The intentional invalidation of the afikoman
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If you are someone who detests all forms of joy, then I have a Seder stringency for you.
The great 13th-century rabbi, Rabbenu Asher b Yeḥiel (known by his acronym, Rosh) believes that, nowadays when we do not have a Temple, the purpose to our eating of the afikoman at the end of the Seder is to mirror the fact that the korban pesaḥ would be eaten at the end of the Seder (Pes. 10:34).
And this equating of the afikoman with the korban pesaḥ explains a number of interesting practical halakhot. To give but a couple of examples: not only must we eat the afikoman by halakhic midnight because that was the time by which people had to eat the korban pesaḥ, and some of the rules regarding how much of the afikoman we must eat are also governed by the laws of eating the korban pesaḥ.
But it could, in theory, also lead to a stringency. Admittedly, you have to take a lot of things to their logical conclusion – but that is usually how stringencies develop.
If the afikoman is treated like the korban pesaḥ then it requires constant vigilance. Without this vigilance there is a concern that the korban may have become impure while the person was distracted and thus no longer valid (Pes. 34a). Indeed, Reb Ḥayyim of Brisk is quoted as explaining this as the source of our practice to wrap and hide the afikoman during the Seder at Yaḥatz: by keeping it in a secure location we need not fear anything happening to it.
But here is where my joyless stringency comes in. Because, if your custom is for children to hide the afikoman, then how can you be certain the child has hidden it in an appropriately safe location? And, if your custom is for you to hide the afikoman which is then stolen by children, how can you be certain of the afikoman’s continual safety? Surely, the afikoman is invalidated by the very custom!
I can think of three possible solutions. The first is to abandon the custom of children being involved in the afikoman hiding and stealing. And, as I said at the beginning, this is for the truly joyless. Even I – who is often accused of being a Party Pooper (I won’t say by whom, for privacy’s sake let’s call her “Ruthy G.” No, that’s too obvious, let’s say “R. Glass”) – think this is several leaps too far.
The second solution is advocated for by Rabbi Hershel Shachter, among the most prominent of Yeshiva Unversity’s Roshei Yeshiva. In his Haggadah, he recommends that “if the children ‘steal’ the afikoman, they should be careful not to place it in an exposed location, but rather in a secure one” (p. 71). It’s sensible advice that leans into the stringency. Though I’d wager that giving any children the explicit instruction to not hide the afikoman in a certain type of location is a guaranteed way of encouraging them to hide it in that very type of location.
The third solution – the one I’d like to advocate – is to recognize that having our children invalidate the sanctity of the afikoman might be the entire point. For all that the afikoman may be treated like the korban pesaḥ, we need to remind ourselves that it isn’t the real thing. For all that our Seder is a testament to our resilience as a people – how, even with our Temple destroyed and thus the mechanisms through which we can worship God destroyed, we kept things goings in exile without barely skipping a beat – we cannot forget that our Seder isn’t exactly how things should look.
In truth, we recognize this in multiple ways during the Seder: the constant presence of the zeroa on the Seder plate, reminding us that we don’t have a korban pesaḥ; the mentions – both at the beginning and the end of the Seder – that we hope to be in Yerushalayim next year (which contrary to popular opinion, is not a prayer for us to be sent on an all-expenses-paid luxury Pesaḥ program in Israel but a hope for the rebuilding of the Temple).
But these things risk becoming token gestures. Sat around our Seder we can all too easily fool ourselves into thinking this is how things should be. This is how Judaism was supposed to function. And so we find ourselves forgetting that the korban pesaḥ was even a thing – because we’ve replaced it with the afikoman. And now, we take that idea so seriously that we remain ever vigilant over its location.
But along come children, whose power is to tear through the illusions that adults construct for themselves, and mess it up. They steal the afikoman and sever the connection between it and a korban. “Were it a korban it’s no longer valid,” their actions tell us. And, by doing so, they shatter our conviction that the Judaism we live is an ideal one. We cannot replace the korban pesaḥ with anything else – and any attempt to do so fails at the first hurdle. Their actions transform our le-shana ha-ba’a birushalayim ha-benuyah from a fun little song to a genuine prayer.
We should still honor the fact that the afikoman is treated like the korban pesaḥ – but the constant vigilance we must maintain should not be directed towards a broken piece of matzah but to reminding ourselves that, despite appearances, we must pray that our religion is repaired.