הארבה כוסות ואת הארבה חופשות | The Four Cups of Wine and the Four Freedoms, by Dr. Aurora Mendelsohn and President Franklin R. Roosevelt

Contributor(s):

Aurora Mendelsohn and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Shared on:

1 April 2014 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories:

Magid, Modern Miscellany

Tags:

Freedom, North America, 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., Wine, Four Cups, Four Freedoms, haggadah supplements

Traditionally each cup in the Passover Seder is liked to a promise made by God in these verses, Exodus 6:6-7. The four cups can also be associated with the Four Freedoms first articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941, which were an inspiration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and were explicitly incorporated into its preamble.

TOGGLE COLUMNS (on/off):

ADJUST COLUMN POSITIONS: select the column header cell and drag it where you want. show me!

COPY INDIVIDUAL COLUMN(S): use CopyTables, a browser extension.

TABLE HELP

Hebrew	English
	Traditionally each cup in the Passover seder is likened to a promise made by God in these verses, Exodus 6:6-7:
לָכֵן אֱמֹר לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲנִי יְהוָה וְהוֹצֵאתִי אֶתְכֶם מִתַּחַת סִבְלֹת מִצְרַיִם וְהִצַּלְתִּי אֶתְכֶם מֵעֲבֹדָתָם וְגָאַלְתִּי אֶתְכֶם בִּזְרוֹעַ נְטוּיָה וּבִשְׁפָטִים גְּדֹלִים.	So say to the children of Israel: I am YHVH, and I will take you out of the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments;
וְלָקַחְתִּי אֶתְכֶם לִי לְעָם וְהָיִיתִי לָכֶם לֵאלֹהִים וִידַעְתֶּם כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם הַמּוֹצִיא אֶתְכֶם מִתַּחַת סִבְלוֹת מִצְרָיִם.	and I will take you to Me as a people, and I will be to you a God; and you will know that I am YHVH your God, who brought you out of the burdens of the Egyptians.
	These verses contain four phrases describing liberation:
וְהוֹצֵאתִי	v’hotseiti — I will take you out
וְהִצַּלְתִּי	v’hitsalti — I will deliver you
וְגָאַלְתִּי	v’ga’alti — I will redeem you
וְלָקַחְתִּי	v’laqaḥti — I will take you to me
	The four cups can also be associated with the Four Freedoms first articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941, which were an inspiration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and were explicitly incorporated into the Preamble of the United Nation’s Charter.
	In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
	The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
	The second is freedom of every person to worship God in their own way–everywhere in the world.
	The third is freedom from want–which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.
	The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
	That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

Words by President Franklin Roosevelt, adaptation and commentary by A. Mendelsohn.

Source

Click to access Aurora-Mendelsohn-The-Four-Cups-of-Wine-and-the-Four-Freedoms.pdf

. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike . 4.0 . International .

“הארבה כוסות ואת הארבה חופשות | The Four Cups of Wine and the Four Freedoms, by Dr. Aurora Mendelsohn and President Franklin R. Roosevelt” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Aurora Mendelsohn

Dr. Aurora Mendelsohn is a biostatistician who lives in Toronto. Her work can be read in the Forward and at her blog, "Rainbow Tallit Baby".

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.

Pocket Pinterest Reddit 𝕏 Facebook Telegram WhatsApp SMS Email

Works of related interest:

"The kitten Cream sleep best on mom" (credit: House Cats, license: CC BY)

הַמַּפִּיל | A Parent’s Prayer for the Safe Sleep of their Newborn Child by Aurora Mendelsohn

The belt of wampum delivered by the Indians to William Penn at the "Great Treaty" under the Elm Tree at Shackamoxon in 1682.

הַכָּרָת רִבּוֹנוּת הָאָרֶץ | Indigenous Land Acknowledgement for Toronto, by Aurora Mendelsohn (2020)

הַנּוֹתֵן תְּשׁוּעָה | A Prayer for the Welfare of the Government of Franklin D. Roosevelt during WWII (from A Naye Shas Tkhine Rav Pninim, ca. 1942)

Hawaii Lava Tree State Park (Credit: S Carpenter, license: CC-BY-SA 3.0)

ט״וּ בִּשְׁבָט | Rebirthing the Tree(s) of Life: Four Teachings for the Four Worlds of Tu BiShvat/Yah BiShvat by Arthur Waskow

Factory For Wine Kegs, 1910
Factory for the construction of wooden kegs in Jaffa (Roni Manor via the PikiWiki - Israel free image collection project)

אֲשֶׁר בָּרָא יֵין עָסִיס | Asher Bara Yayin ‘Asis — a Poetic Extension of the Blessing over Wine for the Passover Seder (ca. 9th c.)

Ukrainian children are fleeing Russian aggression. Przemyśl, Poland 27/02/2022 (credit: Mirek Pruchnicki, license: CC BY)

The Fifth Child: a Refugee Child, a supplemental Passover seder reading to the Four Children of the Haggadah by Rabbi Julie Schonfeld (JDWA 2022)

"Love is..." an image of papercut people arranged in a circle, holding hands as papercut people do. (credit: Chris Jones, license: CC BY-NC)

All Four (Are One), a prayer-poem for Passover by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (Bayit, 2024)

prev next

2 comments to הארבה כוסות ואת הארבה חופשות | The Four Cups of Wine and the Four Freedoms, by Dr. Aurora Mendelsohn and President Franklin R. Roosevelt

Aurora Mendelsohn
2014-04-01 at 7:31 am · Reply.
Thanks for the great photo and layout Aharon!
Aharon Varady
2014-04-01 at 7:48 am · Reply.
You’re welcome! I’ll be adding this to my seder this year.

Comments, Corrections, and QueriesCancel reply

Stable Link: https://opensiddur.org/?p=8785

Associated Image:

Photo of a wall with the “Four Freedoms” at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington DC (credit: BanyanTree, photographer and Hohum, image correction; license, CC-BY-SA)

(This image is set to automatically show as the "featured image" in shared links on social media.)

Source Data: XML | JSON

Re-formatted: HTML | ODT

Terms of Use: Be a mentsch (a conscientious, considerate person) and adhere to the following guidelines:

Properly attribute the work to Aurora Mendelsohn and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Clearly indicate the date you accessed the work and in what ways, if any, you modified it. (If you have adapted the work, let us know so that the contributor might consider endorsing your revision.)
Provide the stable link to this resource: <https://opensiddur.org/?p=8785>.
Indicate that the original work was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license. (To redistribute or remix this work in any format, modified or unmodified, you must refer to the terms of the license under which the work is shared.)

Additional Notes:

The views expressed in this work represent the views of their creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers, its diverse community of contributors, patrons, or institutional partners.
We strongly advise against printing sacred texts and art containing divine names as these copies must be regarded with reverence, complicating their casual treatment and disposal.
If you must dispose of a printed sacred text (one containing Divine Names), please locate the closest genizah (often established by a synagogue) and contact its custodians for further instructions. We also recommend using Morah Yehudis Fishman's Prayer for Adding a Work to the Genizah.

Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture. If you like what you've found here, please help keep our project alive and online with your financial contribution.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17