Passover Part II: Get Down

On Passover we eat matza…that dry, tasteless bread-wanna-be-but-couldn’t-ever-be food. It has all the same ingredients as bread but the yeast is left out and whalla…you get matza, a profoundly moving (while preventing other types of moving) and spiritual food…but what does that really mean and how does it help us get out of our personal boundaries (our “Egypts”)? The answer is that matza represents humility.

Bread is a seriously deep food and an integral part of every festive meal. Think about it…the process of taking a stalk of wheat and making it into bread is sheer ingenuity on the part of mankind. It’s incredible; it demonstrates the proficiency of the human mind, the adeptness of our hands, and the drive of our will. Bread is so important, we even wash our hands and make a blessing on our hands before eating it… perhaps it is because part of the celebration of bread is the celebration of what man is capable of creating with his mind and hands.

But on the flip side, there is a danger of being too aware man’s incredible gifts and capabilities. Sometimes we fall into the trap of putting all our faith into ourselves and other people, versus the main driver of it all. Sometimes, our own plans, dreams, ambitions become too big that we start to miss the point….the fact that G-d is the one who provided us with all those ingredients for the bread in the first place. When our breads get too inflated, when our egos and sense of self grows so large that it starts to bog us down, it becomes impossible to move from where we are.

And so on Passover, we throw away all our yeast (chumatz) and replace it with the flat matza of humility. It’s alarming how serious people get about removing their chumatz. Currently everyone around me has gone off the deep end searching for chumatz, cleaning the pockets to all their clothes, shaking out every book on the shelf, every crumb, every grain, every speck of chumatz must be disposed of, buried, sold, completely out of your possession by the 14th of Nisan.

From this we learn what we are supposed to do with our own chumatz, with our yeast, our enlarged self awareness, or excessiveness…we need to search for it in the deepest recesses of our hearts and burn it! Make a raging bonfire and wildly dance around it!

Once you remove the yeast, you have room to add that special ingredient, the awareness that Jah is really in control of it all and... then bread turns into matza. When G-d is in the equation, you can’t help but have humility. Because it is something so much greater than us.

I’ve heard many explanations about why the matza didn’t rise when the Jews left Egypt…some say it was because we left so fast the bread didn’t have time to rise, some say it’s because we left the men in charge of making the bread while the women packed, but think about it…what can possible rise in the presence of G-d? If the Revelation of G-d was shining in your face, you’d be flat like a piece of matza too.

With that said, eliminate that unnecessary space you are occupying and create some new space for new possibilities. Break out of our self-imposed boundaries and limitations and make room for the divine light, let it guide you by the hand and guide you out of slavery and into a land of freedom.

One more note about eating Matza….people don’t eat it with salt. Because our faith should not be contingent on logic, rhyme, or reason (the word reason in Hebrew is the same as the word flavor). We should have faith without the incentive of it tasting good.