The Magic of Eliyahu Hanavi
Pesach 5772
Shmuel Herzfeld

I recently read in the New York Times about a study of Princeton University Students who actually believed that they had an impact on the Super Bowl merely by thinking about the game. No matter that they were thinking about the game while they watched it on TV in their student center at Princeton University. These elite students thought that their beliefs actually made a difference in whether or not an athlete many miles away performed according to their liking. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/in-defense-of-superstition.html)
How ridiculous it that!
I couldn’t believe that this was true. So I looked up the study and it was even worse than I thought. This is what the professors who wrote the study concluded: “Consistent with our experimental findings, the more participants perceived themselves as having thought about the game, the more they felt responsible for the game’s outcome.” Not only did the students believe that their actions impacted the game, but they admitted that this was what they believed in a survey that they handed in after the game had ended. (They handed in the survey in return for candy.) This means that they had ample time to think about whether they really believed this ridiculous concept and they still kept true to their beliefs!
(http://psych.princeton.edu/psychology/research/pronin/pubs/2006MagicalPowers.pdf)
Reading this study led me to one of two conclusions. First, maybe Princeton University students just aren’t that smart. Now this can’t be true. Everyone I know from Princeton is exceedingly smart. So it must be that people have a will to believe in something, anything, no matter how irrational. It just so happens to be that those Princeton University students are misguided believers in the wrong thing.
In the Jewish religion we also have magic that appears in our rituals and our celebrations.
We just celebrated the Seder. One of the highlights of the Passover Seder is the cup of Eliyahu Hanavi.
There is a tradition that Eliyahu Hanavi will appear at the Seder and will actually drink from the “Cup of Elijah.” This tradition is an offshoot of a practice in Ashkenazic communities of placing an extra cup of wine on the table and calling it the “Cup of Elijah.”
In many families there is another “tradition”; i.e. that a person at the table will secretly shake the table and thereby try to convince a young child that Eliyahu is actually drinking wine from the cup of Eliyahu. One year at our Community Seder, I went so far as to engage an actual magician and have him make the cup of wine entirely disappear!
At the time I was just trying to enliven the Seder and keep everyone interested.
Unlike those Princeton students, I don’t think anyone at our Seder (children included) actually believed that Eliyahu the prophet was drinking from the cup of Elijah. We knew it was a joke. Still, behind every joke there is some truth.
In truth the tradition is for us to welcome and invite Eliyahu to the Seder and not for him to actually come and drink at the Seder.
But without question there is a lot magic associated with the prophet Eliyahu. I remember once when I was in rabbinical school one of my revered teachers told me a story about how he had personally met Eliyahu. He told me that Eliyahu had saved his life once when he got stranded in a snow embankment outside of Buffalo.
This teacher was from a different world than the one I grew up in. He grew up in pre-war Poland and he had a personal intimate relationship with our Creator that surpasses anything I can ever achieve. So when he spoke about having met Eliyahu the Prophet the rational side of me has a hard time relating to that concept.
This type of mysterious relationship to Eliyahu is difficult for us to wrap our heads around. It seems so magical and fanciful.
But the more I study about Eliyahu and this extra cup of wine at the Seder, the more I realize that there really is something magical about him. It is just not the magic that I was expecting.
If as I said before we are not expecting Eliyahu to drink from the cup of Eliyahu at the Seder, then why do we have a cup of Eliyahu in the first place? There are two classical answers to this question:
First is the answer of the Vilna Gaon.
There is a dispute amongst the medieval commentators as to whether or not we are supposed to have four cups of wine or five cups at our Passover Seder. The majority of medieval commentators rule that there should be five cups, but nevertheless the practice has developed in most homes to have four cups.
The Vilna Gaon suggested that the cup of Eliyahu symbolizes the fact that Eliyahu will come one day to decide this legal dispute and tell us whether or not we should have four or five cups at the Seder. The reason that this is Eliyahu’s job is because when there is an unresolved dispute in the Talmud, the Talmud often concludes with the word teiku, which literally means in Aramaic, “let it stand.” But some later commentators suggested that it stands for: Tishbi Yitaretz Kushiyot U‘abayot; i.e that Elijah the Tishbi will come and resolve all of our questions.
Thus, the Vilna Gaon connected the two ideas—that of the dispute over how many cups there should be at the Seder and also the concept that Eliyahu resolves our legal difficulties—and for this reason he says we have a cup of Eliyahu at the Seder.
A second explanation of why we have a cup of Eliyahu takes an entirely different approach. According to this second approach it has nothing to do with whether or not we should have four or five cups of wine at the Seder; instead it is connected to the idea that Pesach is a time of messianic redemption.
At the Seder we celebrate the fact that we were redeemed from Egypt many years ago. For this reason Rama writes in a gloss to the Shulchan Aruch (480:1) that “at the end of the Seder we should open our doors and remember that it is leil shimurim, the night where Hashem promises to watch us and protect us and in the merit of this strong faith that we have, the messiah will come.”
