How can we ever adequately serve God or those we love?
Tradition holds that we have two complete loaves of bread over which to say Ha-motzi at Shabbat and Festival meals. These two loaves represent the double portion of Manna that the Israelites were able to collect on Fridays so that they would have food for Shabbat. On every other day, only enough manna fell to support each Israelite for one day, so that day by day they would be dependent upon God. If they tried to collect more to hold over to the next day, they would find that the extra manna would rot and be useless. But miraculously, on Fridays they collected twice as much and it all stayed fresh until the conclusion of Shabbat. A double portion of manna, so two challot or in this case, on Passover, matzot. Each matza is considered a full loaf.
But there are three matzot at the seder. The top and bottom matza are each whole and so fulfill the above tradition representing God’s gracious bounty. But when we eat the matza at that point in the seder, each person is supposed to get two pieces: one from the to matza which is whole, and one from the middle matza which is broken. If the point of the two whole matzot is to remind us that God provides for us, why are we not eating from the two unbroken matzot?
Think about it this way: When we eat the broken matza with the whole, we are ingesting – a better word might be internalizing – our awareness of our own brokenness. It is a recognition that for all of God’s beneficence, our lives are still broken in so many ways. We try to repent and change our ways, to escape from the “narrow places” (meitzarim) in our lives that from our own Egypts (mitzrayim). Like our ancestors we seek to liberate ourselves from temptations and bad habits, to release ourselves from enslavement to ego, materialism, and selfishness, to break free of addictions and compulsions, but we are never fully able to leave them all behind. We are also broken by loss and grief, and we are frustrated, saddened and sometimes feel shame because of our inability to achieve our goals as perfectly as we aspire to.
This year in particular, we feel broken. We have struggled to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, worrying about and looking after loved ones while trying to figure out how to prepare for the holiday while in isolation. We have confronted food shortages that mean we may not have everything for our seder plate, or maybe could not make that special family Passover treat. We have struggled to clean, kasher and prepare our homes for seder, but we have neither all the supplies we need nor the energy. All the while we are stressed about loved ones who live away from us, in senior living facilities or out of town. We are unable to be present for them in the way we know that we should, and we worry about their wellbeing.
With our lives so shattered and in such chaos, how can we possibly fulfill the mitzvot of Pesach? How can we ever adequately serve God or those we love? Our overriding sense of inadequacy is accompanied by an encumbering sense of guilt. At the very time we are supposed to celebrate our freedom, we feel enslaved.
But that’s the point of the broken matza. You see, we fulfill the Passover seder not by offering God perfection but rather by offering God our brokenness. We lay the shattered pieces of our lives before God’s holy throne and we say:
“Here it is, God. I have done all I can to make my life whole, now I need You to make me whole. My life, my heart, my soul depends upon You just as it was for my ancestors when they left Egypt. From day to day they feared they would come up short, lacking the manna they needed to survive, but each day You were there for them, providing for their needs and giving them the energy and determination to continue.
“So too, I have faith that you will sustain me. Help me to see that each fragment of my life is itself beautiful and holy, that I do not have to be perfect, that You accept my service to you with love. Lift me up and heal my brokenness, fill my life with light and joy and blessing. Give me strength to go forward, and I will continue my journey toward You, the journey from the narrow places of Egypt to Your holy mountain.”
This Passover embrace the lacking, the imperfections, the incompleteness with joy, knowing that God loves you as you are. Let God’s presence comfort you and fill you with joy. May that knowledge give you the strength and peace of mind to continue your journey, wherever it leads you.