The Mystery Behind Matzah Brett Kopin, CJHS 2009

Brett Kopin, CJHS 2010

I don’t think I’ve ever met a Jewish person with a neutral relationship with matzah. Some like it, and some don’t. Most of us dread the yearly obligations to clean our houses of all the chametz and dip our plates and bowls into boiling water. I personally like matzah, and all that comes with it: matzah pizza, matzah with cream cheese and lox, matzah and Nutella, matzah brie, matzah ball soup — the list goes on. In reflecting more this year on matzah and its meaning, I returned to the first place we learn about matzah in the Torah, and saw something I hadn’t noticed before, which deepened my appreciation for this brittle cracker and its rich symbolism.

Let’s recount the scene: the Israelites are on the brink of freedom. Pharaoh’s heart is still hardened, even after nine horrible plagues, which killed off Egyptian livestock, destroyed their crops, and shrouded them in three days of paralyzing darkness. But Pharaoh does not understand that the worst is yet to come — the death of the firstborn. The Israelites are commanded to smear lamb’s blood over their doorposts, so that the Angel of Death will not enter their homes. The scene is full of anxiety and fear.

But in commanding Moses and Aaron to instruct the Israelites to smear the blood on their doorposts for protection, God also, mysteriously, tells them to observe a week of eating matzah, the unleavened bread. And perhaps more mysterious than the fact that they are given this odd instruction, when Moses gathers the elders of Israel to relay the message, he only tells them to perform the Passover sacrifice and to paint the doorposts with blood. He does not mention the seven-day festival of matzah! Perhaps it was not yet time, on the eve of the tenth plague, to reveal God’s plan to condemn all future Jews to an annual week of no chametz, as Moses will give them that commandment upon leaving Egypt the following day.

After the tenth plague strikes, and the Angel of Death smites all the first born Egyptian males, loud cries of anguish are heard all over the empire. The Egyptians, in this bewildering and horrific moment, do not know that the plague is only attacking first-borns. They believe they will all be killed as long as the Israelites remain in Egypt (Exodus 12:33), and so they begin pushing them out. describe how hastily the Israelites left, it tells us the following:

For such a dramatic scene, it seems odd to place this seemingly insignificant detail in the story. Even after describing their miraculous departure from Egypt, the text returns to the dough:

Now we must ask an important question: why draw out this very specific detail about unleavened dough in the story? I want to suggest that the answer lies in the tension between God’s command — prior to the exodus — to eat matzah, and the historical circumstance of the exodus itself, which left the Israelites without enough time to let their dough rise.

Perhaps the Torah is teaching us that God’s instructions are meant to harmonize with the events of human history. The threshold between the natural and supernatural worlds, the border between fate and free-will, the resonance between divine plan and human action, is so narrow that sometimes we cannot tell if we arrived by ourselves or if God led us all along. Perhaps the most important lesson here is that the space between God’s will and human action is so fine and brittle that it cracks easily–much like the texture of the matzah itself — revealing God’s role in the world.

םרט וקצב–תא םעה אשיו :םמכש–לע םתלמשב תררצ םתראשמ ץמחי

So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls wrapped in their cloaks upon their shoulders.

Exodus 12:34

םירצממ ואיצוה רשא קצבה–תא ופאיו םירצממ ושרג–יכ ץמח אל יכ תוצמ תגע :םהל ושע–אל הדצ–םגו המהמתהל ולכי אלו

And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not delay.

Exodus 12:39