Tomorrow night marks two weeks (gulp!) to the first Seder.
So now is the time to start getting our minds and hearts into gear, so that we’re primed to make it a meaningful experience.
Let’s first refresh our memory of the Passover narrative:
The Jews are enduring centuries of slavery in Egypt. Finally, G-d tells Moses to liberate them and starts to weaken the Egyptian grip by whacking the Egyptians with an assortment of plagues. Then, two weeks before liberation day (Passover), G-d presents Moses with the Exodus Plan:
A. In two weeks, the Jews should have a special meal, consisting of a Passover offering, Matzah and bitter herbs.
B. Later, at midnight, G-d will inflict a final plague on the Egyptians.
C. The Jews will then leave in the early morning hours.
As things turned out, they needed to rush when they left and their bread for the journey didn’t have time to rise. So, they made Matzah instead.
Those are the basics.
It sometimes gets overlooked that the Jews actually had two Matzah experiences. There was Matzah on the planned-in-advance Passover evening menu. And then there was the Matzah that seemed to be happenstance that the Jews made in the early morning hours when they need to rush to exit Egypt.
So, let’s dig deeper:
G-d told the Jews that liberation would take more than exiting Egypt’s geographical border; they needed to leave their internal “Egypts,” and the Matzah mentality would enable their internal freedom.
In Chassidic thought, Matzah represents humility, which is an antidote to the inflated Ego, the greatest threat to our internal freedom. Self-absorption and self-indulgence breed deafness to one's need for spiritual growth. The bloated sense of self is represented by the risen dough of a loaf of bread.
By contrast, Matzah’s dough hasn’t been allowed to rise. Matzah is simple, representing humility and openness to self-improvement. Matzah represents faith, because faith takes a recognition that one can't control everything. That it's okay to let go.
So the Jews prepared their Matzah and held a spiritually successful Passover meal.
They were then ready for a second level of Matzah; a deeper dimension of surrender, granted as a gift by G-d.
Once they had worked within themselves to find humility and faith, G-d granted the Divine coup de grâce to their ego struggle.
In the words of the Haggadah: “the dough of our ancestors didn’t have time to rise...[as] the King of kings, the Holy one…revealed Himself to them.”
The second Matzah wasn't planned, and it wasn't in our hands to create.
It was a Divine gift.
A gift that keeps recurring, every year, when we process our spiritual Matzah and genuinely open our minds and hearts to G-d.
The preparation begins now….for the gift of Matzah.