[Previous sermon: "Shabbat Zachor - March 18th, 2005"] [Next sermon: "Yom Haatzmaut 5765 - May 13, 2003"]

Shabbat/Erev 7th day Pesach - April 29, 2005

Recently, a colleague told me the following story:

At the end of the second Seder, my mother would take a piece of the afikomen, put it away behind the dishes in the cupboard, and announce it was 'fur mazel' so that we should have good luck in the coming year. She learned the tradition from her mother who had learned it from her own mother in their shtetl. Each year, the piece of matzah would be taken out of the cupboard during the Pesach cleaning, to be replaced by a new piece after the Seder. Three years have passed since my mother died, and now I have begun to observe the tradition. The first year, just a brief month after her death, I placed my first piece of matzah in the cupboard. I forgot about that piece of matzah until I found it while cleaning for the next Passover, a month after my mother's first Yahrzeit. I picked up the matzah and felt such an incredible sense of loss and longing, as I envisioned her saying 'fur mazel' that my eyes filled with tears. That is how it is during the first year after the loss of a parent, especially around the first Yahrzeit.

Any little thing can open the floodgates of longing, even after we think we are past that point in our mourning. Last year, as I again found the afikomen behind the dishes, tears threatened to well up as I reached for the phone and then remembered I could not call my mother up to recount my cleaning progress, as I used to do. But the moment passed more easily than it had the year before. This year was different. My heart seemed less heavy when Yahrzeit came. Somehow after more than three years, my mother's life has finally begun to eclipse her death. Finding the afikomen meant something different to me this year. The little piece of matzah evoked not my sense of loss but my sense of my mother's continued presence in my life: her smile; her voice, serious and playful, saying 'fur mazel.' Instead of a tear, I felt a smile on my face, joyful in finding that something so small and ordinary could trigger such a warm memory of my mother. Finding that little piece of afikomen each year, I realize she was never really lost.

Its unusual to hear a touching story about the afikomen, that little piece of matzah we hide at the Seder and the young ones around us try to find. After all, finding the afikomen is that wonderful moment, in addition to the four questions, to engage the young ones at our tables in a fun activity and keep them involved in a long order of rites and rituals. Eliezer Papo, a Sephardic rabbi of late 18th century Sarajevo taught that the afikomen is like the Torah: Its words are hidden to all those except the modest - that is why the job of revealing the hidden afikomen is left to the children. But the dimensions of the afikomen's symbolism really go to the heart of the meaning of Pesach for us adults- that true freedom and redemption is the ability to find that which was previously hidden to us.

Passover is replete with actions revolving around revealing that which was previous hidden. Customarily, this process starts a month prior to Pesach, when one is called upon by our tradition to crack the books and bone up on the rules and laws of Passover in preparation for the holiday. For those of us who have been around the Pesach block once or twice, we may remember many of those rules and regulations year to year. Still, our tradition demands that we take that latent, knowledge and in essence bring it out actively from its hiding place in our memories.

Then in the days before the onset of the festival, we are to begin a process of cleaning. And here it is important not to miss a very important point of the holiday. Pesach is not JUST about changing the dishes and switching our chametzedich foods with Pesadich ones. Indeed those are the conspicuous parts of our preparations. We also must search out the corners of our cupboards, our pockets, our drawers, to find the leftovers, the crumbs, the waste that was hidden from the last year and clear it away to make way for the new. There are places in all our homes that we don't frequent - under the drawers of our cabinets, under the seats of our cars, in the cupboards above our refrigerators. You can see how a little piece of matzah could linger there a year and be forgotten. And by clearing and cleaning our homes, we hold up a mirror to ourselves to search out the places in our hearts that have not been visited in the past year, the empty places, and the places where leftovers and waste have accumulated and have hampered our ability to love freely and be loved.

But the true symbolism of the hiding and seeking of Passover happens at our Seder tables. Think about it: one of the first things in the order the our Seder is Yachatz, breaking the middle of three matzot.

The smaller piece is put back in its place under the decorative matzah cover with the other two to be used later for eating. The larger half is set aside to be hidden as the afikomen. Now one matzah has two lessons to teach us. The smaller piece that is replaced inside its cover speaks to us about hidden resources and resourcefulness that is within us. Before it was broken that matzah served its function whole, just like the others surrounding it. And after being broken, it is called upon to serve that same function despite its loss. This matzah is like us, too. It reminds us that we can indeed persevere, even when our resources are compromised. A friend asks to borrow a car for a day or two and most of us figure a way to adjust for the temporary inconvenience of one car. But if that same friend needs a car for a whole month, most of us would likely rethink the offer. But then something happens to our own car, and it takes the mechanics just about a month to fix it. And a funny thing happens: between our spouse's car, carpooling with friends, a bit of juggling and patience on our family's part, we adjust and barely miss a beat in our busy suburban schedule that month.

