OzTorah

One of the puzzles of the Torah is why it took the Children of Israel 40 years to get from Egypt to the Promised Land when the distance was so short and could have been covered in a few days or at worst a few weeks.

Surely God had a special purpose in mind when He planned the journey to freedom.

One explanation is that this was a motley people who had just emerged from bondage. A few days or a few weeks would not have been sufficient to turn them into a disciplined nation able to handle independence and possessed of an esprit de corps.

We all learn that lesson if we imagine that a cultural gap can be closed almost overnight. Taking a short cut is a wonderful idea but it can make matters worse.

The sages speak of paths which are “short but long” and paths which are “long but short”. Things have to take their time.

Matzah existed before the Exodus.

Since the Egyptians are said to have pioneered the leavening process in baking bread, unleavened bread must previously have been the norm.

Even when leavened bread became available, it was probably limited to the aristocracy and the wealthy. It was too expensive for the ordinary person, who had to continue eating something like matzah (though the matzah they made was thicker and softer than ours).

This may be why the Haggadah calls matzah lechem oni, the bread of affliction or poor man’s bread “which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt”.

It is said that by the time of Moses, there were as many as forty types of bread in Egypt, and some or all would have been flavoured and eaten with onions.

When the waters of the Nile were too low, the economy was in jeopardy and people threw bread into the river as an offering, since divinity was attributed to the waters. Maybe this is the origin of the phrase, “Cast your bread upon the waters” (Kohelet 11:1).

Originally bread (as well as matzah) was baked at home. It was only about three centuries ago that professional matzah bakeries began and the matzah became hard and crisp, though some non-Ashkenazic communities still prefer soft matzah.

When the Israelites left Egypt they looked forward to eating rich men’s bread as a mark of freedom, but they were in such a hurry that there was no time for the dough to rise and they had to make do with unleavened bread once again.

“In every generation a person must see himself as if they had come out of Egypt”.

That’s what the Haggadah says. The Pesach story isn’t merely an ancient event involving our ancestors, but a personal experience in which we ourselves took part.

We were there.

We were enslaved in Egypt, we yearned to break free, we followed Moses out of bondage. That’s why the Haggadah praises God who redeemed us as well as our ancestors.

Not only our forebears but we ourselves emerged from serfdom to freedom, from darkness to daylight, from subjugation to selfhood.

This explains why even those who were born long after 1945 are Holocaust survivors who feel the pain and rejoice in the deliverance.

Don’t imagine that anyone is trying to minimise the horrors of the Holocaust years, but it shows that no Jew is ever a latter-day bystander.

If he was not Abraham himself, he lived with Abraham in that generation. He was Moses or Moses’ contemporary.

When someone asks how old I am, I can’t answer in years. I am a Jew, as ancient as history.

If someone asks how long I expect to live, I can’t hazard a guess as to my life expectancy.

I am a Jew, and a Jew lives until history is no more.

If I am Abraham or Moses I could also be the Messiah. It might depend on me as to whether mankind will reach redemption.

Q. Everyone knows that Jews invented sandwiches, but who invented pizza?

A. The Haggadah seems to suggest that Hillel invented open sandwiches, since he took paschal lamb and bitter herb and placed them on matzah.

According to Chaya Burstein’s Jewish Kids’ Catalog, Roman Jews invented pizza when they put cheese and olive oil on matzah. But whether they then baked it in a pizza oven we do not know.

There are of course many characteristic Jewish foods (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) but most are merely tasty Jewish adaptations of the cuisine of the environment.

Q. What is the origin of the communal Seder?

A. The community Seder is a widespread feature of the observance of Pesach.

In Israel thousands of people go away for the festival and the hotels are full of Pesach programs, often commencing with hundreds sharing a Seder in the main banqueting room of the hotel, though some family groups have their own Seder in a room of their own.

The first communal Seder – held before the actual Exodus – was when God told the Israelites to sit around to eat the paschal lamb in groups (Ex. 12:4).

By the time of the Mishnah, Pesach had been an annual event for centuries, and part of the celebration must have been group Sedarim, since the rabbis debate whether one may go from one company (chaburah) to another on Seder night.

The Jerusalem Talmud tells us at the end of tractate B’rachot, “One who heard Hallel in the synagogue on Seder night has fulfilled his obligation”.

The 14th century liturgical authority David Abudarham explains that this refers to a Babylonian/Spanish custom of running a Seder in the synagogue for the sake of those who were not well versed in the festival procedures.

However, some say that it was not the full Seder that took place in the synagogue, and after the synagogue ceremony people would go home, eat vegetables (karpas), say the blessing “Who has redeemed us” and drink the second cup.

In some places they needed outsiders to conduct the Seder as there were views that everyone present should recite the Haggadah word for word after the leader though only they, but not he, would say the Divine Name in the course of the b’rachot.