Rabbi Neal's Weekly Commentary

There’s an old saying about public speaking: tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. Recapitulating the most important message you want to communicate is not a mystical principle and does readily explain the Torah reading at the end of the three agricultural festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. This Torah reading includes Deuteronomy 16, a chapter which distills each holiday to its essence of observance and meaning.

Regarding Pesach, the Deuteronomy text reminds us why we eat matzah, the “bread of affliction:”

You shall not eat anything leavened with it; for seven days thereafter you shall eat unleavened bread, bread of distress-for you departed from the land of Egypt hurriedly-so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live. (Deuteronomy 16:3)

So far, so good: in this verse, matzah is the symbol of leaving Egypt in a hurry. Yet this raises a question: if matzah is the symbol of leaving Egypt in a hurry, why is it called lechem oni, the bread of distress? Isn’t leaving slavery in a hurry a wonder and miracle? Our friend Rashi, the great medieval sage, suggests that the “hurry” in the above verse doesn’t describe the Israelites, but the Egyptians. In this reading, the Exodus was a great blessing, but the reason Israel made haste was the Egyptian army fast pursuing them. Thus matzah symbolizes the leaving of Egypt (good), but the speed of leaving is a reminder of the forces of oppression, hence matzah as “bread of distress.”

An earlier description of matzah, from the book of Exodus, raises a related question:

And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had taken out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, since they had been driven out of Egypt and could not delay; nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. (Exodus 12:39)

The imagery of these verses is very familiar from our telling of the story on the first night of Pesach: the Jewish people had to leave Egypt so quickly that they had no time to prepare, so they grabbed their kneading bowls and headed for freedom as fast as they could. That’s a compelling scene in the dramatic unfolding of the Exodus, but turning back to the beginning of Exodus 12, we find Moshe telling the people two weeks earlier that the final plague is coming and they must prepare for the miracle to come.

So if the people had been told to prepare weeks in advance, why didn’t they make some bread or other provisions? Rashi again provides a helpful explanation: the verse tells us they didn’t prepare in order to praise the people, who didn’t object that they weren’t ready, but”believed in God and went forward. ” Note well that Rashi’s two comments on these verses can be read together: the Israelites did know the Exodus was coming, trusting in the Divine Promise of freedom, but they left in a hurry when the Egyptian army was in hot pursuit.

Rashi’s commentary on the meaning of matzah hints at a truth about human beings: change is often forced upon us by circumstance, even when we know it’s coming. This is true in every realm of human life, including religion, economics, environment, politics, and health (personal and organizational): we know, intellectually, that things can’t go on the way they always have but we often don’t change our habits until we have no choice. That lack of choice often comes faster than we can ever imagine, sometimes in an instant. In a hospital, we often see patients confronting spiritual, relationship or moral distress only after a medical crisis and it’s easy to wonder: didn’t they know this was coming? One could judge another unfavorably for putting off these reckonings, but as a chaplain, I’ve come to see that it’s simply human nature not to cross the Sea, as it were, until Pharaoh’s army pushes you to the shore.

We make haste when we have to because as humans, it’s often too hard, if not impossible, to prepare for what we can hardly imagine, but then matzah comes along one week a year to remind us that we have what we need for the journey. Sometimes, as Rashi reminds us, all we can do is trust in God and go forward together, forgiving ourselves and each other our frailties and imperfections. Thus matzah is not only lechem oni, the bread of distress, but also symbol of our precious humanity, imperfect but more than sufficient, and in this we can rejoice.