Pesach: The Matzah That Changes Meaning
Why do we eat Matzah? It turns out, we change our minds about it.
There is a way that I have always understood the seder, to be two concepts competing throughout the evening: Remembering Slavery and Celebrating Freedom. There are things we do to remember the bitterness of slavery, most famously the marror. There are things we do to celebrate freedom, like eat and drink and recline. In fact, a good key for knowing whether something we are doing is to remember slavery or to celebrate freedom is if we recline for it. Cup of wine? Recline. Marror, no recline.
Which one of those is matzah? Its kind of unclear. We start out the seder referring to the Matzah as “lechem oni”, “poverty bread”, and dividing it in half to save some for later as a poor person might do. But later on, we end up eating it while reclining, and we also assert that we eat matzah because we didn’t have time for it to bake while going free.
I have an idea as to what’s going on here: Over the course of the seder, over the course of telling the story of how we started out as idolaters and then became slaves and then went free, we start out telling one story about the matzah (it’s poverty bread) but then end up recontextualizing it within a different story, the story of our going free (We didn’t have time for the bread to bake). We change the meaning of the Matzah by telling a different story about it. It starts off as bread of poverty, but then, by placing it within the context of the Pesach story, it now becomes a symbol of our freedom, which we recline for while eating.
Not only that, but we apply that same power to the marror itself. After we eat the Matzah, after we have practiced our power to recontextualize and redefine trauma by telling a different story about it, we turn to the bitter experience of slavery itself. First, we eat it alone, really experience the bitterness in its fullness, while not reclining then. But then comes Korech. Why the stress on eating the matzah, marror and korban pesach all together? Because you are now taking the bitter trauma of slavery and changing its meaning by making it part of a larger story, one that celebrates your freedom. You take the marror and experience the joy of recontextualizing past trauma into a story that transforms its meaning, by combining it with the korban pesach and the matzah that changed its own meaning over the course of the telling of the story. And korech you recline for.
This is a great distillation of the dual nature of the Seder as programmed by the Tana'im to reflect those dual aims. Curious as to how this fits with the Biblical פסח/חג המצות . You can see the juxtapositions there - as you note with korech, the original mitzvah of maror was not to eat alone but with the korban ”על מצות ומרורים" and the sole verse that refers to matzah as a bread of poverty also invokes the concept of חפזון, alluding back to the haste with which the Israelites were commanded to consume the first Pesah lamb in the Exodus passage, and the haste with which they left without baking their bread (though didn't they bake matzah to eat the lamb before they left?).