Pesach: The Mystery of the Number Four

Tonight I have decided to take up with you the symbolism of the number four, which you asked for last time. It is a foretaste of a chapter of my forthcoming book — be’ezrat Hashem, with G-d’s help — a thematic commentary on the Haggadah, in which I treat precisely the symbolism of the number four on the night of Pesach. Yet this number four is bound up with the very reality of the creation of the world and the creation of the Jewish people. You know well that the creation of the world attains its purpose with the birth of the Jewish people and the building of the Tabernacle. That, indeed, is why there is a vav in Ve’eleh Shemot (Exodus 1:1) — a conjunctive vav at the head of the second book, to tell us that the book of Shemot is the continuation of the book of Bereishit. The book of Genesis deals mainly with the creation of the world; the book of Shemot, Exodus, deals with the birth of the Jewish people. And the purpose of that birth is “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6): a people that affirms itself above all through its spiritual aspirations, on a land granted to it by the Holy One, blessed be He, so that it might truly develop all its capacities. That is what we celebrate on Pesach. I have a very particular explanation, which I have not seen anywhere, for the Shabbat that precedes Pesach and is called Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Shabbat.

There are various interpretations — for instance, that on this Shabbat the rabbi never stops alerting his congregation to the meticulous laws of Pesach, among other things. But for me, Shabbat HaGadol is first and foremost the Shabbat that closes the Shabbat of creation. That is why our Sages tell us that if the people of Israel kept two Shabbatot, they would be redeemed: we would be settled in the messianic era. Which two Shabbatot are meant? The Shabbat of creation and the Shabbat of the Exodus. Indeed, when we sanctify the Shabbat day, we recall the memory of creation and the memory of the Exodus from Egypt. And because Shabbat HaGadol is the prelude to the birth of the Jewish people through the Exodus, it is called the Great Shabbat.

Nothing else distinguishes this Shabbat except the haftarah from Malachi — the last of the prophets, who closes the book of prophecy and in whose words the coming of the messianic age is indeed announced. With that said, let us now inquire into the symbolism of four in the birth of the Jewish people. You know that in the unfolding of creation there are four stages: that of emanation; that of creation ex nihilo, out of nothingness; that of conception, of formation; and that of realization. In Hebrew these are called olam ha’atzilut, olam haberiah, olam hayetzirah and olam ha’assiyah. These four attest to the reality of the world in its existence, upon the structure of the Divine Name, yud-heh-vav-heh. It has four letters, yet we do not read it as written; we substitute for it the letters alef-dalet-nun-yud, which are rendered “Lord,” “my Lord.” And alef-dalet-nun-yud is the manifestation of this Being in the world of matter.

There is a world of spirit, which is yud-heh-vav-heh; a world of love, which is yud-heh; and there is the world of physics — no longer of metaphysics — which is that of alef-dalet-nun-yud. Of course, you realize how wide a gulf may separate the world of emanation from the one in which we find ourselves. But we are always striving to bring this world of reality back toward the world of Atzilut, and this is done by means of Shabbat, which is a time that is not part of time. Why? Because nothing was created in that time. The day of Shabbat is a day outside of time, and that is why it is not said, “and there was evening and there was morning, the seventh day”: there was neither evening nor morning on the seventh day.

It is quite simply the day on which the world of spirit reclaims the world of matter. It is the day in which the kingship of G-d, reconciled with the world, is inscribed. For we know very well that Adam missed his course from the very first day; he entered into Shabbat in order to restore his existence, to recover what he had lost. Know that the creation of the new Adam is Yaakov Avinu — Yaakov our father, over whom the angels ascended and descended to see whether this was indeed the same portrait of Adam, the same stature, the same divine image that he bears. And it is Yaakov Avinu who, by his descent into Egypt, established the link between G-d’s promise to Avraham and the descent of the Jewish people into Egypt — that is to say, the akedah of the Jewish people in Egypt.

Just as Avraham carried his son onto the altar, so Yaakov carries his children onto the altar of Egypt. But they are assured, in the same way, that at the last moment death will spare this child, because G-d does not want it and G-d opposes it — and so it will be for the Jewish people. That is why the number four is inscribed in the decree of exile of the Jewish people: four hundred years of slavery. And this is connected to the four streams that issue from the Garden of Eden and spread throughout the whole universe. The Jewish people must have these universal dimensions, just as Adam must have them. Now these universal dimensions are not acquired overnight. They are not given; were they given, they would be worth absolutely nothing.

