Leaving the Leavening Behind / Fred Casden

Parashat Vayikra

Every Shabbat morning, one half an hour before the davening starts at Musar Avicha, a small band of stalwarts assembles for Rav Ezra’s Mishna shiur. We are working our way, slowly and deliberately, through Menahot, the tractate that deals with the meal-offerings that were brought to the Beit Hamikdash. A few months ago, we were on the first Mishnah of chapter 5, where we found a makloket between R. Meir and R. Yehuda, the kind of disagreement that makes the Talmud so interesting. The matter in dispute was regarding the todah offerings and the two loaves brought on Shavuot.

Since these loaves ‘shall be baked with leaven,’ where does the leavening agent come from? R. Meir was certain that the leaven would come from the same flour used for the offerings, and he and the sages had some excellent arguments to back up their claim. However, R. Yehuda was having none of it.  ‘That is not the optimal way of leavening the meal-offering, since the dough does not ferment effectively with such new leaven. Rather, he brings the leaven, prepared several days earlier from his home…..’

I had to smile when we read this exchange. R. Yehuda, who won the argument, must have known about sourdough, a method of bread making that takes several days to prepare, using the natural yeasts found in the air and in unprocessed flour.

However, all the other meal-offerings – and we can only imagine how many there would have been! – were offered unleavened. (Kehati helpfully refers us to Lev. 2:4 and 5. —“unleavened cakes… and unleavened wafers,” and likewise for the meal-offering baked in a pan, “it shall be unleavened…”)

One week after our little group reviewed this particular Mishnah, everyone who arrived in shul in time for the Torah reading heard the reading of Parshat Bo, where, for the first time, we are introduced to the prohibition of eating or having any connection to chametz. And this prohibition, effective during the seven (or eight) days when we observe Pesach, seems to have been carried over to our sacrificial offerings long after we departed from Egypt.

There are many ‘explanations’ for the aversion to chametz, one popular one being the idea that leavening represents arrogance, excessive pride, something from which we need to cleanse ourselves from time to time. But perhaps we should examine its role in Pharaonic Egypt for a slightly different understanding.

We have no idea who first figured out that cutting down stalks of the earliest varieties of wheat, grinding the kernels, mixing them with water, and baking them would create a nutritious flat bread.  We do know that ‘chametz,’ leavened bread made with the natural yeast found in flour, was developed in Egypt, where it became an essential part of their way-of-life – to the extent that an offending baker would be judged more harshly than an equally guilty wine steward. We can deduce that when we are told that Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of everything except his bread, it meant exactly that! (Remember, we read that Egyptians would not share their tables with foreigners.)

To appreciate much of what the Torah is teaching us, we need to understand life in Pharaonic Egypt. Only then can we understand the full force of HaShem’s attack against the Egyptian culture, its deification of their ruler, its panoply of false gods, and its preoccupation with death. Today, thanks to a century of archaeological excavation and two centuries of deciphering hieroglyphic writing, we have a much better understanding of what went on there than did our forefathers, dwelling in the wilds of Europe. Here’s one example, furnished by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (with his thanks to R. Dr. Rafi Zurum ‘for suggesting this line of thought’).

As R. L. Sacks points out, we are told no less than twenty times in the text about Pharaoh’s heart being hardened. Most of the commentary on this matter deal with the issue of the ruler’s free will and/or the lack thereof. But Sacks and Zarum suggest an entirely different approach, one that focuses on the precise meaning of that expression. “According to Egyptian myth, the deceased underwent a trial to establish their worthiness…to enjoy life after death in Aaru, the Field of Reeds, where souls live on in pleasure for eternity.” The person’s heart – where the soul resides – was weighed; if it was as light as a feather, the deceased would proceed to Aaru. If not, the heart would be eaten by the goddess Ammit and the person would be taken to the Underworld.

“It follows that the root k-v-d, ‘to make heavy,’ would have had a highly specific meaning for the Egyptians of that time. It would imply that Pharaoh’s hear had become heavier than a feather. He would fail the heart weighing ceremony and therefore be denied what was most important to him – the prospect of joining the gods in the afterlife.” Imagine that: Pharaoh giving up what he most wanted, life after death, just to get back at those pesky Jews and their One God!

What we are reading about – and what would be understood by the participants – is a polemic against the Egyptian way-of-life. Whatever they held to be important, HaShem will show to be futile, worthless – even their seeming preoccupation with leavened bread. The Children of Israel will leave Egypt with the flat bread of their ancestors, and we will use mostly flat bread in our holiest place. We will believe in One God, and we will extoll life, not death.

And we will make a mockery of their gods. As R.L. Sacks wrote later in his article (from the Jan. 25 edition of Torah Tidbits): “That is the point of at least three of the plagues: the first directed against Hapi, the god of the Nile; the second, frogs, directed against Heqet, the Egyptian goddess of fertility and childbirth, represented in the form of a frog; and the ninth, the plague of darkness, directed against Ra, the sun god.” My suspicion is that the other seven plagues are also a slap in the face of some of their other gods; we just don’t know as of yet which ones. Otherwise, what would be the point?

We think of ourselves as thousands of years away from the perils of Egypt and the Exodus, but every year we celebrate Pesach as a reminder of what we endured and to free ourselves from the idolatry that still plagues the world around us. Something to think about when we bite into our matzot in a little over a week.