Matzo reminds us of enslavement

You find out that you are going to move to a far-away place in two weeks. Let's say you get this incredibly great job offer, the money is too good to refuse, but you have to move. You decide you are going. Then what do you do? You put your house on the market, or notify the landlord. You make arrangements to figure out where you are going to live. You call the movers and set up a date for the move. You figure out how you're going to get to the new place - whether you should ship your car or drive it to your new home. Then you start packing all your stuff, and, if you're like me, you make lists of everything you need to get done and forget where you put the lists.

By the time moving day came, the bags were packed and I was ready to go, humming, like Peter, Paul and Mary - leaving on a freeway!

All of this discussion is by way of trying to understand something that makes no sense, that all of us accept as fact, but that I started wondering about.

If God told Moses on the first day of Nisan that he should expect that on the 14th of the month the people and he were going to get thrown out of Egypt, and Moses told the people, which the Torah says he did, why is there this whole issue of not having the time to let the dough rise for bread? They had two weeks notice - they had plenty of time.

In fact, the commandment of the Feast of Unleavened Bread is told to Moses well before there was any discussion of a rush to leave Egypt. God tells Moses to plan a Feast of Unleavened Bread that is to last for seven days and is to be a commemoration of the departure from Egypt, before the people even begin planning the Passover offering. Now, for those of you who are going to doubt this, look it up yourselves in Exodus, Chapter 12. The Passover offering is in fact one holiday, the Feast of Unleavened Bread another, and the issue of the rush to get out of town doesn't appear until verse 34, while the command to have the holiday begins at verse 14.

We all have accepted this idea of a rush, when the rush may not have happened. Can it be that we would prepare to leave town and our ancestors wouldn't? All those Jewish mothers unprepared for a trip? I can't believe that.

Why don't we know what's going on? The Torah says one thing in one place, and yet our Haggadah quotes the Torah someplace else, saying that there was a rush to get out of town. Which statement from the Torah are we to believe?

There is a symbolism to the unleavened bread, which is why we have this holiday. Matzo is the "bread of affliction" not the "bread of liberation." Matzo has not risen; it is as low as you can get. It is the perfect symbol for what slavery is: humble, unassuming, impoverished, low. There is nothing in it to lead it to "rise up." Bread, on the other hand, is puffy and full of hot air. One could say it's full of itself. A slave can't eat such a symbol of uprising, of grandeur, of growth.

Passover falls half a year away from the High Holidays. It's a reminder of where we were back then, on Yom Kippur, when we confessed our sins and recognized how little worth we have. Passover and matzo remind us of the experience of slavery, and the ways we enslave ourselves to all those things that make us just like bread - how we have puffed up our own souls, our own spirits, and filled ourselves with incredible amounts of hot air.

We are what we eat. If we are to know and really understand whence we come, we need to understand that we, in every generation, were slaves: we were matzo thousands of years ago, and in our tradition, just six months ago. And we have been bread - the bread of liberation from Egypt and the bread of our own puffy egos. Matzo reminds us to know who we really are, without all of the trappings and elevations and all the yeast we add to our own personalities.

There may or may not have been a rush to get out of town, but there certainly is reason for the Torah to give us two very good reasons for matzo - so we'll look beyond the rush to see meanings in that which we eat.

Rabbi H. Rafael Goldstein is the chaplain at Banner Thunderbird Hospital in Glendale and is in private practice providing spiritual counseling for people touched by serious illness or loss. He can be reached at ravrafael@earthlink.net.

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