April, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
I am starting to think about the Pesach seder, and in particular about yachatz—the breaking of the middle matzah. Some of my friends have been writing words for a yachatz ritual, and they asked me to help them edit it. So I have been thinking anew about rituals in which you break things.
Fairly early in the seder, the middle matzah is lifted up and broken in half. The larger half of the matzah is hidden away, to be searched for and returned in the end as the afikomen. Many of us, I’m sure, have multiple memories of someone, maybe a child, triumphantly producing the afikomen and the playfully skeptical seder leader holding it up to the first half to make sure it really fits.
I’ve always loved the symbol of the lost half of the matzah being found, of the broken becoming whole again. The Breslov Haggadah (published by the followers of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov/Bratzlav and following his teachings) gives it this beautiful spiritual spin:
Matzah symbolizes great awareness of God.... Mankind [sic] though is not ready for this overwhelming experience of God…. We must therefore break the matzah; separate this great awareness into fathomable sections. The larger part is set aside for the ‘end.‘ In the End of Days, Man [sic] will rise again to his destined level of awareness.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the End of Days theology here, but I love the notion of that cosmic awareness, now broken off and hidden away, being restored to us all Someday. In the blissful, sleepy, full-bellied latter half of the seder, the End of Days half, that which was broken is restored. Elijah comes in and has a drink. We all live in a Yellow Submarine....
But wait! The very next thing we do is pass that afikomen around. Everyone at the table breaks off a piece, chews it up and swallows it. It’s not going to come together again in any easily recognizable way. We can say something, I’m sure, about how that Awareness lives in us all, but separated once again, subdivided, spread around.
I think that one of the tasks for the seder this year, in my heart anyhow, is to search for the value of brokenness. This year, when there is plenty of brokenness and division and fragmentation to go around, it occurs to me that maybe I don’t show enough respect for that smaller half-matzah. It is fragile and incomplete and perhaps a little lonely. Unlike the coveted afikomen, it doesn’t even have a name. It got separated from its bigger half, from full awareness of Everything, from having all the answers, and it sits forlornly on the plate waiting for the Great Return.
Just like us! Just like me… fragile, feeling incomplete, wishing I had all the answers and all the power and could make things right. Of course, I should learn more! Give more! Do more! Be more powerful! Live bigger! Be visionary! But I am, we all are, partial and fragile and, relative to the great ALL, small.
What if, to take just one instance, instead of looking at the political landscape and seeing everyone as heroes or villains, I could see all the players as broken pieces of matzah, partial and fragile, trying to find meaning and wholeness in a vastly complex global landscape that no one will ever completely master or apprehend? What if I viewed science and technology the same way? Or my community? Or my family? Or my own soul?
What if I held that smaller half of the middle matzah with tenderness? What if I were gentle with its crumbly edge? What if I saw my own brokenness, and that of every being, as part of our beauty? What if I looked at the part of me that thinks I should be bigger and more whole than I am and felt some rachmones—that beautiful word that means pity in the best sense: compassionate affection?
When we break glass at a wedding, the Machzor Vitri says, “This is done for the purpose of making the people mindful of the great tragedy of the destruction of the Temple….” At the most joyous moment of a wedding, we remember the great shattering. I always thought that this classical interpretation was a little perverse, but today I appreciate it. Serious brokenness is part of life, we know that. Now go ahead and kiss.
Maybe our chisaron—our quality of brokenness, fragmentation and lack—is part of the design of each of us and of the world we share. This year we can perhaps regard with kindness, maybe even enjoy, that part of ourselves, our world, and our seder plate for a moment before we go ahead and kiss. Happy Pesach, dear community!
