On Pesach night we will drink four cups of wine a toast of sorts to the life of freedom we gained over three thousand years ago. We will celebrate that redemption and in the process we will refresh our awareness of the concepts of redemption freedom and Divine Providence. And for each aspect of these ideas we will raise a cup of red wine.
The mitzvah of the Four Cups was instituted by our Sages to represent the four basic levels of cheirus the Torah’s word for liberty. These four levels are embodied in four expressions used in the Torah to describe Yetzias Mitzrayim. These expressions are:
V’hotzeisi: I will take you out from the suffering of Egypt.
V’hitzalti: I will rescue you from their labor.
V’ga’alti: I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of justice.
V’lakachti: I will take you to be My people (Shemos 6:6-8).
The pasuk ends with three seemingly simple but actually life-altering Hebrew words: “V’haisi lachem l’Elokim — And I will be G‑d to you.”
When we raise the first cup on Seder night when we make a brachah and sip the amount of wine prescribed by our Sages we imbue our consciousness with the level of freedom expressed in the first pasuk quoted above: “I have taken you out from the suffering of Egypt.” This statement focuses on the suffering not on the hard labor itself. The suffering of slaves is more than physical pain or torture. It’s about having no status in the eyes of their subjugators. No Geneva Convention laws apply to them like the protection conferred upon prisoners of war today. To their oppressors they are no more than dirt in human form. Their worth depends entirely on how much labor can be squeezed out of them. And most of all Bnei Yisrael experienced the greatest trauma of all in Egypt — after long years of slavery their self-image had deteriorated. Even in their own eyes they were worthless human beings.
Divinely-given freedom is release from this suffering. The redemption from Egypt first of all stood them upright once more as human beings. It restored their self-respect. They weren’t slaves that found a breach in the wall and made their escape to the wilderness and to freedom. They were explicitly redeemed which means that someone redeemed them. Someone wanted them and desired their good and that Someone of course was the Creator of the World HaKadosh Baruch Hu. And knowing this they began to see themselves as human beings again. Once redeemed they never returned to that particular brand of exile although there have been other exiles including the one we have been in for nearly 2 000 years for whose end we constantly pray.
But ever since Yetzias Mitzrayim wherever the Jewish People have wandered in their exiles and despite unimaginable oppression there was never the taste of utter worthlessness that was their lot in Egypt. Despite the oppression the humiliation the hard labor and the torture in the dungeons of the Inquisition and the concentration camps of Stalin and Hitler they retained their inner liberty. Since the redemption from Egypt no oppressor can touch that innermost spot. They became bnei chorin and thus they stayed in spite of all the suffering yet to come their way.
In honor of this redemption we drink the first cup.

When we make the brachah over the second cup we are focusing on being rescued from the grueling labor itself alluded to in the Torah’s phrase that corresponds to this cup: “And I will rescue you from their labor.”
A healthy work ethic is a good thing but the Egyptians used labor to realize their philosophy of upper and lower social classes. Theirs was a society where the forced labor of “inferior” human beings was anchored in the law of the land and its organizational structure. It was a society that believed all men were not created equal and that a portion of the population had a basic right to tyrannize the other and determine its fate.
In that great house of slavery called Mitzrayim Bnei Yisrael were the most wretched and lowly of slaves. Even other slaves slaves of a “higher” status saw it as an honor to afflict and abuse them.
This was the Egyptian hierarchy and the essence of its outlook on human rights. It was master and slave. Fuehrer and untfuehrer to use the language of the supposedly enlightened 20th century.
On the night of Pesach more than three thousand years ago the concept of adam the human being was redeemed in Egypt — the concept not merely of Bnei Yisrael but of humanity. HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s redemption abolished once and for all the artificial division between human beings that permitted one person to dominate another. This was the Divine revolution that proclaimed for the first time in the pagan world that all men are born equal and all were created in the image of G‑d (and this has nothing to do with the Jewish concept of the Chosen People).
From this redemption all the great liberators in the world have drawn their strength of spirit from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln. For ever since then the call of equality and freedom has sounded from one end of the world to the other. And although not all the fortresses of tyranny have yet to fall the song of redemption from Egypt cannot be halted.
In its honor we pour out the second cup of wine and recite a blessing of redemption.

The third cup corresponds to the Torah’s words “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm.” The word ga’al to redeem bears a meaning of acquiring ownership transferring something from one domain to another. The third cup teaches us about the nature of Jewish freedom. It is dedicated to the Redeemer Himself. It proclaims that the redemption was not an act by which people took their destiny into their own hands and cast their master’s yoke off their shoulders.
By drinking the third cup we imbue the redemption from Egypt with something much bigger than ourselves: We declare that we were redeemed not that we redeemed ourselves. We were redeemed because HaKadosh Baruch Hu revealed His mighty arm.
Thus this redemption has a much broader meaning than mere release from the prison of slavery or from the yoke of colonialism for example. For by this very redemption we were transferred into the ownership of that same Creator Who redeemed us. As Moshe Rabbeinu exhorted Pharaoh in Hashem’s Name: “Release My people and they will serve Me.” Not merely release but a new level of servitude a servitude that is liberating on the spiritual plane.

The fourth cup is dedicated to HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s choosing of Bnei Yisrael: “And I will take you to be my people.” This level of redemption was the foundation on which the Jewish People’s nationhood was built. The redemption from Egypt was much more than mere liberation from oppression. It was this redemption that shaped the nation that molded its image: a people that sprang up from HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s promise to Avraham Avinu at the Bris bein Habesarim; a people that was deliberately selected for this redemption; a people that would bear the imprint of these enormous events on its soul forever. And those events would turn that people into a unique nation a nation that would carry the tidings of the redemption from Egypt like a torch of freedom to the entire world until the end of history.
When we drink the fourth cup we proclaim to our Redeemer and to the world that we are still faithful to those tidings and that we will forever continue to drink the wine of eternity.
Chag samei’ach v’kasher to our readers and to the entire
Jewish People.