Matzah: Bread of Slavery or Liberty?
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This week’s Dvar Torah was written by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, President of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life (JJGI) and Senior Scholar in Residence at Hadar. Together with Elie Wiesel, he founded CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. From 1997 to 2008, he served as founding president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation which created such programs as birthright Israel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. He served as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s chairman from 2000-2002. In his new book, The Triumph of Life, he argues that the Holocaust and the Jewish assumption of power in creating the state of Israel are the beginning of a new era in Jewish history.
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Made only of flour and water — with no shortening, yeast, or enriching ingredients — matzah recreates the hard “bread of affliction” (Devarim / Deuteronomy 16:3) and meager food given to the Hebrews in Egypt by their exploitative masters.
Like the bitter herbs eaten at the Seder, it represents the degradation and suffering of the Israelites.
Matzah is, therefore, both the bread of freedom and the erstwhile bread of slavery.
It is not unusual for ex-slaves to invert the very symbols of slavery to express their rejection of the masters’ values. But there is a deeper meaning in the double-edged symbolism of matzah.
It would have been easy to set up a stark dichotomy: Matzah is the bread of the Exodus way, the bread of freedom; hametz is the bread eaten in the house of bondage, in Egypt.
Or vice versa: Matzah is the hard ration, slave food; hametz is the rich, soft food to which free people treat themselves.
That either/or would be too simplistic. Freedom is in the psyche, not in the bread.
Halakhah underscores the identity of hametz and matzah with the legal requirement that matzah can be made only out of grains that can become hametz — that is, those grains that ferment if mixed with water and allowed to stand.
How the human prepares the dough is what decides whether it becomes hametz or matzah.
How you view the matzah is what decides whether it is the bread of liberty or of servitude.
The point is subtle but essential.
To be fully realized, an Exodus must include an inner voyage, not just a march on the road out of Egypt.
The difference between slavery and freedom is not that slaves endure hard conditions while free people enjoy ease. The bread remained equally hard in both states, but the psychology of the Israelites shifted totally.
When the hard crust was given to them by tyrannical masters, the matzah they ate in passivity was the bread of slavery.
But when the Israelites willingly went from green, fertile deltas into the desert because they were determined to be free, when they refused to delay freedom and opted to eat unleavened bread rather than wait for it to rise, the hard crust became the bread of freedom.
Out of fear and lack of responsibility, the slave accommodates to ill treatment.
Out of dignity and determination to live free, the individual will shoulder any burden…
Tradition specifically requires eating unleavened bread on the first two nights of Pesah; during the rest of the holiday, the only requirement is not to eat hametz.
Eating hard bread during the holiday of liberation stimulates appreciation for the flavor of freedom and summons up empathy for those still in need.
At the Seder, the Exodus retelling opens with the Aramaic phrase, “Ha lahma anya / This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in Egypt.”
The moral consequence follows immediately: “Let all who are hungry enter and eat; let all who are in need come and join in the Pesah with us. This year, [we are] slaves. Next year, [may the slaves be] free.”
SHARED COURTESY OF THE HADAR PESACH READER Copyright © 2021 by Hadar / Adapted from Rabbi Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), pp. 46-48.
