Dvar Torah on Parshat Tzav

This week, we read Parshat Tzav, which deals with some of the specifics of the basic daily sacrifices, and the ritual which was practiced in order to sanctify Aharon and his sons as priests who serve in the Temple. This week is also the Shabbat before Passover, which is traditionally called Shabbat HaGadol - the great Shabbat, the Shabbat which precedes the exodus from Egypt and the birth of the free Jewish nation.

One of the sacrifices discussed in the Parsha is the Mincha, or grain offering. This sacrifice, brought by the priests on a daily basis, as well as by other individuals on certain occasions, consisted of flour, olive oil, and frankincense. A handful of it was offered on the altar, and the remainder was eaten by the priests. Interestingly, the Torah tells us that the Mincha must be made Kosher for Passover  - "as a Matza (unleavened bread) it is to be eaten…it is not to be baked as leaven". This, in fact, is the rule for all but one of the various grain offerings in the Temple. Why does God demand that grain offerings not be allowed to leaven? Why is the law prohibiting chametz  (leavened bread), which seems to be specific to the Passover holiday, enforced all year long in the Temple?

The symbolism of refraining from eating leavened bread on Pesach seems to be fairly straightforward. When the Israelites left Egypt, they were forced to leave very quickly; the Egyptians were, understandably, totally demoralized by the Plague of the First-Born, and pressed the Jews to leave as speedily as possible. As a result of this need to rush, the Torah tells us that "they baked the dough which they had brought out of Egypt into Matzot, for it had not fermented, for they had been driven out of Egypt, and were not able to linger…" On Passover, we eat Matza and refrain from eating chametz to commemorate this event.

There seem to be a number of messages here. The miraculous turnabout, wherein the Egyptians, who for so long had been so unwilling to free the Jewish slaves, but were now urging them to hurry out of Egypt, is apparently worth commemorating, as is the speed of God's salvation which, after years of suffering in slavery, ultimately occurred quickly - "in the wink of an eye" in the Rabbinic phrase. These lessons serve as a comfort and a beacon of hope to the oppressed and discriminated against, who may not be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but are reassured by the Exodus story of the possibility of an unexpected, speedy redemption. The eating of Matza and rejection of chametz - leaven - would seem to be an attempt to identify with the experience of the Jews in their exodus from Egypt, and to learn these lessons from it.

However, there seems to be more to the imagery of the Matza than just the speed of the exodus. Before the last plague, at the beginning of the month of Nissan, some two weeks before the exodus, God had already instructed Moshe to tell the Jews to bake Matzot for Pesach, long before, and apparently unconnected to any rush to leave Egypt in a hurry. There seems, therefore, to be another reason why we eat Matza and reject chametz on Pesach. The Rabbis have discussed the larger symbolism of chametz at length, and I would like to summarize some of their thinking.

Broadly speaking, leaven is seen as a symbol of surfeit, appetite, gluttony, and desire. The Matza , on the other hand, is seen as not only the bread we ate because we were in a hurry to escape affliction, but also the bread of affliction itself, the bread of the destitute, which we ate as slaves in Egypt. In this nexus of symbols, eating the Matza is a way of identifying with the poor, oppressed and downtrodden, and of rejecting the excess and luxury of the oppressor - imperial Egypt with all of its decadence and excess. An oppressive, inhuman Egypt, which enslaves and murders strangers in order to build itself magnificent monuments, is what we reject by shunning the richer leavened bread and eating simple Matza on Passover.

With this in mind, we can see the insistence on only serving Matza in the Temple, all year round, as an attempt to make the Passover revolution against imperial Egypt an ongoing one. By prohibiting the baking and eating of leaven in the Temple, the Torah is turning the revolution of Passover, in which the oppressors were punished and the oppressed were freed, into an ongoing, permanent value in Jewish life. Just as, when we sit around the Passover Seder table, celebrating, we are commanded to eat the bread of affliction and thereby, even as we celebrate our own freedom, identify with the downtrodden and enslaved, so, too, in our Temple, which represents national strength, autonomy and independence, we are commanded to reject the chametz of the rich and oppressive, and eat matza, the bread of the oppressed and the poor. This acts as an antidote, a corrective, to the kinds of feelings which could easily be engendered around the Passover table or in the Temple; feelings of self-satisfaction and self-congratulation, of power and possession, which we must reject, or at least temper. By eating Matza and refraining from chametz, we embrace, both at the Pesach Seder which celebrates our birth as a nation, and in the Temple, our national religious center, a solidarity with the oppressed, the poor, and the enslaved. This is the symbolism of the mincha, the Kosher l'pesach grain offering offered daily in the Temple.

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Sameach,

Rabbi Shimon Felix