Usually I send out a pre-Passover teaching. This year what came to me came only at the seder, so I’m sharing it now.
Here are two takes on the Passover seder’s message, reflecting on Yachatz, the moment when we split the middle of three matzahs into a bigger and smaller piece, and then say “This is the bread of poverty our ancestors ate…All who are hungry come and eat, all who need come and make Pesach”:
In my family going back to my great-grandfather’s seder, we always used whole, round hand-made matzahs. At Yachatz, he would take the middle matzah and break it very carefully into one big piece like a dalet (imagine an open-mouthed Pacman) and a small piece that is maybe 1/4 or at most 1/3 of a circle (you can’t do this so easily with machine-made because of the rectilinear perforations). This year when I held up that smaller very broken-looking piece and recited “Ha Lachma Anya - This is the bread of poverty”, the words “Let any who are hungry come and eat” struck me in a new way . It’s quite a stark image - according to our words, we aren’t inviting all those hungry people to share in the feast that will follow, or even to share the afikomen that makes up the bigger half. The invitation is very literally to eat a fragment of a broken matsah that wouldn’t even be enough for one person.
What does it really mean to hold up this broken piece of matsah and invite anyone who is hungry to come share it? I know we can come up with answers from religious texts, Kabbalah, etc., to explain the spiritual or symbolic meaning or kavanah behind this, but very concretely, what would it be like to really only have a crust, so to speak, a broken fragment, and to share that piece with another hungry person? That is the question I held with me all night through the first seder. Here are two answers:
1. When people are most generous, it’s often when they feel they have more than enough for themselves. Maybe I’ve put ten quarters in my pocket to give out as I stroll down Broadway in the Upper West Side, knowing that I have ten dollars in my wallet. This act of giving obviously creates a
hierarchy, a benefactor and a recipient. Maybe I gave $200 to a charity knowing that it would go to taxes if I didn’t disburse it myself. I give what I know I don’t need or can’t use for myself. But homeless people also give to each other, and even the poorest person is mandated in Jewish law to
give tsedakah. On a material level, we invite fellow poor people as another poor person, offering to share even if our own resources are meager. On a spiritual level, by offering this lechem oni, poor bread, we invite others without pretending to be the one who sees the whole picture or who overflows with what others need for sustenance. On an ecological level, we must not imagine that we are the ones saving the earth - we come poor, and need to ourselves to join all the creatures, every aspect of being, into the process of nourishing and sustaining each other. If the lechem oni means that we
invite other hungry and needy people to join us, as true equals in our poverty, then the hierarchy of generosity is undone. Only then does it make sense to imagine that this act fo breaking bread is what could make us all free, as we say at the end of the passage, “This is the bread…now we are slaves, next year, free people, l’shanah haba’ah b’ney chorin”.
2. We live in a society in which everyone wants a “whole share” - enough stuff for themselves and their family to feel self-sufficient and equal to everyone else, with a little more to spare. If this is what it means to have “enough”, then all the world can’t provide enough cars and TV’s and 3 bedroom homes on ¼ acre to take care of 6 billion people’s needs. To do so would mean developing the entire world around us into either resources or places for people to live, with nothing left over for the other animals. If we only give when we ourselves are whole, then ultimately this is what we are modeling. If we give when we have less than a whole, if we can imagine living with much less than we have, not more, than what is left for the earth and the other creatures is the bigger share. In the end, the wealth that is real wealth comes back to us in the abundance of what surrounds us, not of what we own, but of what we fit into, a greater whole that is richer than any material riches. That is the afikomen, the bread of redemption.