Temple Beth Bolshoyeh had an enormous Passover educational fair this weekend. The Sunday School kids had tons of stuff (my Perfect Non-Reader made a Seder Plate with fabric matzah and a fabric egg, construction paper parsley, charoset and bitter herbs, bubble-wrap salt water and a Milk-BoneTM) and there were a bunch of samples of Passover desserts and juices, and a few educational opportunities for adults. I skipped the Pesach Pizzazz and the State of Israel ones as well as Papa Rabbi’s retelling of the Passover Story, but Baby Rabbi was doing a class on Mysticism and Matzah, so I went to that.
It was great. Did it ever occur to you (those of you with the Hebrew for it to be possible that it might have occurred to you) that the word chumetz is chet mem tzadi and the word for matzah is mem tzadi hay? So the difference between the two is the difference between a chet and a hay? Well, then, what is the difference between a chet and a hay? Why, that a chet is closed and a hay is open. So when we change our chumetz for matzah, we are opening ourselves to the Divine.
Also, the Talmud asks, why do we rid ourselves of chumetz for Passover? It answers with another question: why do people sin? Because the evil impulse is like the yeast in the dough. What is the word for sin? That’s right, chet. Because in sinning, we close ourselves from the Divine. But then, you may ask, why do we eat leavened bread all the year around? Well, if there were no evil impulse, there would be no children, there would be no progress of any kind.
It’s a contradiction, which of course is no bad thing. Matzah itself is a contradiction. It’s the bread of affliction, which our forefathers ate in Egypt. And it is the bread of redemption, which our forefathers ate after they left Egypt. It’s both. And of course matzah is made from chumetz, as we celebrate Passover even with the evil impulse within us.
Speaking of duality, we call the holiday Pesach the feast of Passover, to observe and memorialize how the Divine passed over our houses, visiting the plagues on the Egyptians but not upon us. But in the Torah, it’s called hag ha-matzot, the festival of unleavened bread, to commemorate our willingness to leave Egypt and slavery for the wilderness and the Divine. That is, we name the holiday out of love for the Divine, and what the Divine did for us when we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt. But the Divine names it out of love for us, and what we did for the Divine when we were slaves of Pharoah in Egypt.
One more thing, and then I’ll post it and let y’all talk about Passover and Matzah and Chumetz: you could guess that the tradition of Spring Cleaning predates the observance of Passover. But did it occur to you that in ancient times, when they wanted bread, they got their yeast the way that people in Northern California do now, by grabbing a bit of the starter dough they’d been keeping for that purpose. Sadly, of course, they didn’t have refrigerators, and for a variety of medical and aesthetic reasons it wasn’t a good idea to keep the starter dough going for years and years, they way they do it up there. There were evidently communities that adopted the quite sensible practice of throwing out all of that leavening every Spring as part of the cleaning…
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Hay, oddly, may be considered kitniyot.
Really? Fortunately, Francis the Talking Mule is Sephardic.
What’s the dilly-o with corn syrup these days? Other than the impending heat death of the universe, I mean—as corn is in the kitniyot, the one-crumb restrictions on chumetz shouldn’t apply, and there’s no need to remove kitniyot from the house (for those that remove chumetz from the house entirely, which I don’t), but does the milk-and-meat 1/60th rule apply? Or do we have to schmeer the OU?
Thanks,
-V.