They must be earned, they must be acquired; the people must be attentive to the whole universe created by the Holy One, blessed be He. It must refine its language so as to endow language with a creative power. That, in sum, is what we are asked to do on Pesach: to restore to language its reach, its worth, its creativity. How did I come to develop this theme of the symbolism of four? By reading a poem by Ibn Ezra. It is attributed to Ibn Ezra; it is not signed. I want to read it to you quickly, because it is not long and it is indeed devoted to the festival of Pesach. I will read it in Hebrew. […]

[…] Now I will translate it, skimming over it. The One, by four letters, is borne by four. These four that bear Him are four emblems: the lion, the eagle — the figure of the eagle — the emblem of the ox, and that of Adam. So He is borne by these four emblems. He is surrounded by four: these are four angels who accompany us through life — Michael on the right, Gabriel on the left (these names are familiar to you), Uriel in front and Raphael behind.

These are the emblems of the legion of His people. And His people, when it marches through the wilderness, has four banners, which represent these four emblems. […] And here are the four corners — the four corners of the world; from there He drew out the one who was about to drown. And by the times, the periods, the seasons — four seasons; we too have our symphony of four seasons — and […] He overturned the four seasons, He did not respect them, at the moment when He was roused against His people. But He remembers the essence of this people, which bears the mark of the four letters. For the Jewish people at the Exodus was no better than Egypt, and it is said that the angels — meaning the princes of each nation, the defenders or guardian spirits of each nation — said: there is an injustice here after all. For the moment the Jewish people is no better than the other peoples; why is one condemned to perish and the other to survive? And G-d said: I save the one who bears My name — Israel. […] And He who is destined to defy time answered with four pennants, four banners, and celebrated His victory with four verses; with joy […] He commanded that He be praised in this way […]. And the poem ends: give thanks to the name of the Eternal, all who are in Yah — those who bear the name of G-d. Now you know that for the tribes of Israel, if a man was named Chanokh, his family was called haChanokhi.

If he was Shelumiel, it would be Shelumieli, and so on: one had to add the yud and the heh. And the yud and the heh, as you know well, make up the first attribute of G-d within yud-heh-vav-heh; that is why these two letters have, so to speak, an intrinsic sacred value. And within the assembly of the Eternal they give glory to His great name. That is the poem. Now let us come to our symbolism of four. The first point is that the creation of the Jewish people revolves around these four letters, which in reality are nothing but a twofold repetition of yud-heh: “בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה ה’ אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד — On that day Hashem shall be One and His name One” (Zechariah 14:9). Yihyeh — yud-heh, yud-heh: it will no longer be yud-heh-vav-heh, but the transcendent and the immanent — the One who governs the heavens, who governs the spirit, and the One who governs matter — will be merged. The ma’amarot and the dibberot will be like the cherubim, intertwined with one another.

The ma’amar and the dibbur — “saying” and “speaking.” What does that mean? I will have occasion to explain it: when I “say,” I am speaking to myself; when I “speak,” I am addressing someone else. When I say something to myself I have no interlocutor; but when I speak there is an interlocutor, and there is even the possibility of contesting and verifying what I say. I hope that is clear now. So all this unfolding, this divine communication, takes place through the articulations of the four letters I mentioned earlier — I will not repeat them so as not to lose time. And they are borne by the strength of the lion — the royal scepter of the lion held out to the Jewish people, the emblem of Yehudah; by the flight of the nesher, the eagle — and the Holy One, blessed be He, carried us “עַל כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים — on eagles’ wings” (Exodus 19:4) […]; and then the ox. Why was it chosen? For its capacity to gore, on the one hand, but also for economic strength, on the other — the economic base of an entire people. And Adam.

Adam is, in sum, the one who is supported, guarded and protected by this strength below, by this ability to take flight and to tame everything, like an animal one can master and live with without fear. […] with the acuity of vision that characterizes him. So these faculties with which the people was endowed in the sphere of Atzilut, the sphere of emanation — for at this point it is conceived as the world was conceived — are supported or accompanied by four emissaries. These four emissaries, whom we call angels, whom we translate as angels, we carry within us; they accompany us. Let us know this: we do not live in an angelic world. But we are called to be people who are a reference of hesed, through the attribute of Michael; of strength — because kindness is not simply resignation, a token of niceness, the path chosen by someone incapable. No: there is the strength of Gabriel. And there is a possibility — you know, when one loses the sense of hearing, one can no longer fully keep one’s balance.

