A question reached me before this Passover. It was not a legal question but one that came from the heart, asked in pain: given that we are in the midst of war, our soldiers in the field, missiles falling daily, should we postpone the Seder this year for a month to Pesach Sheni, the “Second Passover”?

The legal answer is brief. Pesach Sheni is a remedy for those who could not bring the Passover offering in its proper time, and only with regard to the offering itself. Since we have no Temple, there is nothing to defer.

But his question gave rise to three deeper questions, three questions that appear entirely unrelated, and yet a single answer addresses them all.

The first question. We are commanded to fulfill the central obligations of the Seder night before midnight: the matzah, the bitter herbs, the retelling of the Exodus, the Hallel. This is the ruling of Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah in the Talmud, and of the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law. But when did the redemption itself arrive? After midnight. The plague of the firstborn came after midnight. Pharaoh summoned Moses after midnight, and the children of Israel went free after midnight. Shouldn’t we celebrate redemption at the time of the redemption? Why do we celebrate before it has arrived?

The second question. The Talmud in tractate Berakhot records a dispute over the verse in Deuteronomy (16:3), “So that you may remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life.” Ben Zoma reads the word “all” as extending the obligation to the nights as well as the days: the commandment to recount the Exodus applies not only by day but also by night. The Sages read it differently: “all” extends the obligation into the messianic era, so that even after the final redemption, we will still recount the Exodus from Egypt. Both positions agree that a future redemption will so overshadow the Exodus that it becomes secondary. But according to Ben Zoma, the commandment to recount the Exodus may disappear entirely. How can a commandment the Torah binds to every generation simply cease? What kind of commandment carries within itself the seed of its own demise?

The third question. The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that the four cups of wine at the Seder correspond to the four expressions of redemption in Exodus (6:6–7): “I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, I will take you.” One cup for each stage, with the fourth cup bringing the Seder to its close. And yet the declaration of Asher Ge’alanu, “Blessed is He Who Has Redeemed Us,” the high point of the entire Haggadah, is recited over the second cup. Two cups remain. The Seder is far from finished. How do we proclaim “Blessed is He Who Has Redeemed Us” when the redemption has not yet arrived?

In all three cases, the Seder, the commandment, and the second cup, we are placed not at the moment of completion but in the middle of the process. Not after the redemption, but before it. Why do we celebrate redemption before redemption has actually arrived?

The answer is found in the words we will say tonight at the Seder, in the passage the Haggadah calls Lefichach — “Therefore” — which comes just before the blessing of “Who Has Redeemed Us.”

“Therefore we are obligated to thank and praise… He brought us out from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to festival, from darkness to great light, from bondage to redemption. And we shall say before Him a new song, Halleluyah.”

Three things in this passage are worth thinking about.

First, the structure. Every phrase shares the same architecture: from something toward something. From slavery toward freedom. From sorrow toward joy. From darkness toward great light. This is not the language of arrival. It is the language of movement between two poles, and it places us inside that movement, not at its conclusion. “From darkness to great light” does not announce that the light has come. It announces that we are on our way to it.

Second, the internal tension. The Haggadah says “He brought us out,” past tense, settled, certain. But where do we say this? Over the second cup, with the Seder still unfolding, with two cups still before us. We declare the redemption complete while the night is still unfinished. This tension is not accidental. The Seder creates it.

Third, and most profound: the passage does not end with the song of a past redemption. It ends in the future tense. Ve-nomar lefanav shirah hadashah, “And we shall say before Him a new song.” Some Haggadot carry an alternative reading, ve-ne’emar, in the past tense, but our version is future. In a single breath, past redemption gives way to a song of celebration not yet sung.

This is the redemption of Seder night, the redemption of anticipation. It is to declare ourselves free while the night is still unfinished. That inner freedom, which no Egyptian can take from us, is itself the first redemption, before a single miracle has occurred.

And now our first question becomes clear.

Midnight is not merely the mathematical midpoint of the night. Midnight is the turning point, the moment at which the night changes direction. Before midnight, every passing hour carries us further from dawn and deeper into darkness. After midnight, every passing hour brings us closer to morning. The moment just before midnight is the night’s greatest darkness, when the darkness is at its most complete and no sign of light yet exists.

