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Matt's Story, Part I
Contributed by Serena Jake

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

Matt Minnicino is a playwright, adaptor, actor, director, teacher, and theatermaker with an MFA from Colmubia. In his spare time, he teaches kids about Shakespeare.

There was a wonderful queer rabbi I knew, a man with a shaved head, sharp cheeks cut like burnished marble, and eyes that pierced and perceived like one searching the depths of a dark-watered sea, urging you not to look away. This rabbi told me once that the foods of the Seder are each the ingredients one must use to create love.

What do you mean, I said. I knew the story. I knew, even lax as I was in my own practice, the frenzied fable of our people’s rushing from dusty Egypt before the bread could rise, left with those dry placards I had so dreaded eating as a child. I knew the story. 

No, no, said the rabbi (and I swear this is true), You must awaken from the slumber of what things are said to be and into the world of what you know them to be.

The matzoh, he said, is our divine love. We have three pieces of matzoh—the one above, which is G-d, the one below, which is our very selves, and the one between, which connects us.

I was of course perplexed, and asked further.

Why do we break the middle matzoh, I asked my friend, hearing the weary scowl of my voice lighten like a child’s.

Because connection is hard. And we often break ourselves off from what is divine in us, simply by being.

I couldn’t deny I was moved. He spoke with the delicacy of a palm frond on still water, and yet so resolute in this. A part of me needled him, wanted to poke a hole in his symbols.

What about the afikomen, I said. What’s this nonsense about hiding it, letting a child find it. Surely that’s just to entertain the kids! And I remembered how I’d be rewarded with a little chocolate gelt when I plucked the crumbly sheet of bread from between the pages of some old tome in our basement.

Ah, ah, the rabbi said. It is because, though we break ourself off, we cannot truly continue until we have found the part missing that will allow us to connect. And it is never us who find the piece. It is always our children.

(Here the middle piece of matzoh is broken, and one piece set aside. Someone at the table will now hide this piece - the 'akifomen' - for the children, or most childlike among you, to find later in the evening.)
haggadah Section: Yachatz
Source: Matt Minnicino

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