Ozen, the ear; the verb izen, to balance; moznayim, the scales. So who gives these two attributes — the attribute of kindness and the attribute of strength — their balance? Raphael. He is the one who remedies every imbalance that may arise. But all of this is for the sake of Uriel: to advance, to carry forward the light of the Absolute, the light of G-d — Uriel. So the conception of the Jewish people at the moment of its creation follows the contours traced for it by the avot, by its fathers. For Avraham was the attribute of hesed, Yitzchak that of gevurah, and Yaakov that of emet, truth — he is the one who brings balance, who measures out the two attributes and corrects them.

And finally Yosef. You know that we always count only three avot, yet Yosef belongs to the line of the avot, because he is the father of the Jewish nation from Egypt onward. He is its constituent; he represents the yesod of the Jewish people, the foundation of the Jewish people […]. The Jewish people undertakes its departure from Egypt only when it is capable of grasping light through darkness — that is the ninth plague of Egypt. At that moment the signal is given for the birth of the Jewish people. But this birth, once again, is linked to what we might call the quadrature of the four matriarchs.

Sarah, who sent away Yishmael; Rivkah, who set aside Esav; Leah, who set aside Lavan; Rachel — through her sons Yosef and Binyamin, who will determine the final advent. […] Rachel is not buried in the Cave of Machpelah. She has a burial place of her own; she lies at the crossroads, weeping for her children; she is the one charged with finding them again. And she set on their road her son Yosef — Yosef is the political figure who must precede, who constitutes the first stage of the messianic advent before the final, spiritual advent. So you see clearly these four fathers and these four mothers. And the women, their descendants, distinguished themselves by being the first to resist Pharaoh’s project, his decree: they stood by their husbands and urged them to rebel against that decree. And so, bi-skhar nashim tzidkaniyot — by the merit of these righteous women (Sotah 11b) — our fathers went out of Egypt. The number four, in sum, will also determine four stages of the Exodus, contained in G-d’s four promises. Vehotzeti — I will bring you out of Egypt; I will bring Egypt out of you.

Vehitzalti — I will deliver you. This is a commitment of total kindness on the part of the Holy One, blessed be He, toward the Jewish people, since the Jewish people had not rebelled against its persecutor, Pharaoh, in its concentration camp, Egypt. And after vehitzalti we have vega’alti: Go’el Yisrael, Ga’al Yisrael — this relates to Yaakov, as we say in the prayer […]. And finally velakachti: “וְלָקַחְתִּי אֶתְכֶם לִי לְעָם — I will take you to Me as a people” (Exodus 6:7) — I will adopt you as a people, once the unity of the Jewish people has been attested in Egypt itself. For when they perceived the light, the text says that they saw, each man his brother, in the darkness. They saw one another — and this seeing of the other in the worst moments of life is what creates the unity of the Jewish people, and what decides the departure from Egypt, that is, the departure from every exile.

Know that Mitzrayim is the matrix of the four exiles: Bavel, Madai, Yavan and Edom. The first three — Babylon, Media and Greece — we have left behind; they are past, obsolete. And Edom is the exile in which we live. They persecuted us; we have been bathed in our own blood, so to speak, under these four empires, these four powers. And they sought to turn the elements of creation against us: to fight us with fire, to fight us with water, to fight us with the drudgery of the earth, to bury us within walls, within buildings, to make of us a museum people. And they sought, with the ruach, to bury us — to make our spirit disappear entirely.

So the four constituents of the earth — esh, mayim, afar and ruach — they transformed into instruments for persecuting our very being. And that is why we lament that their hatred was manifested on four levels: the mineral; the vegetable — they fed us the bread of tears; they unleashed the beast of the forest against us; and they reduced us to shame and to decay among the nations. They made of us a despised man, they persecuted us, and they imposed on us the four death sentences: sekilah, serefah, hereg and chenek.

There are those who died by stoning […]; those who vanished into ashes by burning; hereg, those who fell victim to the sword; and those who were strangled, who could never make their voice heard — even in their mother’s womb; they had not yet left it, they had not yet seen the light of day. But the people that was to carry all these virtues within it at its birth is not the spoiled child of the Father, the Creator. It is a child torn out of the chaos in which creation found itself at its origin — for creation, too, at its origin, suffers from these four words: “וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל פְּנֵי תְהוֹם — Now the earth was tohu and vohu, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). There are four expressions of chaos.

