Four cups of wine and the courage to count
I recently called my rebbe in Israel and asked how he was doing. It was not easy to hear. His children have not been in school. The family runs to the mamad with a regularity that has become, in the most heartbreaking sense of the word, routine. He described life lived under suspended tension, not quite war in the total sense, not quite peace in any meaningful sense, just an ongoing weight pressing down on daily life in Eretz Yisrael.
And then he said something I was not expecting. He said, I think we are somewhere in the middle of something. I think we are watching it happen.
He meant the Geulah.
That word has been sitting with me ever since, and as Pesach approaches and we prepare to lift the arba kosos, I find myself thinking that the four cups are asking something more of us this year. They are not simply a commemoration of something that happened long ago in Egypt; they are a template, the Torah’s own map of how redemption actually unfolds.
The most familiar explanation traces the four cups to four expressions Hashem uses in Parshas Vayera, “I will take you out from under the burdens, I will rescue you from their service, I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and I will take you to Me as a people” (Shemos 6:6–7).
The Yerushalmi in Pesachim (10:1) connects the four cups to these four expressions of redemption.
The Torah Temimah explains that if these were simply four synonyms, there would be no reason for four separate cups. The significance lies precisely in the opposite. Each stage is genuinely distinct, independently real, and worthy of its own recognition.
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Why does redemption unfold gradually rather than arriving all at once?
The Midrash in Shir HaShirim Rabbah (2:2) describes two sages walking together at dawn as the first light appeared. One turns to the other and says that this is how Geulah comes to Klal Yisrael. First a single small glimmer, then slowly and steadily the light spreads until the entire sky is illuminated. Redemption comes in stages because if it arrived all at once it would overwhelm. It would blind.
But that image carries a demand as well. If redemption unfolds in stages, gratitude must unfold in stages too. The Shelah HaKadosh writes that the angels waited until the Egyptians drowned before wanting to sing Shirah. Dayenu does not let us make that mistake. Each stage of the seder demands its own acknowledgment before the next one arrives, because each moment of kindness stands on its own, and a moment that passes unrecognized is a moment lost (Shelah, Maseches Pesachim, Ner Mitzvah).
We make that mistake constantly. We tell ourselves we will feel grateful when it is finally over, when things are calm, when the complete picture comes into focus.
My rebbe in Israel is not waiting for that moment. He is counting.
Every morning his children wake up and go about their lives, every Shabbos table set under pressure and lit with candles anyway, every unexpected shift in a situation that looked immovable, each of these is its own cup, its own moment of Ki Leolam Chasdo, its own Dayenu.
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And then there is the fourth cup. Rav Asher Weiss points out that halacha does not permit any interruption between the third and fourth cups, while pauses are permitted between the earlier ones (see Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 474; Minchas Asher, Pesach 20). This is not arbitrary.
The first three stages, the physical dimensions of redemption, can unfold with space between them. The fourth stage, VeLakachti, the drawing close, the formation of relationship, cannot be interrupted or deferred. The Ramban, in his introduction to Sefer Shemos, explains that the book is called the Book of Redemption even though it concludes with the construction of the Mishkan, because physical freedom without the return of the Divine Presence is not yet the whole story.
Freedom from is only the beginning. The question that follows is always, freedom to what.
Rabbi Akiva stood at the ruins of the Beis Hamikdash and laughed while his colleagues wept (Makkos 24b). He was not dismissing the destruction. He was already tasting what came next. He could feel the fourth stage before it arrived because he refused to stop counting, refused to wait for the complete picture before expressing gratitude for the partial one. That capacity to feel redemption before it fully arrives is precisely what allowed him to stand in ruins and still believe.
That is the courage the arba kosos ask of us this Pesach. Not to wait for complete redemption before we acknowledge it. Not to postpone gratitude until the story is finished. But to lift each cup with full awareness of exactly where we are in the unfolding, to recognize Ki Leolam Chasdo in the stages we can already see, and to trust that the cup we have not yet reached is already being poured.
Chag Kasher V’Sameach.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach, www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
