Moshiach meal symbolizes redemption and joy anticipating Moshiach’s arrival
Jews around the world are familiar with the custom of a child (or children) asking the Four Questions during seders on the first night of Passover. But there is another special custom that concludes the eight-day festival and that links the first and last day meals into the concept of liberation and redemption.
The Meal of Moshiach, celebrated on the eighth day of Passover, symbolizes this redemption and the coming of the Messiah.
Congregation B’nai Avraham will host a Moshiach meal on Saturday, May 30. During the meal, the B’nai Avraham community will follow a custom that began at a yeshiva in 1906, in which the Rebbe Reshad (the fifth Rebbe of Chabad) gave four cups of wine to the young boys studying at the institution.
Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin, spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Avraham, is the official Chabad emissary to Downtown Brooklyn. The author of the books “Letters of Light,” “By Divine Design” and “Guardian of Israel,” and co-author of “The Rabbi & The CEO,” Raskin explains in a Chabad.org video the Torah tradition on which this relatively recent eighth-day custom is based.