The great commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, the Mishnah Berurah, adds: “For this reason it is a custom in these countries to pour one additional cup and to call it the ‘Cup of Eliyahu.’ This hints to the fact that we are believers (leremez sheanu maaminim), that just as Hashem redeemed us from Egypt He will redeem us again and send us Eliyah the prophet to bring us the news (veyishlach lanu Eliyahu hanavi levasreinu).”
There is in fact a long tradition that Eliyahu Hanavi will come to us on Pesach and tell us that we are being redeemed and that the Mashiach will soon come. This idea is recorded in the greatest mystical work in the Jewish tradition, the Zohar, which states that Eliyahu Hanavi will come to us on Pesach with this message of redemption.
Anecdotally, I remember as a little boy that a friend once approached me in an excited fashion on Pesach and said: “Did you hear the great news?” I hadn’t heard the news so I asked what was going on. He told me that a famous rabbi in Israel had announced that Mashiach was coming right after Pesach. I was so excited and was quickly calculating in my head if I would have to miss the baseball game that I had tickets to that chol hamoed.
One reason why I think there is a long tradition of Eliyahu Hanavi coming on Pesach to predict the arrival of the messiah is because we hype up the messiah on the Shabbat before Pesach which is known as Shabbat Hagadol.
On Shabbat Hagadol we read the Haftorah from the prophet Malachi which states: “Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet," and it concludes, "And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers."
This prophecy is predicting the arrival of Eliyahu to tell us about the messiah’s coming. So since we read it the week before Pesach it is understandable that people would get all excited about Eliyahu and the mashiach.
But this creates a little bit of problem and some awkwardness. What do we do if we get everyone excited in anticipation of Eliyahu’s arrival and then he doesn’t show up?
If every year we invite Eliyahu to our Seder and expect him to come and redeem us, and if every year he doesn’t bother to show up, then how are we any better than those irrational students who watch the Super Bowl at Princeton?
The difference is that there is something silly and meaningless about what the Princeton University students believe in, but there is something beautiful and glorious about what we believe in.
The author of that article in the New York Times argues that superstitious beliefs are helpful because they make us psychologically healthier. As the author writes: “Belief in destiny helps render your life a coherent narrative, which infuses your goals with a greater sense of purpose.”
I agree with him, but only if what you believe in has a greater sense of purpose.
Our challenge is to believe in something of great value and merit.
There is of course a major difference between someone who believes in magical reference points that connect them to God and someone who believes in magical reference points that connect them to winning a football game.
When we anticipate Eliyahu’s arrival, it isn’t so that he can help us win a football game, but rather, so that he can tell us that the Mashiach is coming. And when we yearn for the Mashiach, what we are actually hoping for is to witness something incredibly beautiful.
We pray for Elijah to come –and we work hard to prepare a clean path for his arrival--so that he can “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers." In other words so that he can bring peace to the world and bring to a peaceful close any ongoing family struggles.
There is nothing to be embarrassed about believing in that type of magical dream. Even if our belief is irrational our goal is beautiful and deeply rational. We want to believe that Eliyahu will come and help us turn our world in the right direction. We not only believe this as a matter of faith, we also try to bring him earlier by performing acts of kindness and charity.
This is why after Eliyahu fails to arrive at the Seder, do you know what we do next? We don’t give up on the dream of Eliyahu coming. Just the opposite. Our Haftorah for the eight day of Pesach is all about why we want Eliyahu to come. It is a Haftorah that speaks about the Messianic world and what that world will look like:
They are some of the most glorious words in our entire Tanakh:
Veytazah choter migezah Yishai:
“But a shoot shall grow out of the stump of Jesse…venachah alav ruach Hashem…The spirit of the Lord shall alight upon him: A spirit of wisdom and insight, A spirit of counsel and valor,
A spirit of devotion and reverence for the Lord. He shall sense the truth by his reverence for the Lord: He shall not judge by what his eyes behold, Nor decide by what his ears perceive. Thus he shall judge the poor with equity And decide with justice for the lowly of the land.He shall strike down a land with the rod of his mouth And slay the wicked with the breath of his lips. Justice shall be the girdle of his loins, And faithfulness the girdle of his waist. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard lie down with the kid; The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together, With a little boy to herd them. The cow and the bear shall graze, Their young shall lie down together; And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw. A babe shall play Over a viper's hole,
And an infant pass his hand Over an adder's den. In all of My sacred mount Nothing evil shall be done; For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord As water covers the sea.”

This dream for a better world is magical. And no matter how irrational it may be, and no matter how long we must wait—and how hard we must work--for Eliyahu to arrive, I am proud to say that I will continue to believe that this magical dream is a possibility.