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Yachatz: Lechem Oni and Afikomen
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

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Anyone who has ever handled matzah knows that it’s extremely fragile. Often enough when we open a box of matzah, some of the sheets are already broken. Sometimes when biting into it, pieces fly everywhere. Anyone who’s ever attempted shmearing cream cheese or jelly on matzah knows it doesn’t usually end well. It’s a good thing we don’t have to search for matzah after Pesach is over, or we’d be looking for crumbs all night. So why does the seder ask us to break the middle matzah tonight?

The Torah calls matzah lechem oni, “the bread of poverty.” The Rabbis of the Talmud interpret this to mean that we should recite the Pesach story over a broken piece of matzah, not a whole sheet, because poor people in their times often couldn’t afford to buy a whole loaf of bread, only pieces. By breaking the middle matzah and hiding away the bigger half, we truly make the smaller half the bread of poverty.

But what about the two other sheets of matzah? And what about the bigger half of the broken matzah, the mysterious afikomen ? Some say the three matzot we start the seder with represent the patriarchs—Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya’akov—others say they represent the three castes of Jews from the times of the Temple—Cohanim, Levi’im, and Yisra’el—but neither of these answers are particularly satisfying.

Perhaps the three matzot represent the past, present, and future, times that we move through fluidly tonight. The seder is largely set in the past, asking us not to merely recall our ancestors’ slavery but to relive it. But through its constant invitation to envision the World to Come, the seder also shows us glimmers of the future. The present moment practically ceases to exist during the seder, or more accurately, it becomes intimately intertwined with the past and the future in a way we don’t often see in daily life. By breaking the middle matzah, we divide the present up between the future and the past. The lechem oni symbolizes the part of the seder we spend in slavery, but the afikomen— the bigger, better half of the matzah that we are about to hide away—is the redemption that awaited our ancestors, and awaits us in the World to Come. 

Yachatz forces us to contend with our own brokenness and with the brokenness of our world. Though the afikomen reminds us that redemption will eventually come, the irreparable damage left by mass communal tragedies like genocide, incarceration, and police violence may never truly go away. Once the middle matzah is broken, it can never be fully repaired, but we can pick up the pieces and do our best to try to put them back together again. This is the redemptive hope of tikkun olam.
 
haggadah Section: Yachatz
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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