So, unfortunately, when we came out of Egypt we had to confront […]. There is something I would mention in passing, following the weekly parashiyot. I said earlier that the creation of the world was brought to completion by the erection of the mishkan, the Sanctuary, and by the manifestation of G-d in the Ohel Mo’ed, the Tent of Meeting. That is where it closes; and immediately comes the book of Vayikra, whose first parashah we read yesterday — this call, a call to Moshe. Who calls Moshe? We do not know; we will learn it afterward. “וַיִּקְרָא אֶל מֹשֶׁה — And He called to Moshe” (Leviticus 1:1): man is called, and he will be given a name afterward. This means that the name is given — for a girl, on Shabbat; for a boy, once the first Shabbat has already passed.

Why? Because one must pass through that Shabbat of restructuring. The birth of the child must be accompanied by a Shabbat. For just as the Sanctuary, in its conception and its construction, is always accompanied by Shabbat — by the commandment of Shabbat — so too for every child who comes into the world. And that will not be the end of it for him, for he will have to face […]. There are, in sum, two Torahs among us: what is called the Torah of Moshe and the Torah of Aharon. The Torah of Moshe is the Torah of halakhah, of the strict practice of the law.

The Torah of Aharon is the Torah in which love can sometimes lead to mistakes, to abuses, to excesses. So one will make up for it, one will recover. Aharon is capable of letting the Golden Calf emerge out of love for the Jewish people, because he would not want to let it fall altogether. So he lets it go its way a little, and it will recover by itself. Now Mishpatim, the parashah of the laws, precedes the parashah of the mishkan, because the mishkan will, in a sense, make good the sins of the Jewish people, whereas the Torah of Mishpatim does not: it rules decisively on four categories of damage. There is force — the ox; there is the pit that someone dug, into which another fell through inadvertence, because the proper precautions were not taken; there is the fire, where again due care was not taken.

Pay attention: all of this is symbolic. The bor, the mav’eh — the beast one sends into the fields because one wants to profit, to profit from other people’s property. This dwells in man. Man is capable of harming his neighbor; he is born with his yetzarim, his instincts. So the descent into Egypt and the Exodus are also bound up with this passion that consumes the being, this disregard for the other, this contempt for the other — all these four scourges that ravage our being were put to the test during our sojourn in Egypt, and they had in fact been its cause. We know very well that it was the discord among the brothers that caused Yosef to end up in a pit, to fall victim to their passions, then to end up in a prison, and so on. All of this harms yud-heh-vav-heh, the Havayah — Being in its transcendence and Being in its immanence. I hope you are still following me. And that is why you will find in the festival of Pesach…

…four names of the festival of Pesach — did you know that? Yes, you know it. It is called Chag HaAviv, the Festival of Spring: “שָׁמוֹר אֶת חֹדֶשׁ הָאָבִיב — Keep the month of spring” (Deuteronomy 16:1). Pesach, the name we know. Zeman Cheruteinu, the season of our freedom. But which is the one we find and celebrate? Chag HaMatzot, which is translated as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Now matzah is at one and the same time the bread of slavery and the bread of freedom — that ambivalence of a freedom incubated within slavery and, one day or another, projected outward. That is what we celebrate through the matzah. And that is also why some have drawn a connection between matzah and matzah in the sense of dispute, quarrel, and have linked it to metzar, the narrow strait, the border; while others have said: no, matzah is the bread of the word, the bread of faith — of faith in man — the bread through which man returns to his original nature, that of Adam. You know that it was forbidden to bring honey or leaven with the offerings (Leviticus 2:11). Why? Because they denature the bread, they denature the offering. If I heap praise upon praise on you, if I puff you up with it like se’or, like leaven, I am not sincere toward you; on the contrary, I am leading you into error. Now G-d says: if you truly want to draw near to Me, if you want My closeness — that is kerev, and kerev means the inside: bekerev ami, “in the midst of My people.” I am in the midst of the land (cf. Exodus 8:18) — within the land, not merely near it. That is how we must feel it: our Judaism is within ourselves; the light, the presence of G-d, is within ourselves.

Enough of placing G-d outside of yourselves. He dwells within us. He is in Egypt, within us, and we must be able to free Him. To free Him, one must pass beyond the stage of Assiyah — that of the child, to whom one gives all sorts of representations of G-d; some people keep them even at the age of seventy-six — and then beyond that of Yetzirah, of formation, of the image. But beware: we have been told not to trust the image, not to trust any representation. One must pass to Beriah, to the level of creation, and place Him in the nobility of Being, at the most sublime level you can imagine. And that is what the four stages are, which we live, so to speak, in the Haggadah itself: the Seder night has four stages. Today we treat it a little as a game — Ma Nishtanah; we give it to the little children, who sing “Ma nishtanah, ma nishtanah,” and we have fun around it. But there is nonetheless a message in this Ma Nishtanah, because this is the night of questioning. I was born Jewish — why? What am I living through this, and to what am I responding? Perfect I am not: I have four sides in me. Sometimes I am the chacham, the intellectual; I claim to belong to that elite. But sometimes I am the rasha; I have rebellious reactions of that sort. Listen — yesterday I said that there are four sacrifices, four types of offering. There is the one of the shor: the one who brings an ox. Some people say, “Come on, let’s go for an ox! That’s how I’ll express my love for G-d.”

