Along side Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah I’m also going to be sending out eight Haggadah ideas in the run up to Pesaḥ
There’s always one person at every Seder (in our house it’s me) who, as everyone is sat eating korekh – holding a sandwich of matzah and maror looking sad – will dramatically sigh and lament the fact that in the days of the Beit ha-Mikdash, the Seder revolved around something more akin to a shawarma laffa.
And though the absence of the korban pesaḥ means that we can’t have the shawarma component at the Seder, the sharp contrast between the matzah we eat – more like dry cardboard than anything else – and what matzah would have looked like in Egypt, more laffa-like, is palpable at the Seder.
But there is something far deeper to the miserable matzah we eat than we realize. Something with the power to transform, not just our Seder, but our entire experience of Pesaḥ.
What makes the obligations to destroy our ḥametz and eat matzah interesting is that they’re two sides of the same coin. Usually, mitzvot aren’t paired like this – on Sukkot, when we wave arba minim, there’s no concurrent obligation to burn all other plant life that we see. But on Pesaḥ we are obligated to not only eat matzah but to destroy ḥametz.
And to say the Torah is insistent on this point is an understatement: not only does God state twice in four verses that one of the worst possible punishments will be inflicted upon one who eats ḥametz during Pesaḥ (Ex. 12:15, 19), but He also stresses that it is forbidden for a Jew to even see or find ḥametz in their home (Ex. 13:7).
But most fascinating of all is the fact that God does not use the word ḥametz when telling the people what they must eradicate from their homes but the word sĕ’or – which, while typically translated simply as “leaven,” has a much more significant meaning for freed slaves from Egypt.
During Covid, when baking sourdough bread was all the rage, a man called Seamus Blackley – most famous for creating the Xbox – decided to take his baking to the next level. Unlike everyone else, his recipe wasn’t taken from a YouTube video, his ingredients weren’t from the store, and his starter wasn’t from a neighbor. Instead, everything was from ancient Egypt.
With the help of museum archives, he was able to extract dormant yeast from 4,500 years ago from ancient Egyptian baking vessels – and he used a recipe written in hieroglyphs. And while this just sounds like an exciting project, it’s key to understanding Pesaḥ.
Because, as H.E. Jacob discusses in Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History, Egypt was the first society to develop bread as we know it:
Porridge and flat breads, flat breads and porridge, remained the menu for many centuries. … But for the example of Egypt they would never have known real bread. … While all other peoples feared lest their food decay, the Egyptians set aside their dough until it decayed and observed with pleasure the process that took place. This process was the process of fermentation. …
Before long they had fifty varieties of bread. But they would have been sufficiently proud of one alone. The thing they took out of the oven hardly resembled what they had put into it. … In the ancient world the Egyptians were known as the “bread eaters.” The term expressed almost equal portions of admiration and contempt. Certainly it expressed also a considerable portion of astonishment, for bread was not an incidental food but the principal food of all Egyptians.
The lower classes in Egypt lived almost exclusively on bread. … This “manufactured” product, bread, was much more than Egypt’s principal food. It was a cultural unit and a unit of measure. “Number of breads” signified wealth; the ovens throughout the land were virtual mints. Flour baked in an oven eventually became the coinage of the realm. For hundreds of years wages were paid in breads, the average peasant receiving three breads and two jugs of beer a day.
A better translation of sĕ’or is “sourdough” – a word that references the cultural dish of Egypt, bread.
And so, when the Torah insists that we destroy all ḥametz from our homes – that we eradicate all the sĕ’or we own – and eat matzah instead, there’s not only a specific intent behind these commandments but a tremendous strength of feeling, too.
Because everything that is ḥametz, everything that is sĕ’or, is inherently Egyptian. And on Pesaḥ, when we celebrate our freedom from Egypt, we do so in part by rejecting everything that’s Egyptian in our homes. Because though we don’t realize this, every bread, cake, doughnut, cracker, and beer in our homes is Egyptian at heart. And on Pesaḥ, we show our contempt for their world by not just refusing to eat it, but by destroying it – eradicating it – from our homes.1
And so, when we eat our miserable cardboard matzah at the Seder, it doesn’t matter if we don’t enjoy it – we’re eating it because it’s the antithesis of Egypt. It’s something only someone who absolutely despises Egypt would ever insist on eating – simply as a refusal to embrace anything remotely Egyptian.2 We eradicate anything that even looks like it belongs in Egypt from our kitchens – and we burn it ceremonially before Pesaḥ begins.
Because on Pesaḥ we reject Egypt. We won’t even let it into our diets – even if that means our palates (and stomachs) will suffer for 8 days straight.
Have a חג כשר ושמח!
While I don’t claim any halakhic merit to this, there’s what to say mitzad derush about the Ashkenazi refusal to eat kiṭniyot and the recognition that most protein in Egypt was legumes and pulses.
There’s a parallel here to the tendency among some Jews nowadays to not buy anything German.