To complete the Seder before midnight is not premature. It is to arrive at precisely the right moment. There, at the point furthest from the light, at the height of the very darkness that the Lefichach names, we declare the redemption and believe in it. This is faith in its purest form: to hope for redemption and proclaim it not when it appears on the horizon, but at the height of the darkness, before the night has turned. The Seder belongs to the darkest hour, not the brightest.

And now our second question, the hardest of the three, becomes clear as well.

We asked: how can a mitzvah the Torah binds to every generation simply cease? The question contains its own answer. A mitzvah that can cease is not a mitzvah of memory — memory does not expire. Its essence must be something else entirely.

Its essence is anticipation. The recitation of the Exodus story is not the preservation of a completed memory but the declaration of a living promise, a redemption still to come. As long as we remain in anticipation, the mitzvah holds.

And so, when the full redemption arrives, the mitzvah’s work of anticipation will be complete. According to Ben Zoma, when there is nothing left to wait for, the mitzvah in its anticipatory form ceases. The Sages say that even then, a memory of what it was to live in faith through the darkness will remain, though secondary to the redemption that has arrived.

Both opinions agree on the essential point: in this world, in this time, the recounting of the Exodus is the mitzvah of anticipation.

“And It Came to Pass at Midnight”

At the end of the Seder we sing the ancient poem Vayehi Bahatzi Halailah, “And It Came to Pass at Midnight.” The poem catalogs the miracles that occurred at midnight across the generations and closes with a prayer for that day which is “neither day nor night,” the day of the final redemption that has not yet arrived. The poem rests precisely on the threshold we have been describing: between the redemptions that have passed and the redemption still awaited, always facing what has not yet come.

The Midrash in Shemot Rabbah completes the picture. All the great songs of Scripture, the Song at the Sea, the Song of Deborah, the Song of Hannah, are referred to as shirah, a noun in the feminine form — because like a woman who conceives and gives birth and conceives again, the sorrows come and pass, the redemptions arrive and recede, and the songs accompany them. But in the time to come the song will be referred to as shir, a noun in the masculine form: “Sing to God a new song” (Psalms 98:1) — because a man does not give birth, and that final song will not be followed by another exile.

And now recall: the Lefichach itself closes with ve-nomar lefanav shirah hadashah, “we will sing a new song before Him,” in the Hebrew feminine. Still the feminine song, still within the cycle, still waiting for the masculine song that will end the cycle forever. We have not yet reached the final redemption. And “Blessed is He Who Has Redeemed Us” over the second cup is the declaration of those whose anticipation is itself their redemption.

Now we can return to the verse that defines this entire night and understand that it has never said anything else.

“It is a Leil Shimurim, a night of watchful waiting for God, to bring them out of the land of Egypt. This very night is for God, a night of watching over all the children of Israel throughout their generations.” (Exodus 12:42)

Rashi explains that from the six days of creation, the Holy One waited for this night, anticipating the moment to fulfill His promise to Abraham. He told Abraham: on this night I will redeem your children.

Not only the Jewish people wait on this night. The night itself is waiting. Prepared from the beginning of creation for this very moment. Anticipation is not born of hardship alone. It is the essence of this night, woven into the structure of creation itself, before any exile and any redemption.

And every Passover night throughout the generations, this is still that night, a night of anticipation.

Of course the Seder must be completed before midnight. Of course we must declare “He has redeemed us” over the second cup. Of course the recounting of the Exodus must be a mitzvah of anticipation. How could this night, a night in which anticipation has been woven since the six days of creation, be otherwise?

The First Night, and Ours

On the first Seder night in Egypt, the children of Israel performed all the rituals before they were redeemed. They slaughtered the lamb, they ate, they placed blood on the doorposts, at the height of the darkness, before the tenth plague had descended, before Pharaoh had yielded. They did not know the outcome. It had not yet happened. They believed. And that belief itself, the act of sitting at the table as free people while still in bondage, was the first redemption, before a single miracle had taken place.

Tonight, as missiles are still falling and our soldiers are still in the field, we sit at the midnight of our people’s history. And we declare: Asher ge’alanu, He has redeemed us.

The question we considered at the beginning now answers itself. We do not observe this Seder despite the darkness. This is what the Seder was always meant to be.

The Seder is a celebration of the redemption of anticipation — for anticipation itself, embraced at the height of darkness, is its own redemption.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)