Yachatz

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There are three pieces of matzah stacked on the table covered by a cloth.

We eat matzah in memory of the quick flight of our ancestors from Egypt. As slaves, they had faced many false starts before finally being let go. So when the word of their freedom came, they took whatever dough they had and ran with it before it had the chance to rise, leaving it looking something like matzah.

These days, matzah is a special food and we look forward to eating it on Passover. It is the staple of maintaining kosher for passover, which we maintain during this time, to remain the hardship and struggle of having just this bread to eat.

It is altogether proper that matzah is called the bread of affliction, because it has been afflicted more than any other foodstuff on earth. It is born in a searing-hot oven and then completely ignored for fifty-one weeks of the year while people walk around shamelessly eating leavened bread and crackers. Then, Passover rolls around, and it is smeared with various substances, ground up into balls, and, in the morning, fried up into a counterfeit version of French toast. Everyone eats it and nobody likes it, and there's always one last box that sits untouched in a cupboard for months afterward, lonely, broken, and utterly unloved.

Uncover and hold up the three pieces of matzah and say:

This is the bread of poverty which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. All who are hungry, come and eat; all who are needy, come and celebrate Passover with us. This year we are here; next year we will be together, though it is traditional to say next year we will be in Isreal. This year we are slaves; next year we will be free.

Yachatz is the name of this portion of the Seder in which the middle of three pieces of matzah is split in two.

We will now break the middle matzo into two pieces.

The smaller piece is returned to the table, tucked in between the two remaining whole matzot, and the larger of the broken pieces, the afikomen, is wrapped up and secreted away, to be sought, found and eaten at the Seder’s conclusion. During Yachatz, we pretend not to see the act of hiding. Only later is it announced, “Now is the time to search for the afikoman, the hidden, broken piece of matzah, that we all turned our attention to early on in the Seder and that we each must partake of in order to complete the Seder meal.”

If Passover is a holiday about found freedom and realized redemption, surely it also carries within its potent message a reminder to seek, name, taste and pay attention to that which is (those parts of us which are) not free or redeemed, that which is broken, cast away, rendered off limits.

We point to the whole matzah as a symbol of the slavery our ancestors endured and then rejected. We locate in the broken matzah our own cracked edges, our unfulfilled yearnings and unrealized potential. It suggests all the ways we are not (yet) whole, all within us that we feel compelled to hide, all about us that remains undiscovered, enslaved. The broken matzah represents the parts of us we or others reject. Therefore, we hide it. But without finding “it,” the afikoman, it is impossible to continue with the Seder. And without acknowledging the broken and partial aspects of our ways of living, it is unlikely that positive growth and reconciliation will occur in our lives as individuals and in the world as a whole.

Why do we hide the broken matzah, only to retrieve and consume it later on? To me, this is a profoundly Jewish ritual for the following reason. It recognizes and allows us to act out the human tendency to want to hide or ignore those things about others and ourselves that reveal our fragility, weakness, and limitations. And then, the Seder script calls upon us to search for and hold aloft, in plain view, the found broken matzah, symbolic of all that we put energy into keeping out of sight and out of mind. Not surprisingly, it is (our) children, those uncannily perceptive youngsters who sense our vulnerabilities most acutely, who triumphantly return to the table with the afikoman to announce in essence, “You can’t continue this celebration until you own up to having hidden things from us and yourselves. Admit to being less than whole and in need of repair as individuals, as families, as a Jewish community, as global citizens. Show us your good intentions to acknowledge these truths and then we can go on.”

So we negotiate their claims and our responsibilities and the Seder continues, but it does not reach its conclusion until we have each swallowed a piece of the very same broken matzah. In chewing and swallowing, we own – we claim - all that is partial, incomplete, rejected, and hidden away in ourselves and our world. We do so humbly, recognizing the many ways in which we are not (yet) whole and transparent.

What in our lives and in our world is broken and in need of repair? What can we learn from that which is broken, hidden, and undoubtedly revealed? What drives our quest of attempt to become whole? What might actually bring us wholeness/shalom?

haggadah Section: Yachatz