No. It is not by offering royal gifts to one’s wife that one has truly won one’s wife. That is not it. One must not play the big shot with an offering. One does not serve G-d with a keen sense of “I am the best, I am the closest,” and so on. Enough. Nor does one serve Him like a sheep. The one who brings a sheep — beware: you feel you are in the current, you do as others do. That is a fault; one must bring an offering for it. And then there is the one who does it because he wants to take flight with it, and says to himself: “Well, in the end I’ll live my Judaism — sometimes I’m on this branch, sometimes on that one; I don’t want to define myself as such; at times I am, at times I’m not.” And then there are those for whom G-d is ultimately their lifeline, their livelihood — those would bring a minchah, an offering of flour.

That’s it. […] (“Can you hear me now?” “Yes, now I can.” “From what point did you stop following me?”) So: we had finished with the sheep, and with the bird that hops from one branch to another. People change hats in politics — it is done nowadays; they move easily from left to right. And the one who has made it his livelihood — the flour. So we say: beware, know that this korban attests to a certain failing in you, on four levels — just as it exists at my table. The children I have before me: I must not hold it against them if I have a chacham, a rasha, a tam at the table. It is because I am like that. They are my image; my children are in my image.

They represent something of what I am — only sometimes it has come out more sharply, it has been thrown into relief, and so they are like that. That is all. And that is why I will not hate them for it, I will not reject them for it. On the contrary, at this level I must find the right language for each one. At these four levels there are four modes of speech — four modes of speech found in the Haggadah of Pesach. Haggadah — “וְהִגַּדְתָּ לְבִנְךָ — And you shall tell your son” (Exodus 13:8) — an authoritative language. Amor, as I told you earlier, is a gentle language. Dabber is a dialogue, an adult dialogue.

But the one who sulks, who does not want to talk to me, who does not want to listen to me — well, I will coax him: “אַתְּ פְּתַח לוֹ — you open for him.” That is the language of persuasion, of winning over — yet another language. So there are these four languages. You see, then, this number four comes back. Of course there are nuances between them, but these are the matrices — matrices that we find again in the very structure of the Seder night. For when you look at, when you observe the structure of the Seder night, you know that Kadesh: you aspire to sanctification, which is the most sublime. Then you need a little purity — purity of the hands.

You must have the sense of sharing: sharing even the karpas, which is barely an herb — hardly enough to eat, not even the minimum measure — but to know how to share. That is the first quartet of the Seder, if we may call it that. Then comes the second: Maggid. Now you will speak, you will borrow your language from the four figures that stand before you, the four persons who dwell within you. Then after Maggid comes Rachtzah. Here one must make the blessing. Its meaning is that you raise your hands, you are going to share bread, and you will remove from this bread the original curse, the one that […]:

“בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם — By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Then Shulchan Orekh: there is the second quartet. Then comes the third quartet. The third quartet is when you have taken a measure of matzah, taken a measure of maror, and eaten it; then you have made the korekh; then you have shared the communal meal. You have four measures. And then you have said Birkat HaMazon, with four blessings — there are four blessings in Birkat HaMazon. I see that time is getting on. I have not finished. But know — I will conclude, I will conclude — know that we end the Seder night, the night of Pesach, with leil shimurim: “לֵיל שִׁמֻּרִים — a night of watching” (Exodus 12:42), a vigil of guards, of sentinels. We are sentinels; we remain the sentinels of humanity.

So it is leil shimurim […], and there are also four movements of song: the shir, the Hallel […]. And with that we end in this song — I do not have time — but there are four who are bound to give thanks. The psalm proper to the festival of Pesach is the homage paid by four people who are bound to glorify the name of G-d. Either because they were in prison and came out of it; or because they escaped a shipwreck, crossed the seas and came through; third, the one who was sick on his deathbed — yes, he was in danger; and the fourth, the one who remained lost in the desert, who has not yet found his road, who has not yet found his way. Well, on the night of the Haggadah we are a little of all these people gathered together. But we recover our unanimity, our heart, in song — because at no moment can we consider ourselves definitively lost.