Great Days Are to Come

I spent last summer in Madison, Wisconsin, where the sidewalks are paved with poetry. I’m not exaggerating.

As I walked from my apartment to the synagogue by the lake, I passed beautiful words of poetry etched right into the concrete.

Here was a favorite poem I encountered on the sidewalk last summer:

There’s no question
These are hard times
And maybe there are
Always bad times for some
But right now
This minute you
Are green, beautiful
And young
And great days
Are to come

These striking words not only resonated with me then,but also come to mind this morning

Because they sum up the message of Passover:

1. “These are hard times” BUT

2. “Great days are to come”

Perhaps no symbol in the Passover seder summarizes this better than the four—well, really, five—cups of wine.

The practice of drinking four cups of wine at the Passover seder dates back to the second century, if not even earlier.

This number is linked to one of God’s powerful pronouncements in the Book of Exodus:

I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary acts of judgement. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. 

  This Divine promise contains four key “verbs of redemption:”

וְהוֹצֵאתִ֣י

I will free you;

וְהִצַּלְתִּ֥י

I will deliver you;

וְגָאַלְתִּ֤י

I will redeem you;

וְלָקַחְתִּ֨י

I will take you to be My people.

Our rabbis teach that we drink four cups to ritually embody these steps of redemption. But here’s where things get complicated: There are actually FIVE verbs in this passage.

God continues:

וְהֵבֵאתִ֤י

I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

If there are FIVE verbs of redemption, then why don’t we drink FIVE cups? There were some medieval rabbis who mandated a fifth cup, and some others who argued that it should be an optional addition.

But today’s seder includes four, not five, ritual cups. There’s a compelling, philosophical explanation: We can’t mark the complete list of verbs of redemption because redemption itself isn’t complete. After all, as that poem on the sidewalk said, “These are hard times.”

Some of us know this from our personal lives. When facing the devastation of a loved one’s diagnosis or death, or after losing a cherished companion or career, our aching sadness might prove that our imperfect world is far from fully redeemed.

Others of us know this from constant news alerts that bring the world’s suffering, unrest, and crisis onto our screens and into our hearts. A world with so much suffering can’t be fully redeemed.

It can be tempting to stop there, to throw up our hands and pessimistically proclaim, “Well, redemption hasn’t come yet, so it probably never will.”

In the past few, tumultuous years, I’ve known that feeling, too. But Passover insists that our story can’t end there. Yes, “These are hard times,” BUT

“Great days are to come.”

That fifth cup didn’t simply vanish from our tables in submission to the world’s brokenness. Instead, it transfigured into Kos Eliyahu, Elijah’s Cup. This undrinkable cup, which symbolizes the world’s imperfection, thus became a reminder that the prophet Elijahill still come, and with him, the future redemption he will herald.

Elijah’s cup, which simultaneously insists that “these are hard times” AND that a better world is possible, provides a roadmap for our fraught moment.

You see,Kos Eliyahu entered our Passover rituals at an especially dark time in Jewish history: the aftermath of the Crusades in Europe. In the shadow of massacres, forced conversions, and systemic destruction of Jewish communities, post-Crusades haggadot started to include illustrations of men standing in their open doorways, waiting for Elijah, expectantly holding that fifth cup of wine out to meet him. Precisely in the hardest of times,when our medieval ancestors might have given up hope, might have stayed stuck in “These are hard times,” they opened their doors—and their hearts—to the possibility of a future that would be better than the present.

They added an annual reminder to our seder plates: “Great days are to come.”

The addition of Elijah’s cup affirms: The world isn’t yet redeemed, But that doesn’t mean that it’s irredeemable.

How might we embody this hope today? We can start by noticing the glimmers of redemption that already surround us. Passover occurs in springtime, precisely when the natural world is full of things that are “green, beautiful / And young," like that poem described. And shifting from springtime to interpersonal interactions, we can notice small but powerful acts of kindness: The stranger who picked up the orange you dropped in the grocery store check-out line, the friend who sent a postcard, the relative who stayed late to help clean after holiday dinner. When we notice these glimmers, we remember that our world, even with its brokenness, is also full of boundless beauty.

We remember that tomorrow can be better than today.

And once we survey that potential, we can get up and act. The ritual of Elijah’s cup is active. We leave our comfortable tables and open our front doors because the messianic age requires our participation. Some of us might visit the sick. Others might donate to a local food bank. Still others might volunteer their legal or medical training to provide specialized services to those in need. We all have different tools we can use to herald in “better days.”

Third and finally, we can emulate our medieval ancestors by creating rituals to meet our fraught moment.

Thank God, we aren’t living in the aftermath of the Crusades like they were, but these are definitely “hard times.” What new traditions might we need to invent? Perhaps we can add an olive branch to the seder plate to symbolize our hope for peace in Israel and the Middle East. Or perhaps we can add a prayer for the United States to our family haggadah.

My answer might look different than yours, but we can each dream up ways to make our seders uniquely relevant and resonant. By celebrating the beauty that already surrounds us, actively participating in improving our world, and imagining new rituals, we can open the door to redemption.

After all, the first-century sage Rabbi Yehoshua once said, “In Nissan [the month of Passover], The Jewish people were redeemed. In Nissan, we will be redeemed in the future.”

Perhaps this is the Nissan where we can herald in ultimate redemption and finally drink that fifth cup of wine. Perhaps this is the Nissan where we can transform our “hard times” into “great days” to come.