Wine serves as the symbol of our sanctity, of freedom, of Divinely inspired victories, of the greatest, most joyous moments of our past, and of our dreams for the future. Wine has always held an honored, obligatory, almost irreplaceable, place in our culture. Yet the Jew of yesteryear rarely indulged in such a luxury. People rarely have become drunk on Kiddush. Perhaps the very pedestal on which we have placed wine inspires the Jew to raise wine from the gutters to which alcoholism would doom it.
Wine is far more than a drink.
In its power to loosen restraints, it clarifies the contrast between man's inner self and his external reality. And in wine's ability to induce forgetfulness, it confronts the ever-present tension between pain and suffering on the one hand and the human need for happiness and comfort on the other. A precise balance must be found between the forces of joy, pleasure, and freedom embodied in wine and the reality and rationalism that exist outside of wine. Perhaps the magic of the Kiddush lies precisely in its ability to balance the drink of wine and the message of the Kiddush, to enable the Jew to balance the forces symbolized by wine with the forces of rational reasoned pursuits symbolized by the kiddush. Perhaps, in a deeper sense, this knowledge has enabled the Jew to negotiate safely the contradictions of his existence, the sorrow and joys, tragedies and victories that are often the catalyst that brings people to hopelessness, thereby leading them to drink.