This Passover is brought to you by the number four. Why do we drink four cups of wine?
Ma nishtana halaylah hazeh mikol halelot? Shebekol halelot anu shotim cos echad. Halaylah haze, halaylah haze arbaah cosim.
How is this night different from all other nights? Usually I don't drink a bottle of wine on a Monday. Because as my lovely girlfriend pointed out, four glasses is a bottle.
The number four comes up a lot in Passover. Four questions, four children, four names of Passover--none of which is chag yayin or wine festival. So why four?
The Open Door Haggadah says because four are the ways that G-d promises us to GTFO Egypt for freedom. He promises to "bring us out," to "deliver us" to "redeem us" and to "take us".
As a people to whom joy=wine, I have to say that the buzz I'll be rocking this Exodus is not too temporally distal from the hangover of my vershnikte I was on Purim.
So WHY drunk? Why so drunk? While not biblically official, Purim is now soaked (literally and figuratively) in a tradition of binge drinking that makes even St. Pat's Day in Chicago look like a lil' bitch. And it's because it's a happy holiday where we not only don't die but we WIN. It's so inconceivable that the rabbis believed we should get to the point where we can't conceive the location of the bathroom to even get close to comprehending it.
Passover is also a joyous holiday. Possibly the second happiest days of the year. It lacks the solemnity of the High Holy Days or the modern pandering of Chanukah.
But think about Passover: We were slaves until G-d tortured our captors, killed their babies and sent us into the desert. And I can't eat bread. Dayeinu.
Dayeinu is this ingenious catchall that in essence, means be grateful for what good you do have because it could suck way more.
We have holidays that aren't happy.
And that might be the real reason that we drink four glasses of wine at Pesach. Not to get Purim shitfaced but to gently ease the bondage of our own minds. To go from sober slavery to an uncertain freedom and in that uncertainty to say Dayeinu.