There are so many things which we think we just can't live without, until we have to. Likewise how much we can give and share is sometimes a product of a skewed picture of reality. Our limitations, in many cases, are only perceived limitations, fictitious barriers which many before us have overcome and others just like us will continue to surmount. Its Erev Pesach, 1978 in the Christopol prison in the former Soviet Union. Yosef Mendelovich is a gaunt human shell, and he is about to light a candle. Made of hoarded bits of string, pitiful droplets of oil, and stray slivers of wax, this is a candle fashioned by Yosef's own hands. Sometime earlier, Yosef had complained of back problems. The prison infirmary provided him with mustard to serve as a therapeutic plaster. Unused then, this mustard becomes maror at Yosef's Seder table. A long saved onion bulb in water had produced a humble bit of greenery, karpas. And the wine? Raisins were left to soak in an old jelly jar, water was occasionally added, and fermentation was prayed for. This was wine. The Haggadah which Yosef transcribed into a small notebook before being imprisoned had now been set to memory. (Story from Pg 32-33, Passover Survival Kit, Simon Apisdorf)

Yosef was not altogether free. He was denied the liberty of doing what he wanted, seeing the sunshine and the stars twinkle. But then again he was more free than his captors. He knew who he was, what he wanted and found a way to have it. Today he walks the streets of Israel, buys his candles, matzah and maror at a store. And he also studies Torah, as a free man now, just as he was even behind those lifeless prison walls.

This is what Yachatz teaches us, the smaller middle middle matzah on our Seder tables, that continues to function whole despite is diminished size. It reminds us that when brothers, sisters or friends need us, a truly free person finds it in their material resources and in their spiritual resourcefulness to give and share with them, and finds they, themselves are not really diminished by doing so. This week I visited with a family at the hospital. There they sat, clinging to their cooler filled with matzah and Pesadich foods on which to nourish themselves while they awaited the results of their son's surgery. One might think that in a time of family emergency, packing special items appropriate for Passover would be the first thing to go - the extra effort to be expended in other needed directions.

I realized quickly that the foods of our people was this family’s source of strength. It was as part of them as their son, and neither was to be compromised, even in such times that stress and strip faith to its core. The matzah we often think of as the bread of affliction, can really be the bread of freedom.

Then there is the larger piece of that matzah, the afikomen itself. Tzafun, is the part of the Seder, when the afikomen, which was hidden is revealed. And at this point it becomes the ultimate symbol of the hidden potential in all creation. As Rabbi Harold Schulweis has taught, the afikomen is the matzah of the future redemption. It's a broken matzah because the world is still unredeemed, but our hope is not yet broken. And this is other aspect of the freedom we exercise at Pesach - the freedom to imagine the potential in our selves and in creation. In telling the story of redemption from Egypt, we enlarge the picture and imagine our own world redeemed. Even the way we eat the afikomen tells this story. It is dessert. And by definition, dessert is the extra meal we eat after the meal.

I oftentimes joke that I must have a separate stomach for dessert, because no matter how full I am from dinner, I always can manage a treat afterwards. But we never need dessert. The afikomen is to be savored not to fill a hungry stomach, but as a sweet mitzvah after our needs are satiated. If the seder meal is to taste the blessings of this world, the afikomen is to taste the world that is yet to be. The afikomen is the matzah of the freedom to be idealistic, to imagine that we can, and have the power to change the world. We see the inborn idealism and wonder at the world in the faces of the children who bring us the afikomen from its hidden place. Those faces show us that we too must share in that wonder, in that idealism. Maturity, cynism, and experience all squelch those impulses within us to imagine that the plagues of war, starvation, pollution and oppression can actually be eradicated from the world. But the afikomen beckons us to bring to the surface our deep hidden notions that we are here for a reason. And that we can and must make a difference, that we can taste a bit of that future world redeemed. That is what my colleague's mother tasted when she ate a bite of the afikomen and then hid a piece 'fur mazel' for luck.

Luck that in the coming year, that which was hidden will be found, the gifts the love we have to share, the comfort of our tradition, the companionship of our people, the sweetness of knowing we can make a difference. That all who are hungry will yet eat, that those who have died are not gone, that next year, we will all be in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri