Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Shabbat, arrives each year on the Shabbat before Pesach, carrying with it a name whose meaning has never been entirely settled. Some say it is great because of the festival that follows, whose holiness casts its shadow backward across the week. Others say the greatness belongs to the rabbi’s derasha, delivered from the pulpit on this day as a kind of final preparation before the Seder. A few, with quiet humor, suggest the greatness refers simply to the length of that derasha, which makes the day feel considerably longer than any ordinary Shabbat.

But the deeper question, one that surprisingly few derashot actually address, is why this Shabbat’s haftara comes from the third chapter of Malachi. On the surface, it seems an odd choice. The passage does not mention Pesach. It does not speak of the Exodus. It speaks instead of tithes and Temple obligations, of the complaints of the faithful who feel their devotion goes unrewarded, of a world in which the arrogant prosper and the righteous quietly struggle.

And yet, this is precisely what makes it the right choice.

Malachi’s prophecy traces the same arc as the Pesach story itself: suffering that seems without purpose or end, followed by a redemption that reorders everything. The Exodus was not merely a historical event. It was the prototype, the first and clearest demonstration of a principle woven into the fabric of creation itself. That history moves forward. That oppression is never the final word. That however dark the present moment, a “sun of righteousness will rise…with healing in its rays…” (Malachi 3:20).

This is the Jewish conception of history at its deepest level. Not a cycle that turns without direction. Not a decline from a lost paradise. But a spiral that moves through exile and suffering, through confusion and faith, toward a redemption greater than anything yet seen.

The haftara ends where every Seder table ends: with Elijah: “Behold I am sending the prophet Elijah to you…”(Malachi 3:23)

The same prophet whose cup we fill, whose arrival we anticipate, who stands at the boundary between this world and what is yet to come. With that image, Malachi closes the circle. From the first redemption to the final one, the entire story is held in a single prophetic breath.

Questions to Contemplate

• Elijah’s cup sits filled but untouched at every Seder table. We pour for him, we open the door, we wait. This year, that waiting carries real weight. Jews in Israel and around the world are carrying genuine pain into the Seder this Pesach. And yet we fill the cup anyway. That is not naivety. It is one of the most serious acts a Jew can perform, to insist, in the face of everything, that the story is not over. What would it mean this Pesach to fill Elijah’s cup as a genuine declaration that you believe redemption is still coming?