Parshah Commentary

Famously, matzah plays a key role in the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, back in Shemot. We all know the story: The Israelites, in a rush to leave Egypt, didn’t have time to let their bread rise—they “could not delay; nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves,” the Torah tells us, and so they set off on their desert trek with just the unleavened fare we know today. But this week’s parshah, Tzav, provides us with a much lesser-known biblical reference to matzah: the sacrificial rituals of the Tabernacle and Temple. The text instructs the people that anything left over after sacrificing the meal offering “shall be eaten by Aaron and his sons; it shall be eaten as matzot, in the sacred precinct; they shall eat it in the enclosure of the Tent of Meeting. It shall not be baked with hametz [leaven].” It’s striking that a form of matzah—and not simply unleavened bread, but unleavened bread that cannot be combined with hametz, the ingredient that is forbidden to eat during Passover—is so central to the sacrificial service. During the seder, then, when we eat matzah, we not only reenact the Exodus; we also reenact an element of the Temple service.

We might consider this doubleness in relation to matzah’s status as a bread of dichotomies. Traditionally, matzah is understood as both the “bread of affliction” and the “bread of freedom.” In a famous Talmudic debate, the rabbis draw on a biblical reference to matzah as “lechem oni”—literally, “the bread of poverty”—and pun on “oni” with the word “onin,” which means “to answer,” dubbing matzah the bread “that prompts us to speak about it.” In the context of the seder, speech is the opposite of slavery; the ability to go on and on about the story of our liberation is thus diametrically opposed to the conditions of enslavement. And so, as the Women’s Seder Sourcebook puts it, matzah as both the bread of affliction and the bread of discursive freedom means that when we eat matzah, we “taste both slavery and redemption in a single bite.” So what might we gain from viewing matzah through the doubleness of its role in the Exodus and in the rituals of the Temple? Perhaps that the bread can prompt us to hold together change, surprise, and revelation, on the one hand, with consistency and steady ritual on the other. After all, the Tabernacle and Temple and their attendant services are, in Jewish memory, representative of stability, agency, and power.

But these associations also point toward another generative layer of doubleness. The newly liberated Israelites are immediately tasked with building the Tabernacle, casting it as the inversion of the kind of labor done while in slavery. The building of these grand structures—filled with gold, silver, and fine cloths—bears little resemblance to the bricks they were once forced to make in Egypt. In this sense, the Temple and Tabernacle represent something very different from what we generally think of as Passover’s core themes. The seder invites its participants to alternately identify with the experiences of oppression and of liberation from oppression; notably, both of these seemingly opposite ideas are about dependency rather than agency. Matzah, viewed through the lens of oppression and liberation, represents human need. To bring the Temple’s symbolism to the seder through the added meaning it gives to the matzah means contemplating not only our dependency but also the agency with which we shape the world.

Though the Temple is a reminder of our past power, it is also a reminder of the destruction that can befall us when we act unjustly. In this way, even as the Temple symbolizes the magnificence we can create with our own hands, it also functions as a warning that, unless it is guided and checked by our obligations to others, power will inevitably turn to devastation. This year, as we eat our matzah, let us reflect not only on our liberation but on those commitments and the terrible consequences of neglecting them—and on the responsibility and power we have to work toward the liberation of others.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.