It is Pesach season again. My fiancé and I got into our car and headed to The Grove in Cleveland, a kosher market with two isles of dry kosher for Passover…everything. I truly never am aware of how many items fall into this category until I got to such a market and look up and down the shelves and wonder why two different jars of Kasher L’Pesach jam have such a difference in price.
One of the items that remains is matzah. Matzah seems to be a constant and there is never any variation to the bland huge cracker of bread that never does seem to break in a straight line. In the Torah Matzah is referred to as lachama aniyah, literally the bread of the
‘poor.’ It is easy to see how it gets this name as, according to the story, it was the sole source of sustenance for our ancestors as they left Egypt. Yet, this lachama Aniyah plays another role which seems to confound and confuse its supposedly humble status.
When sacrifices were offered in the Temple if they included bread, it was lachama Aniyah. The bread of the ‘poor’ somehow became the main staple in the most sacred place in the Jewish world…the place closest to God. And so as we struggle to schmear whatever we are daring enough to put on a butter knife and apply to lachama aniyah this year, the bread carries an important reminder of the Jewish situation. Often times we have found ourselves among the poorest of the poor, and at others we have walked with the Divine. Lachama aniyah holds and symbolizes both of these statuses of Jewish communities historically and today. And while
the matzah may taste the same, it is the reminder of how for this coming holiday we are connected to previous generations and to each other at this season.
L’Shalom,
Rabbi Jim