, that is, in a "place" where they are free to work out their destiny as Jews. Perhaps the physical homeland is seen, in this worldview, as not an end in itself, but simply a means to insure a continued religious freedom, to guarantee that the redemption, once achieved, has a physical space in which it can be safe and thrive, a place in the real world for it to be.

The language used in our verses referring to the Land of Israel as the land promised "to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob", and as "a heritage", seems to point to issues of preservation and continuity, not to issues of essence. If this is the case, the absence of the fifth cup at the Seder table makes sense. After the people of Israel have left Egypt, received the Torah, and accepted God as their God, they are the people they need to be -"I will take you as my people" God says to them at that stage, which parallels the fourth, final cup of redemption. In this approach, the gift of the land is an additional element in rooting, preserving and maintaining that redeemed status - it is not the content of the redemption.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix