OUR OLD-NEW MATZAH

Somehow it happens each year, miraculously: In the midst of taking our pre-Passover inventory, my wife and I discover, deep in our kitchen pantry, ancient boxes of matzah, unused and unopened from years before.  Here, a Streits’ box, vintage 2003.  There, an orange and green Manischewitz box, baked four years ago.  Wait, yet another box – whole wheat matzah, still in its cellophane wrapper, no date.  Amazing!  And each spring, we make the same old joke:  that the old matzah tastes just as good as the new matzah we have just bought!

This is the essence of Passover.  Old and new are linked.  Each year we look to the old and make the holiday new.  We sit around the Passover Seder table, telling the same old story we have told for generations, and we make it new again.  In fact, the first chief rabbi of the Land of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) taught that this is the mission of every Jew:  In every generation, each of us must make the old become new, and make the new become holy.  In Rabbi Kook’s original Hebrew phrasing, this teaching has a wonderful poetic rhythm:  “L’chadesh et ha’yashan, u’l’kadesh et a chadash.”  Innovation, we’re told, is holy.

Did you know that the ubiquitous square boxed matzah we eat during Passover today is one such recent innovation, an invention of the 20th century and industrialization?  Before the industrial age, matzah was made in every village and shtetl – even in big cities – by hand by bakers in brick ovens, and it was round.  Then, as historian Dr. Jonathan Sarna from Brandeis has shown, in the early 1900s an entrepreneur named Ber Manischewitz from the city of Cincinnati realized that if he could mass produce matzah, he could make his fortune in America.  The matzah his factories’ machinery produced was square by necessity.  Thus, the square matzah we know so well, which we lift up and point to at the Seder table each year saying, “This is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in Egypt,” actually never existed before 1911. 

But as Rabbi Kook taught, every Jew must always look to the old, reinterpret it, reshape it, renew it, and sanctify it.  This imperative is never clearer to us than at Passover.  Once, long ago, I went to a Seder where the leader read in a strict monotone voice straight from the Hagaddah.  Singing songs, stopping to ask questions and offering opinions was forbidden, a violation of his sense of decorum.  Newness and innovation was verboten.  That Seder was also, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, not a ‘true’ experience.  He wrote this in a Yiddish essay titled God Loves That Which is New: “Just as a pair of shoes won't fit someone else’s feet, so too God cannot be served with someone else’s ideas.  Our thought must be quivering with novelty.”

This year at my family Seder, we will add to the classic Exodus story in our Hagaddot by invoking a newer and urgent genocide crisis in Darfur.  We will make the old story new again by asking our children to add their thoughts on what liberation means.  We will add our own outrage at the modern Pharaohs of today who disregard the values for human dignity and basic human rights that we inherit from both our ancient sacred texts and new modern sensibilities.  This year, I expect we will incorporate into our Seder conversation about health care for all, policies permitting torture, just and unjust wars, and our renewed concern about nuclear proliferation. 

We will re-read the old story of the Hagaddah, of the time in history when our people fled Egypt without enough time even to bake our bread, and we will see in it our own lives some three-plus thousand years later, inspired  by the ever-new story of hope and redemption made complete by our own innovation.  As we hold up our square matzah, we will say again, with a hope we renew in our hearts each year, that liberation is at hand, and perhaps this will be the year that the Messianic time finally arrives.

I wish you and your dear ones a very happy and sweet Pesach.

Rabbi Andy Vogel